Middle-class POC have more White Privilege than Poor Whites — or, BLM Logic on Police Killings

If you only see race, you see two facts about police killings in the US:

1. Numerically, two times more white people than black are killed by the police. In 2020, 457 white people and 241 black people were killed.
2. Statistically, black people are over twice as likely to be killed by the police. “Among Black Americans, the rate of fatal police shootings between 2015 and July 2021 stood at 37 per million of the population, while for White Americans, the rate stood at 15 fatal police shootings per million of the population.”

Fact #2 is the basis for #BLM insisting police killings are all about race. They see that white people are less likely to be killed by the police than black people and conclude that white people are privileged.

But if you also see class, you see more facts:

3. Almost everyone killed by the police is poor. Brian Burghart, creator of the Fatal Encounters database, concluded, “it’s poor people who are killed by police.” Noel Ignatiev, author of How the Irish Became White, said this in a review of police killings, “The present data show that what whites and blacks who are killed by police have in common is poverty.” Ulrich Schimmack, a professor at the University of Toronto…