Municipal gov’ts using tax $ to make selective payouts to victims of their police forces, accompanied by the occasional criminal trial—even if we were to agree this represented “justice”— certainly doesn’t represent any real challenge to structural racism...

Equating Black people’s lives to a dollar amount like a line item in a budget is a defining aspect of how racial capitalism operates. Enslaved people were insured for dollar amounts like any other property. The abuse of enslaved people was sometimes handled in civil courts...

The reality is the US legal system serves to legitimize the status quo violence of racism by pretending—what happened to George Floyd, for instance— is somehow unique in its horror and unlike all the other racist violence that’s accepted as routine...

And so it goes that, on the same day the state conducts a murder trial against one of its former police officers, it also argues another instance of murder by police is somehow less clear— while also saying the only thing 100% clear is the sanctity of inanimate merchandise...

It all amounts to a system that reinforces the idea of Black ppl being less-than-human equivalents of property. Perhaps worth a $ amount in a civil suit payout for the sake of maintaining order, but never valued at the level of maintaining a white supremacist, capitalist system.

It’s never that difficult to reach a mainstream consensus that “racism is bad” in the most abstract way or in a specific instance like everyone repeatedly watching the premeditated murder of George Floyd on video. Political divergence always happens with the inevitable riot...

...because mainstream thinking is still not at the point of viewing Black people in general as fully human or more deserving of breath and existence than inanimate items that were manufactured with cheap labor and then overpriced for sale at a profit.

When you say it like that, folk scoff—

“No one feels that way! Why, the mayor & police chief in ____ are both Black! They’re just concerned about negative economic impact!”

But that’s the difference b/w understanding that “racism is bad” & actually understanding what racism is.