"Short Skirt" Racism

"Blaming the victim" is a rationalization commonplace in cases like rape and sexual assault.  She had a short skirt.  She was asking for it.

Now, with the spotlight on lethal force used by police on unarmed black people (not to mention vigilantism by assholes like George Zimmerman and Michael Dunn), we're hearing the same lame excuse-making with racist undertones:

The black person . . . was big.  He argued.  He looked older.  He ignored my command.  It looked like a real gun.  He was reaching for something.  He had an arrest record.  I feared for my life.  His father had a drug conviction.  He looked suspicious.  He was a misdemeanor suspect.  Etc.

In code-speak, he was less than perfect, no angel, and so killing him had some level of justification.  Figuratively, he was a black man in a short skirt. 

The worst of these blame-the-victim defenses is the "black-on-black crime" excuse espoused by Rudy Giuliani and others on the old, tired, white right.  Most crimes against black people are, in fact, committed by other black people, and that's why, according to Rudy, the police have such a short fuse with the black community.  Rudy says that if all these black people weren't so busy killing each other, we wouldn't have to send so many violent, hard-ass white cops into black neighborhoods to add to the killing process.

What Rudy doesn't say is that virtually the same high percentage of crimes against white people are committed by other white people.  Where is the equivalent presence of race-profiling, violent black police officers sent to maintain security by harassing, arresting, jailing, and killing proportional numbers of white people at their youth soccer fields, Volvo dealerships and Whole Foods stores?

When it comes to cop interactions, it's demonstrably unequal -- too often white people get a warning and black people get dead.  Police training and tactics must change, and virtually everyone knows it.