Outstanding post. One place where I detour is the mention of Chauvin. Assuming the technique he used was taught of part of the training, he never checked the status of Floyd even after the rookie prodded him. I do not believe he should have been prosecuted for murder, but he did mess up. The haters with their agendas on the one side then used this to drum up hysteria and get their foot soldiers marching. For me the shining evidence of attributing everything to race essentialism is the tendency of too many to lump certain names together. For the haters on both sides, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown are exactly the same, just as Derek Chauvin and Darren Wilson are presented as either having committed the same crime or as being wrongly persecuted for the same thing. We're (white) middle-class living in a (white) rural underclass area where the drug and crime problem is like the country version of downtown Baltimore. We are very slowly shifting the trajectory, but everything you describe above applies.
You make a fair point about Chauvin. My beef with all of that is not that Chauvin did everything right - it seems manifestly obvious that he did not. It's just impossible for me to read the autopsy report and conclude that Floyd was actually murdered. So I agree that there was plenty that was wrong with that whole affair and that Chauvin was probably not without fault. My beef is with the decision to charge Chauvin with murder and then for the prosecutor to engage in some questionable behaviors to make it stick.
We are all of the human race. What we do to one another is not determined by labels. It is determined by character.
Outstanding post. One place where I detour is the mention of Chauvin. Assuming the technique he used was taught of part of the training, he never checked the status of Floyd even after the rookie prodded him. I do not believe he should have been prosecuted for murder, but he did mess up. The haters with their agendas on the one side then used this to drum up hysteria and get their foot soldiers marching. For me the shining evidence of attributing everything to race essentialism is the tendency of too many to lump certain names together. For the haters on both sides, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown are exactly the same, just as Derek Chauvin and Darren Wilson are presented as either having committed the same crime or as being wrongly persecuted for the same thing. We're (white) middle-class living in a (white) rural underclass area where the drug and crime problem is like the country version of downtown Baltimore. We are very slowly shifting the trajectory, but everything you describe above applies.
You make a fair point about Chauvin. My beef with all of that is not that Chauvin did everything right - it seems manifestly obvious that he did not. It's just impossible for me to read the autopsy report and conclude that Floyd was actually murdered. So I agree that there was plenty that was wrong with that whole affair and that Chauvin was probably not without fault. My beef is with the decision to charge Chauvin with murder and then for the prosecutor to engage in some questionable behaviors to make it stick.