If you look at the circumstances on an individual basis it is easy to think they are about individual events, but when you look at the numbers, compare them to the numbers of unarmed white people killed by police officers, I as a white person have to examine the apprehension I experience when I sit alone at a bus stop with a black man, a tension taught to me by institutions that portray people of color as dangerous, desperate, inhuman, and have since this country was founded. And then I wonder how that tightening would manifest if i were a police officer, if I had no black friends or colleagues to prove it unfounded, if I had a gun, if I were encouraged to use it.
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