Fair enough.
I could bring up some others- Tamir Rice comes to mind- but I think I’ll talk about another book I enjoy: Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell.
Blink is about how human beings use heuristics to make fast decisions. The trait was initially adaptive: rather than having to stop and think about whether a certain wiggling in the grass was a snake, human being evolved a snake heuristic to quickly determine what’s a snake and what is not. Unfortunately modernity throws a monkey wrench into the evo psych works.
There is a good rationale to be suspicious of the foreigner: as I briefly mentioned wrt Guns, Germs, and Steel, foreigners may carry disease which you have no antibodies to. The last 3 years should be demonstrative in the importance of antibodies: COVID-19 was incredibly deadly the first few months, stayed horrible for 18 months, then gradually evolved towards a less virulent version of itself as humans got better at defending themselves from the virus. (Flame me if you want, idc. I worked in Boston hospitals through the whole pandemic and I saw this go down personally. I know what the truth is on that.)
So there’s a good reason to mistrust the foreigner; he might give you smallpox, and it might radiate through your whole society decades before white people even colonize your shores. The white man didn’t even really mean to do it; surely Columbus had no notion of germ theory. But that’s the “germs” part of guns, germs, and steel: the ingredients to world domination.
Mistrusting the foreigner gives rise to a heuristic: people whose skin color and appearance are unlike yours are dangerous for nonspecific reasons. Add to that Inter-tribe competition and you have the basic recipe for racial bigotry. Then when you add imperialism and technological superiority… well, not to sound simplistic, but that goes a long way to fleshing out white supremacy.
Anyway, Blink relates this true story at the beginning: a black man recently immigrated from Lagos to NYC was shot on his front stoop as he tried to retrieve his wallet from his pocket. The responding officer was responding to a call about a previous break in in the area. The black man didn’t understand the officers directions and reached for his wallet, to get an ID. The policeman thought he saw a gun, he feared for his life. Bang. He shot the immigrant, who had done nothing wrong but be in the area when a crime was committed, dead on the spot. When questioned later, the policeman thought the shape of the wallet in the man’s hand was a gun. And feeling there was no time to react he shot first and asked questions later.
I honestly think this is where most police killings start. Operating from a place of fear, law enforcement is too quick to apply lethal force and feels the penalty of doing so to blacks is minimal. So they do, with a predictable regularity and a predictable result.
I still think hardliner white supremacy, in the reactionary form it takes here, is reductive and stupid. You guys really are just telling yourselves a bunch of just-so stories and doubling down.
I’ll take “letters from Charles Manson” for 800 please, Alex.