Looks like I’m on the side of a pariah here, but the comparison is absurd. The Hunger Games is about a privileged few living off the backs of the downtrodden many, if my recollection is correct. It’s about keeping the poor toiling away and providing resources to the rich. That is not what the privileged are doing to black people in this country. It’s not what the economically privileged or the pigmentally privileged are doing to black people. It’s a bad comparison, and since it’s the central idea of the article, I started with the assumption that the writer isn’t too skilled.
Now to the point…racism exists, it’s deeply ingrained and endemic. It’s subtle, it’s loud, it’s personal, it’s institutional. It’s literally killing black men (at a rate we don’t know, since law enforcement won’t provide the data). I think the police officers involved should be locked up for the rest of their lives. One metric in sentencing is whether the person would be likely to commit the same act again, and I think these police officers would. The reality, of course, is that they not only avoid prosecution, but also get to keep their jobs, guns, and authority. It’s an absolute outrage.
But the writer goes on about many other ills, which I won’t get into other than to say this: to sit back and say that poor black Americans are helplessly stuck until American people, institutions and the racist fabric woven through American culture changes is only slightly crazier than concluding that every single problem that currently exists in poor black communities has been caused by racist white people.
