kill the moonlight.

an ongoing discussion/moment of clarity.  

words.

"The stilted conversations that have followed these tragedies have largely focussed on the meaning and implications of the nonsensical phrase “racial profiling.” Nothing better illustrates the slick, manipulative power of euphemism than the fact that our dialogue takes seriously this non-term. There is no such thing as “racial profiling”—there is simply racism. What subsequent action, what logical end, does racial profiling produce that abject racism would not? The supposed definition of “racial profiling”—that the alleged behavior of any fragment of a population becomes the basis for categorizing it in its sum, that epidermal hues are a valid means of reflexively predicting character—is what we, in more honest moments in our past, simply referred to as racism.

 ...Gun homicide has declined by forty-nine per cent since its peak, in 1993, largely because of a decline in homicides perpetrated by black offenders against black victims. This reduction in violent crime over more than two decades has done little to diminish white fear of black criminality, or the potency of “black crime” in justifying the violation of black rights. Of course, racism, being a superstition, has never been contingent upon facts.

That this argument finds particular favor among conservatives is even more preposterous. The idea that the treatment of an individual hinges upon his or her demographic category flies in the face of the doctrine of individual rights central to modern conservatism. African-Americans are thirteen per cent of the population; they are also, horrifyingly, fifty-five per cent of the homicide victims. Whites, meanwhile, are sixty-three per cent of the population, but are only a quarter of the homicide victims. Yet, even if you eliminated every black homicide, the United States would still have a more violent population than Western democracies like the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. Based on the logic of collective responsibility at the heart of “racial profiling,” we should also be asking white communities what they’ve done to deal with their tendency toward violence.

The fact that Americans die at the hands of other Americans is, one would naïvely suspect, an American problem—but if those Americans are black, it is considered anything but. This is the alchemy by which racial category takes precedent, yet again, over supposed citizenship. This is the skewed thinking that forms the context in which black people die in the United States."

THE NEW YORKER: No Such Thing as Racial Profiling