You’re an out-of-towner, right? Being any kind of outsider is all it takes really.
The lesson learned from this shouldn’t be to fantasize harder about titillating torture porn scenarios possible if you were black, but rather that black people are outsiders in America. A white person has to go out of his way to look like and/or be an outsider but a black person just has to leave their house, so, all the heinous shit that happens to white people happens a whole fuckload more to black people.
Like,
Lord have mercy this has never helped and it’s not gonna start helping now. God and I know your hearts are in the right place, and maybe we’re in best-kept-secret territory, but, the framing of this narrative is borne from the centrist liberal and compassionate conservative mindset that doesn’t actually want to see positive change . If white people were actually cognizant of and angry at the dehumanizing shit that happens to them, full-stop without any qualifiers, shit would’ve gotten a lot better a long time ago for white and black people.
(and everybody!)
Why do you think the whole band only starts playing when a black person is killed?
The years before I started playing poker I helped a friend research a book about wrongful arrests, convictions and/or sentencings. Nobody gives a fuck. Forget privileged white people, do you know hard it was to teach an average lower-middle-class urban black person to say “what were they convicted for” instead of “what did they do”? Jon Burge And Crew tortured dudes in the basements of police stations to get them to confess to murders. Nobody gave a fuck, and nobody can remember or ever knew the victims’ names.
However, when the whole world is forced to watch a snuff film that’s when delicate sensibilities are offended and polite society declares the whole affair a bridge too far, and the performative white generalized guilt and the performative black survivor’s guilt cum victimhood fetishization breaks the levees. But they don’t want anything to fundamentally change, they just don’t want to watch snuff films.
Put another way: One black person getting killed by police is one too many, but, the chances of an interaction resulting in a killing is astronomically low. What is very fucking far from astronomically low is a wrongful arrest, car impounding, ticket, that ruins your month or year or life. Motherfucking PTSD. The catch is that if the narrative is framed as “black men are getting killed by police worse than hypermegacovidfluaids” and then, conveniently, reality shows that it’s actually relatively rare, people have a built-in excuse to think everything is fine when it’s very much not fucking fine.
I know beyond knowing that posters here don’t fall in that category, and I get the impetus and release of saying “aw sheeit if you were black they woulda loaded you in a cannon and fired you into the sun”, but you need to understand that putting this out in the world inadvertently promulgates this mindset.