A lot of what you just wrote is basically just going "lol no". Unfortunately, it's actually lol yes. You can go read the DOJ report on Ferguson right now, since then there's been a million and one investigations into local police departments all over the country you can pour over if you feel like being depressed. People have been raising alarm bells about (for lack of a better term) for-profit policing for decades. Your average Barnes And Nobel has an entire section devoted to the study of how fucked up this is. Police militarization, the rise and accelerating usage of things like no-knock raids or swat teams for otherwise mundane arrest warrents and in response to protests, that's all well documented also. This is a great book on it written by a guy who, while he has libertarian leanings, is pretty far from a leftist.
When you talk about racial inequality and its causes you're talking about very complicated issues that most people aren't equipped to understand. Not because they're stupid but because most people have more of an actual life then losers like me and don't think reading about 1980's drug policy is "fun". But yes, it's all very complicated and there's a lot of factors that go into it and a lot of reasons we ended up here. But between that and America's general unwillingness to admit its own faults we've often turned a blind eye to just how divided we actually are and just how extreme the results of it have been for black people specifically in this country.
Never mind the government, for a long time most major unions in the US barred black people from being members. They were systematically cut out of every major institution, private and public, and were left to rot on the fringes of society. There's really no overstating how historically voiceless black people are. They were barely even allowed to fight in the civil war, a conflict ostensibly about their own bondage. Whenever they started to overcome this systematic alienation the boot came down again. I think after what happened after George Floyd died you'd have to be hiding your head in the sand to not realize how violent this actually looks, also. The American right refuses to admit it happened but we all saw it with our own eyes on TV, all over the country police decked out in military surplus gear were attacking reporters and otherwise peaceful demonstrators. We got to watch this happen in real time in virtually every major American city. I remember watching a live stream of the Ferguson trial verdict before that. Everything was peaceful, then within a minute of the grand jury decision the police were lobbing insane amounts of tear gas at the crowd and firing rubber bullets. Nobody even had time to riot, they just straight up wanted to do that from the get go.
Powerlevel, after Eric Garner died I attended a rather large protest in Manhattan. A moment that always sticks out to me, this girl was walking down the street with a water bottle calmly and a cop just saw her, walked over, and said "why did you throw that bottle?". This is some tiny white chick, just out of high school. She has no idea what game is being played here. She stammers "w...what?". He rips the bottle out of her hand and says "I saw you throw this. I can put you in jail for a long time." For whatever reason he walked away instead. But he could have, if he wanted to do the paperwork. We all know. And who would have argued? Later on the day I got to witness them pepper spraying people for shits and giggles and blasting LRADS in peoples faces from like 3 feet away, also seemingly for shits and giggles (if you don't know what that is, it can straight up make your ears bleed). I didn't see a single act of vandalism or violence from a crowd of 50,000 or so, but I saw plenty from the cops.
Let's not pretend the world is always just and loving, and let's DEFINITELY not pretend cops are known for their empathy and patience.
So not only do you have a country that has historically done everything in its power to keep black people as close to the material conditions of slavery as it can, it responds with sheer terror and violence whenever it feels that control slipping.
Acting like these things don't happen, like they don't have serious impacts on communities, like black people on the whole don't understand and notice this shit, is just hiding your head in the sand. I can talk about this shit for hours, I really can. Because it's interesting and sad and I like interesting and sad things. But the long short is we have actual conflicts in this country, and they are deep, and they are probably impossible to solve, and on top of all of that they mark people. Every single one of us is a victim of our country's history in one way or another. We have to live in the aftermath of the brutality and greed of powerful people, often long dead, and if there was an easy, loving, way to get out of that I like to think we would have by now.
You accused me of saying black people "lack agency". I respond by reminding you that "agency" doesn't stop bullets.
Another problem Americans have when it comes to understanding ourselves, we believe in individualism to such an extent we don't realize that at the end of the day power is real, governments are real, the justice system is real, the economy is real, and that none of us have any fucking control whatsoever over how these things develop. They are an amalgamation of centuries of policy and struggle that no single human being, anywhere, has any say over.
All the "agency" in the world is not going to stop America's historical demons from launching a tear gas cannister directly into your face.
There is no end to this story as it is still being written. The present is a slave to the past. And it always will be. And none of us, not the cops or anybody else, has any real say in it. There's a scene in the movie Network where the main character explains that global capitalism is really the only thing in the world that matters and that all of us are totally helpless. His ratings tank because as the narrator explains "people don't like being told their lives are completely meaningless".
I can admit that much: people definitely don't like hearing what I just typed.
