I'll start with my thoughts on the current situation. The popular narrative regarding police brutality seems lacking in all nuance, there is an obvious correlation between community crime rates and occurrences of police brutality. This is NOT a justification, police brutality is brutality and therefore can only ever be unjust, I acknowledge this correlation because without understanding there is very little hope for addressing these injustices. Here is my claim: in communities with greater rates of violent crime, police officers are conditioned to an a priori perception that citizens who appear to be in violation of the law are an immediate mortal threat to themselves, and those around them. As a consequence of this assumption police officers in these communities will, on average, be far more aggressive in their dealings with perceived threats. This relationship facilitates violence, when a cop treats a suspect with physical aggression by default, the suspect (regardless of the reality of his intentions) will instinctively defend himself against the cop. At this point the violence becomes exponential, the cop perceives the suspect as a threat and can therefore justify his aggression as defensive, the suspect perceives the cop as a threat and can therefore justify his aggression by the exact same logic. This cycle of totally unscrupulous violence only ends when one of its participants in neutralized as a threat, obviously often resulting in death.

The George Floyd case is not an example of the aforementioned "cop - suspect dynamic", being a rather grotesque case of ultimately one-sided criminal malfeasance; however, I would argue that this dynamic is indicative of most cases involving the killing of a citizen by a cop. I want to be careful in the phrasing of my next few statements, so first let me just clarify one of my core principle beliefs: I absolutely reject the notion that there is a biologically causal link between the ethnicity/race of an individual and the behavior, competency, or moral constitution of an individual. The areas experiencing the highest crime rates across America are, without exception, impoverished communities, and the most impoverished communities tend to have a higher than average ratio between people of color and white people. This economic disparity between the races in where I would argue the systemic oppression (overt, or otherwise) of POC truly exists, and the experience of disproportionately high rates of crime, and therefore violence, suffered by POC is a fatal symptom of this pattern of systemic poverty.

The symptomatology of poverty is a cycle of mutual reinforcing consequences that, in most cases, looks something like this:

[→] POVERTY [→] CRIME [→] ALIENATION [→] DISENFRANCHISEMENT [↓]

[↑] DISENFRANCHISEMENT [←] ALIENATION [←] CRIME [←] POVERTY [←]

  1. Poverty: I am referring to inherited (ergo generational) poverty, a disproportionate percentage of Americans born into poverty are POC, this fact alone is enough to illustrate the systemic reality of economic injustice. Those who suffer the burden of inherited economic deprivation are inherently excluded from life enriching, community building/sustaining opportunities, as such it is far more difficult for these individuals to maximize their potential due to a soul crushing absence of basic opportunities. The majority of American communities beneath the poverty line rarely experience economic growth sufficiently large enough to sustain scalable growth across time, despite a rapidly changing global economy areas of endemic poverty remain static from one generation to the next.
  2. Crime: as a result of systemic poverty afflicting the majority of a community's population from generation to generation, the population becomes dependent upon illegitimate, or illegal methods of wealth acquisition as the only consist way to satisfy its most basic human needs (i.e. food, water, shelter, clothing, etc). However, this means of obtaining wealth does not generate wealth, without having access to economically transformative opportunities (i.e. STEM) the most reliable method of wealth-making becomes crime. A healthy capitalist economy is predicated fundamentally on the principle of mutualism, the quality of any transaction is determined by the net-gain incurred by each of the transaction's participants; this capitalist mechanism ensures economic adaptability in a way that can never unilaterally favor one party over another. This is not to say that non-impoverished economies are perfect, on the contrary consumerism and corporatism are both issues that require solutions, but I'd argue that poverty ought to be the primary concern for anyone interested in ensuring equality of opportunity for all people.
  3. Alienation: the prevalence of crime within impoverished communities prevents the establishment and success of business, and infrastructure. At the point that a community becomes dependent upon deleterious methods of sustenance, it becomes locked in this cycle of poverty that effectively purges a community of its current and future material and human assets. Abiding by the aforementioned principle of mutualism the community becomes less and less able to participate in commerce, the wider market responds to the declining value of the community by abstaining from investing in its growth (which is no longer reliable).
  4. Disenfranchisement: whatever wealth existed within a community is forced to migrate to other places where growth can be sustained, wealthy families are able to relocate before their assets are completely depleted, but the average citizen is financially unable to uproot and therefore becomes trapped in a state of perpetual poverty. Education, which is the foremost inhibitor of economic prosperity, becomes a secondary consideration behind foundational priorities of ensuring that one's children have clothes to wear, food to eat, and a place to sleep. Deprived of access to quality education, each subsequent generation inherits the burden of their parents, thus ensuring that few ever have the option to aspire beyond the satisfaction of deficiency needs (in reference to Maslow's concept of being-needs vs. deficiency needs).

I would argue that this cycle entraps both collectives as a singular entity (i.e. a community) as well as individuals within a collective, though this cycle effects collectives in different ways than it effects individuals. The collective cycle of poverty is one of economic destruction, akin to that economic destruction, individuals born into a state of endemic poverty are at a grotesque risk of psychological destruction. In an attempt to elaborate on my thoughts regarding the toll poverty takes upon individuals I'd rephrase Abraham Maslow's famous quote "if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail" to "if the only tool you're given is a hammer, you could only ever see every problem as a nail."

