"Whenever the national media reports on a black person killed by cops, we must ask ourselves 'Would a white cop not have done that if the person were white?'"

"Because: we are taught that white (and even non-white) cops ice black people (usually men) out of racism. It’s possibly subconscious, but in the heat of the moment, they revert animalistically to their white supremacist assumption of black animality and pull that trigger.... Black people are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by cops, and exactly 2.5 times more likely to be poor, and data shows that poverty makes you more likely to encounter the cops, as even intuition confirms. This is why somewhat more black people are killed by cops than what our proportion in the population would predict.... [M]ost people who take to the streets about cases like Daunte Wright are not thinking about the fact that black people are killed by cops 2.5 times more than their representation in the population would predict. They are protesting because all they see in the news is the black people killed, and have no way of imagining that whites are regularly killed in the same way and in much greater numbers.... Every time the media broadcasts the murder by cop of a black person, ask yourself if it’s really true that a cop wouldn’t have done it to a white person – and then go to, for example, the Washington Post database and see cops doing just that. And upon that, we will settle upon an honest national conversation about the cops as murdering people in race-neutral fashion. Or at least we should." 

Writes John McWhorter in "The Victorians Had to Accept Darwin/We Need to Accept that Cops Kill White People as Easily as They Kill Black People/Otherwise, our conversation on race is deeply and perniciously fake" (Substack). 

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