I believe that African-Americans are right to be upset about police brutality, and to draw the attention of the rest of us Americans to its reality. And beyond police brutality, I’ve written how my work in the past two years has awakened me to aspects of race in America, and the legacy of white supremacy, that I didn’t see before, and which give me more understanding into why things are the way they are. So very many whites are blind to this truth, or too dismissive of it.
Yet what frustrates me to no end about all this is that it is considered impermissible to face the fact that blacks are not only victims, but also, in other contexts, victimizers — and the greatest victims are themselves. It’s as if the discussion of our complex, difficult racial past and present had to be a zero-sum game, in which there is only Good vs Evil — literally, black vs white.
That is simply not an accurate reflection of reality. What if both things are true: that police brutality is a continuing problem, as is the legacy of white supremacy, but the problems of black America today are also largely self-inflicted? Why can both not be true?
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