&gt; Black Americans commit a wildly disproportionate amount of crime. While police conduct exists and is deplorable, my sense as an observer is that the majority of black anti-police activism is about somehow pinning the criminality of the black community on society at large.<p>&gt; While I of course condemn polite misconduct, I can understand how repeated interaction with a recalcitrant criminal element could harden and corrupt a police officer.<p>This right here, this is what racism looks like. This is its kernel, its essence.<p>Racism is fundamentally a double standard between an in group and an out group. The in-group is judged compassionately. Wrong-doing is contextualized and labelled as a mistake, an outlier, the doing of a tiny subset, uncharacteristic. The out-group is judged harshly. Wrong-doing is claimed to be characteristic to the point of being universal, it is never contextualized and there is never an allowance for human imperfection.<p>Here you have a situation where millions of people (black americans) are being characterized by the actions of a tiny subset (criminals), and condemned for it while on the other hand the crimes and abuses of another group (police officers) are contextualized if not excused.<p>All racism is based on a seed of truth, but you can no more use the higher crime rate of blacks to condemn an entire race than you can use the higher crime rate of men to condemn an entire gender.