Monday, July 13, 2015

Ta-Nehisi Coates On Police Brutality

Fresh Air has an interview today with The Atlantic magazine's national corespondent Ta-Nehisi Coates on growing up black and in fear of the police. As with lawyers there are many fine police officers but the culture too often tends to protect the bad ones. Often with devastating results.

According to Coates, despite the media's recent attention to police violence against black men, he does not believe such incidents are on the rise; rather, he says, injustices have been occurring for years — and many of them can be traced to America's flawed judicial system.
As a non-minority (although as an Irish Catholic American from Minnesota I have about the same loathing for institutions such as the Klu Klux Klan and confederate symbols as most blacks), I'll admit that in the past I may not have had as much sympathy for allegations of discrimination and brutality by public officials as I now have after seeing just how dysfunctional and often criminal the justice system can be.

When you experience injustice yourself, it binds you in a deep way to others who have also experienced injustice.

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