Originally posted by Communion

This is a fallacy.

Of course Identity Politics has its drawbacks, especially when it lacks nuance, but by pointing out that the police as an institution work to uphold racism (which in America = white supremacy + anti-blackness), they're not saying white people never face police brutality.

The idea isn't that white people don't face brutality and black people do; it's that black people face brutality because they're black, and white people face it too, but not because they're white. The police are a horrible system that uphold & protect violent beliefs like 1) classism 2) ableism 3) sexism, 4) homophobia, 5) xenophobia, etc. in addition to racism.

But we also see that the harshest reaction and the most violent brutalization occurs when these axes also intersect with racism. Of course white people can be victims to brutality - we see videos of white autistic boys being slammed into cop cars, and this isn't okay (we solve it by battling ableism), but then we see a trend of black autistic boys being shot on sight more often. Of course white women have experienced police brutality, and there's white women who have been raped or sexually abused by police, but the difference is that we see black women are just factually less likely to make it out of the jail cell alive than their white female peers. The police target & exploit the poor, including the white poor, but the black poor are simply more likely to exit these encounters in body bags.

It's a fallacy to try and compare police brutality against whites over black people when the causation for violence on black bodies is racism; the causation of violence on white bodies by police is not anti-white racism, it's just not. Of course it could any other system that we need to combat (ableism, sexism, classism), but pointing out that there is a problem of racism (especially anti-black racism) shown by police doesn't stop us from helping end those other prejudices too (especially since every single one of those issues intersects with racism and is something BLM *also* combats!).

Let's not be intellectually dishonest. Violence on black bodies is rooted in racism; violence on white bodies can occur because of other issues that we must combat, but they're not rooted in "anti-white racism", which isn't a thing or racism as defined by the system that exists within the US.



Add in a structure based on white supremacy that makes it its mission to disenfranchise black bodies, black businesses, black vitality, etc. through whatever means possible, be it centuries of free slave labor, a prison industry that purposely targets black people, the withholding of educational funds and resources to black children (who receive harsher punishments than white peers in school) or even the shoving and funneling of cocaine into black communities to ruin them, and yeah, it starts to add up.