> It's a common but I think unhelpful observation that americans make racism worse by focusing on race more. I see it often in the comments here, people saying

> It's a common but I think unhelpful observation that americans make racism worse by focusing on race more. I see it often in the comments here, people saying things like "why make it about race" or "we should ignore everyone's race." > The thing is it was already about race. Even if that cop disappeared those men for completely non-racist reasons (and we pretend their motivation is even knowable in that way), the racial history of american policing is such that it's part of the story anyway. > A black person reading the race-sanitized headline is going to immediately think "yeah and I bet I can guess their skin colors too" and on looking into it find out they were right and come to conclusion it was obscured out of intentional complicity. > There is no race-neutral way to report on or discuss many things in an american context because those things are not race-neutral. We can certainly wish it were otherwise, but when we try to enforce that fictional neutrality we both obscure and create other problems. Unfortunately, that's the entire point; it's not a coincidence that questioning "why make it about race?" is overwhelmingly from people who benefit from the history you mention. It's just another form of the same cognitive dissonance of that much-overused but often apt Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."