Comment by LordKano
11 years ago
The police seems to be profiling and directing excessive force towards non-Caucasians
Law enforcement has always directed this kind of treatment towards non-whites in the US. What has changed is that there are now cameras everywhere so the officer's word isn't enough anymore and they have begun to subject middle and upper middle income white people to the same kind of treatment that used to be reserved for black and brown people.
For the outsider, the US looks a very unpleasant place to be if you're not white.
Racism isn't a US-only problem. There are incidents of European soccer fans making monkey noises when black players come onto the field. In some parts of Africa, there are issues with the government seizing land owned by whites.
It's not even always about race. Every Irishman with whom I have ever spoken has told me stories about how they and/or their (grand)parents were treated by other Europeans.
I don't know if it's possible to fix the underlying cause of these problems. Whenever people think in terms of "Us vs Them", they find justifications for doing all manner of terrible things to each other. It's just that police are the ones tasked with enforcing the laws of a society so when the laws reflect this conflict, so does the behavior of the police.
And we will always think in terms of "us vs. them" because we're monkeys, and we've evolved highly intelligent brains to, among other things, protect our bananas from the monkey tribe next door.
But we are getting better at overruling our monkey instincts with reason and compassion. So that's a good sign.
My belief is that it's primarily about access to one resource. Wombs. Everything else is ancillary.
What makes a racist more irate than anything? Seeing one of "Them" with one of "Our" women.
Denying good housing, education and employment to the "other" group will make them less able to compete for females from "our" group.
There are versions of this on display in the animal kingdom as well. Male lions are known to kill cubs sired by other males so that they can replace them with their own offspring. In the Gombe Chimpanzee War, females were kidnapped, raped and killed as a method of destroying the "other" group.
I also agree, humanity has come a long way and is getting better.