Because police are sanctioned with the authority of the state and should not be brutal to its citizens.

This. Critical race philosopher Shannon Sullivan calls it “ontological expansiveness,” or this sense your existence is entitled to all physical spaces. (Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege)

My husband grew up in the Eastern Bloc too. He was SHOCKED when he heard that kids recite a flag pledge in school here. He agrees it is creepy, dangerous nationalism. He said,”You were more indoctrinated than we were! And at least we knew we were being indoctrinated!”

I really appreciated this show and can’t believe it was cancelled. My husband has a doctorate in literature and grew up in an dictatorship so relates to oppressive states, and he said it was brilliant (and it’s hard to get his approval about literary things).

It will end. Not soon enough for the people victimized by it, but humans have been around for 200,000 years. White supremacy has been around for 400? Its time will come.

If you have to comply with whatever an agent of the state demands, legal or not, in order to survive, you live in a Despotic Police State.

I wonder if it’s the “critical” in CRT that bothers them. Most people don’t understand the difference between critique, critical theory, and criticism. They probably think CRT is criticizing America and them. White people cannot stand criticism (or critique, for that matter)...

We chose to sacrifice our children’s racial “innocence” for this reason. Innocence that endangers their innocent peers is sinister. It was, honestly, a scary decision. It felt like poor parenting, teaching them something they didn’t “have” to know. I thought we'd plant seeds of prejudice by talking about the issues.…

Because we are the “golden children” of a depraved narcissistic family (national) system and we need scapegoats. Our “perfect,” best family (nation) won’t work without scapegoats; we’d have to face our own shadows (brutal history, twisted ethos) and that will cause utter decompensation (see January 6 etc)

Exactly. Enslavement of Africans was contested from the beginning by members of the same group doing the enslaving (sadly a minority it seems). But it wasn’t like a de facto, unquestioned cultural more; the morality of it was interrogated from the beginning. But, money talks....

I wonder if many enslaved Americans looked phenotypically white, but because of the one-drop rule were considered Black, to justify enslavement and its economic advantages. Despicably raced-based logic but I think the stark image we contemporaries carry between pale owners and dark slaves is simplified. Frederick…

This is exactly right. I have kitchen-table access to (too) many white conservative(s) at all ranges of religiosity, education, and ages. The shared concern is economics. You can’t appeal to justice and humanity in conversations about Black lives or Black experience of American history (and maybe in general—the lack…

All the commenters here are alluding to this but I think it comes down to humility. White Americans are the only people in the world who have not been humbled in the last 100 years, if not longer. Europeans, check. Colonized people, check. American minorities, check.

Same here. I don’t form an opinion on any current events in America before reading The Root and the Black commenters I follow on Twitter. 

Seems just. But then he’d be “martyred” and people will start making analogies with MLK (especially, for certain reasons) and bastardize that legacy (further)

I think it was the case that free Black people would buy their family members as the only way to keep the family together/protect them. So in the ledgers and deeds and accounting, and thus, historical data, it was “owning,” but maybe not really the dynamic on the ground?

I know. I don’t ever want to dismiss the lived experience of Black people in America. I guess I hope there is a less sinister explanation for some circumstances sometimes, but....I realize that is discounting and obnoxious in itself. I’m sorry if it came across that way.

It’s lack of experience. White people who never interact with or see Black people will have trouble telling them apart. It’s a universal human cognition issue that disappears after a couple months of “exposure.”

Exactly. America is a gigantic narcissistic family system, complete with golden children, scapegoats, and other rigid roles assigned to hide and protect the (secret) dysfunction.

My full-blooded sister and I are German/Irish/Swedish descent. I express the Swedish phenotypically and you can only take me for white. My sister has such straight black hair, dark brown eyes, and deep olive skin that people mistake her for Indian, Native American, Latina, and once when we were little, a little black…