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My parents told me about Chairman Fred Hampton when I was a kid. I grew up in New York City in the 1980s and ’90s. The New York of Run-DMC, Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Limelight. But also of Michael Stewart, Eleanor Bumpurs, Bernard Goetz and Amadou Diallo. And Rudy Giuliani — whom real New Yorkers have always hated. Police brutality was an inescapable though largely intellectual constant for me.
But beginning with Oscar Grant’s 2009 murder in Oakland, the ubiquity of cellphone cameras made police killings a visceral reality for white Americans, like me, who’d had the privilege of formerly considering them merely an upsetting conceptual fact. For Black Americans, of course, state-sanctioned and -condoned violence has been an immediate, chronic and existential threat for over 400 years.