Letter: Bristol does care, and America is not systemically racist

Posted 5/27/21

The letter in last week’s Phoenix entitled “ Bristol has shown it does not care about systemic racism ” was written with great passion, but grossly mischaracterizes our …

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Letter: Bristol does care, and America is not systemically racist

Posted

The letter in last week’s Phoenix entitled “Bristol has shown it does not care about systemic racism” was written with great passion, but grossly mischaracterizes our town as a systemically racist community. Nothing could be further from the truth or a more slanderous accusation. The author ought to step back and think about how those words and actions affect other people.

One must question the concept of “systemic racism” when a black man was elected twice as the leader of the largest white nation on the earth.  America has had two black Supreme Court judges, a black Secretary of State, a black Secretary of Defense and numerous black cabinet officials, more than 60 black Congressmen, a great number of senior black military officers, large city mayors, numerous government officials and a growing middle class. Somehow systemic racism seems to be a figment of someone’s imagination.

My question and concern is WHY? What motivates people to be so flagrantly wrong in holding to such damaging and hurtful libels?

Clearly American institutions are not built on racism and the oppression and enslavement of Black people. Nor are blacks being killed due to police brutality. The media and special interest groups are cherry-picking officer-involved shootings to establish a narrative that runs counter to the facts. Facts and evidence show a very different story.

The Washington Post has created a database of every known deadly police shooting in America since 2015. As of this writing, 6,211 people have been shot and killed by law enforcement officers. Forty-six percent of them — 2,883 to be exact — were white, while 24 percent (1,496) were black. Just 6 percent were unarmed.

Recent data, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019, found “no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police,” and instead determined that “race-specific county-level violent crime strongly predicts the race of the civilian shot.”

The real problem in black communities is not from police brutality. Upward of 95 percent of black homicides in the U.S. do not involve law enforcement. Maligning the police who provide law and order in all communities at the risk of their own lives is not simply inaccurate. It is maliciously untrue.

The author rightly condemns the posting of KKK stickers in town. This should never happen; Bristolians do care and they condemned it. It is outrageous to even suggest that the people of this town want to be seen as Nazi sympathizers.

The fundamental problem with Generation Citizen is that it is not civics education. It is more properly characterized as “action civics” or “project-based civics.” Generation Civics does not teach about our government; students are not learning about the Constitution, the roles and responsibilities of our government, the basics of American law, or even the correct story of the founding of our nation.

Generation Citizen is a one-sided view of issues that indoctrinates rather than teaches students to consider both the pros and cons of an issue and does not encourage critical thinking.

The writer would do well to be factual and to present evidence-based conclusions rather than assertions built on false narratives.

Michael Byrnes
Bristol

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