A black man has been murdered by out-of-control cops in Memphis, and the usual culture war narratives are already spewing forth. From the woke left, we hear this is more proof that America is irredeemably racist, and that the police are oppressors who should be defunded; from the authoritarian right, we are told that the guy is responsible for his own death, and that the real villains are the people who demonstrated afterwards. Never mind the fact that the cops who did the killing were black, and that the tapes apparently show absolutely no sign of violent resistance; those facts inconveniently get in the way of a good story.
Let me ask you this: would this murder have taken place if the victim had been white, and if it had, would it be a national story? We don’t know. We just don’t. We don’t even know if George Floyd would have died if he had been white. We just know that the policemen responsible for these actions acted outrageously and viciously for reasons only truly known to them.
The standard narratives don’t help. This is a single event of extreme brutality. It doesn’t stand for all of America, and it probably doesn’t even stand for the whole of the Memphis PD. It doesn’t prove that the system is racist, and it doesn’t prove that the system isn’t racist. If we want the answer to that question, we will need a lot more than one data point.