I wouldn't claim to be qualified to offer solutions to this monstrously complex issue, but I feel it would be relatively uncontroversial for me to argue that quality education will play a crucial role in ensuring equal opportunity between all people. Whilst I would consider myself relatively "privileged" to have grown up free from poverty, on principle I would argue that all people deserve to inherit more tools than exclusively the hammer; so I wouldn't technically consider myself privileged, as "privilege" refers, by definition, to the inheritance of something unearned. Instead I would consider those never presented with essential opportunities as having been deprived of a thing that all people are entitled to: equal opportunity. By labeling the experience of equal opportunity as "privilege" we are normalizing the injustice of being deprived equal opportunity, which all people are entitled to. In line with my thinking here, I would re-conceptualize the idea of "systemic oppression" to "systemic deprivation" as the use of the word "oppression" in this context implies that the system is proactively (and willfully) causing harm to people of color (which is simply not the case).

I do not believe in semantics, I believe all words matter and should be contemplated carefully, most especially when discussing the most important and complex topics germane to human existence; with that mind here is the definition of the word "oppression": "prolonged cruel or unjust treatment or control". Cruelty and justice are both moral judgments, and cannot therefore be used to address the economic system of capitalism, which is operationally amoral. Would it be reasonable to ascribe moral judgement to nature? Would I be correct to label the process of evolution as a thing that is moral, or a thing that is immoral? At risk of committing the naturalistic fallacy I would argue neither, the phenomenon of evolution simply is, it cannot be described in moral terms, evolution does not make moral judgments and is therefore amoral. Evolution subjugates all life, being products of evolution human beings will always be subject to the evolutionary process, but consciousness enables us to override particular evolutionary edicts with tools such as morality. I would liken the process of evolution to the process of capitalism, they are both amoral forces that have to potential to become oppressive when they are allowed to do so by the indifference of people.

We should not expect our capitalist economy to behave morally, this expectation implies that economic processes occur independent of the people who rely upon it to regulate and facilitate the flow of goods and services. Rather, we should set market demands in a way that does not violate our moral conceptions of cruelty and injustice; we must make moral consumer choices if we value a moral economy. The "systemic deprivation" of impoverished communities is a consequence of a consumer class that has explicitly abdicated its responsibility to make moral choices, as a result our economy is obligated to terminate portions of itself which have been drained of immediate economic value. Because contemporary America is so amoral the economy has begun to operate laterally, ostensibly rent-seeking it's way from one unit of commerce to the next, conglomerating and centralizing wealth via massive corporate entities unfettered by a market we the people allowed it to acquire.

This is exactly the reason why we do not see the sort of growth typically associated with technological innovation today, an economy is only as good as it's market, and our market has frankly gone to shit. Instead of asking the pertinent questions about poverty in the 19th century like: "what causes unemployment?" and "how can the market adapt to incorporate more workers?", we asked the federal government to arbitrarily bypass economic mechanisms responsible for the sustenance of growth over-time; and now we simply pay our taxes and presume the money will be enough. It isn't enough, economic growth has been stagnant since the 1960s, and the only thing we seem capable of talking about in today's America are ideologically driven, nonsensical, theories about "patriarchy".

Which brings me to my last point before I end this rant, it's time to acknowledge that blatantly discriminatory social outreach programs are absolutely disgusting. There are several examples that I would argue fall under this category, the overwhelming majority of them discriminate on the basis of sex; all of them, without exception, discriminate against boys and men. The most brazen example of this that I can think of in the U.S would be "Girls Who Code", a nonprofit computer literacy organization with the following mantra:

Girls Who Code is on a mission to close the gender gap in technology and to change the image of what a programmer looks like and does.

Would anyone disagree that the demographic in the greatest need of the learning opportunities provided by a STEM outreach program are those living under or close to the poverty line? People who don't have ready access to the internet, much less a computer? An outreach program with the kind of financial resources to finally grant under-privileged kids with access to a highly valuable job-skill, that sounds like a damn good place to start in the effort to overcome poverty as a nation. Luckily, for half of that economically deprived demographic, "Girls Who Code" is an organization capable of giving you those opportunities; but what about the other half of that same demographic? Here's a snippet from their official about page:

Half of the girls we serve come from historically underrepresented groups, including girls who are Black, Latinx, or from low-income backgrounds.

So here's my question: am I supposed to believe that those underrepresented girls don't have brothers? Brothers like, say, George Floyd? How do they justify this completely arbitrary discrimination? I wonder how the life of George Floyd would have changed had he been given the kind of opportunity capable of saving him from a life of crime and drug addiction, I dare say he might still be alive today, unfortunately we'll never know. For kids who grow with access to the internet and a computer (such as myself), this blatantly sexist exclusion is completely innocuous, but for boys who don't have access to those things? Fuck um I guess, "Girls Who Code" is trying to close the "STEM gap" by any means necessary, up to and including compromising that a boy's extracurricular time is better spent getting jumped in by a gang than learning one of the most valuable skills in the infinitely scalable and economically enriching industry of computer science.