[quote=pri_dk][quote=zk]Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe you’ve been seeing the whole thing out of context this whole time and you just don’t really want to see it.[/quote]
Let’s consider a hypothetical:
You are arrested by the police. They tell you to get on the ground. You comply.
They start beating you. It really hurts. You say. “Ok, I’m down!”
They keep beating you. There are shocks of pain all over your body.
What do you do? Lie there and keep getting hit…plead with them to stop…try to get up and run away?
This is the point in the story that deviates from reality for most Americans, and essentially all white Americans (including me.)
All you have to do is comply with the police and they stop using force, right?
Yeah right.
So what do you do when they keep hitting you after you comply? The blows are hard enough to kill. All it takes is one strike to the head and you are finished.
Are you such a tough guy that you lay there and take the pain because it’s the “correct” thing to do?
So, what do you do?
Oh, you think that didn’t happen – cops did not beat the shit out of blacks, routinely, in cities all across the country at that time?
Any chance that he may have administered a little extra “justice” while making an arrest? You think he was an anomaly?
There’s a whole reality out there that is very different from the civil, air-conditioned offices that so many people sit in while they pass judgement. The video camera exposed that reality for the first time.
And so many people, including the jury, still just did not want to believe it.[/quote]
A hypothetical is exactly what that is. What you describe is not what happened in this case.
Passing judgement from a civil, air-conditioned office is exactly what you’re doing.