The first sentence above makes clear that you are completely unqualified to pass the judgment in the second sentence.
The idea that you can look at a majority-black city, one where blacks are stopped by police at a level that dramatically outweighs even their majority population status, and where the police force is predominantly white, and argue that it is merely “tasteless” for the leaders and officials of this city to routinely correspond in racist emails, is absolutely staggering.
This is the worst type of racism, not because it’s more virulent than any other kind (i’m sure there are plenty of people in America more racist than these idiots), but because it is racism that attaches to instituutional and legal power and control. If some fucking idiot from Bumfuck, Missouri or Incest, Alabama or Flannel, Vermont is a raging racist, that’s something to worry about at the general level of culture and society. But when our actual authorities and law enforcement are racist, that strikes at the very heart of our notions of rights and citizenship. And if some people are willing to simply hand-wave this away as “tasteless,” without any real concern for its impact, i think this actually demonstrates how deeply racist ideology is embedded even among people who would bristle or whine if you pointed out their racism.
In the whole debate over the Michael Brown case, i tried to reserve judgment until the facts were in. I have dozens of the Grand Jury documents on my computer, and while i certainly don’t have time to read all of the thousands of pages of testimony, i’ve read the testimony of quite a few of the key witnesses. Had i been on that Grand Jury, i think there’s a pretty good chance that i would have voted not to indict the cop, just like the actual Grand Jury.
But that doesn’t mean that everything is just fine in Ferguson. The exoneration of the cop in this case doesn’t mean that Ferguson cops don’t police blacks unfairly, and it doesn’t mean that structural racism isn’t part of the force. The DoJ report makes that very clear, and i also believe that, even if incidents like the Michael Brown shooting are found to be justified, the very nature of those incidents often probably escalates precisely because a bunch of racist asshole cops treat almost every black person they come into contact with, for whatever reason, as a criminal rather than as a citizen. The fact that this doesn’t seem to worry you tells us a lot about your character.
And if you believe that referring to a black man as a chimp isn’t racist, especially given the context of the other emails, then you’re either too stupid to breathe, or you’re simply racist yourself. Those are the only two possible choices.