I don't think it's all about race. Race is a factor but not the only one. I don't see conservatives up in arms about Peyton Ham, the white kid killed by the government in his driveway while holding a toy gun. For reasons that I believe are more complex than race, conservatives obsession with liberty from the tyranny of government does not include police killing citzens. That seems to me to be a huge flaw in the ideology at the moment.
and yes I do know conservatives are a massive group and among them there are a wide variety of beliefs. I am speaking to what seems to be the vocal thought leaders we see on TV and the internet that likely drive a lot of the conversation.
Its interesting, because another poster implied just earlier this morning that conservatives only hold the government responsible when a white person is the victim.
This is hard because while I can't speak for everyone, I generally don't get up in arms about things because frankly I can't afford to be up in arms about every issue and every death and every whatever, including what happened to Petyon Ham which I'm sure was a tragedy. That's where all the miserable twitter people come in. Its not about tyranny though. I care...otherwise I wouldn't waste time on a message board talking about it and donating to charities.
But also a huge element for me as a rational person (I also think that this is more a feature of conservative thinking)...is that I'm not going to get up in arms about things that statistically don't seem warranted. At face value that probably seems terrible, particularly to folks on the left, but I'm not programmed to either ignore the underlying math or frankly live based on emotion and the math is irrelevant. Those of course aren't bad people, often well intended, but data and math doesn't suddenly not get to exist.
Doesn't mean that bad things happening is ok or shouldn't be addressed by the people hired to address these things or that we shouldn't talk about them and vote for the people to implement what we want. It doesn't mean we can't observe when the math is particularly punitive for black people and that can influence our thinking about the issue if warranted ...but for me I can only talk about them in the context of data and overall sense of magnitude not just based on the latest video (but they do influence me because I am human). I also have a hard time justifying the implementation of changes based on the impacts to one population based on the color of their skin, I'm not lobbying for police reform on the back of a dozen more Peyton Ham murders because she was white.
There's the famous Joseph Stalin quote "One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic". I think it represents well that there are flaws at either end of that thinking. The 13yr old that just got shot is an absolute tragedy. The mistaken Tazer shooting a tragedy as well. It was horrible, but we see these things on video or even read about them and they create a statistically skewed bias as to the magnitude. Every life is important and we should be focused on improving, but there is the reality of administering a nation of 330MM people, many of which are violent, and the inevitable casualties that will result, particularly for the people that refuse to comply. Mistakes will be made, humans are fallible and when you extrapolate that across tens of millions of interactions people will die. That will not stop until the next 10 mile wide comet arrives.
On the other end of the spectrum of Stalin's quote, I posted a few days ago about 250,000 deaths in the US annually due to medical malpractice....and nobody blinked an eye. Who is up in arms? Guess we need more videos. Unfortunately in 2021, if we really want people to care it would need to be videos of black people or to show that black people are disproportionally harmed. To the posters point...I don't think the right is going to suddenly start caring either way, but when its discovered that black people make up 15% of the deaths...thats when many on the left will begin to care (I was very intentional to indicate not all).
Point is...we should be working to improve policing, we should be working to improve medical procedures. If we really cared about lives, a lot more would be saved if we were up in arms about the latter...but we're not we are more concerned with politics and in-groups. We are exponentially more up in arms about the former and creating an immense amount of hate around the former and there is no doubt in my mind we are creating chain reactions that are are actually ending more lives than otherwise would have through the fear cycle. And here we are.