But he went on, in that same work, to caution: "When people are already dehumanized, due to the oppression they suffer, the process of their liberation must not employ the methods of dehumanization."
Institutional racism and police brutality against colored people long pre-date Trump, though the latter has emboldened white supremacists by his inflammatory rhetoric. Anyone familiar with Hollywood movies or the crime novels of writers like Walter Mosley know that routine police brutality is a feature of life that has rarely been questioned by whites:
In the south if a black man killed a white man he was dead. If the police saw him on the street they shot first and asked questions ... never. If he gave himself up he was killed in his cell. If the constable wasn’t a murdering man then a mob would come and lynch the poor son of a bitch. And failing all that, if a black man ever made it to trial and was convicted of killing a white man -- even in self-defense, even if it was to save another white man- that convict would spend the rest of his days incarcerated. There would be no parole, no commutation of sentence, no extenuating circumstances, no time off for good behavior (Walter Mosley, Cinnamon Kiss).
Racial segregation and a biased criminal justice system have not been confined to the American south. Ken Wytsma writes: "More African American adults are under correctional control today than were enslaved in 1850, ten years before the Civil War began, and more are unable to vote than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was passed. Black men are imprisoned at six times the rate of white men; estimates indicate that black men have a one in three chance of going to prison in their lifetime" (The Myth of Equality: Uncovering the Roots of Injustice and Privilege).
A revolutionary situation can be said to exist when an economic, political or military system is so oppressive that large numbers of people have in their hearts withdrawn consent from the system and from those who administer it. And lament ("This should not be") is the first step in revolutionary change.
A good many of my white friends, with some outstanding exceptions, cannot grasp the severity of this situation. Their view of "sin" is individual, rather than structural and systemic. Because they themselves are not "racist" in their attitudes to others, they fail to empathize with the rage of those who suffer every day. So they continue to vote for politicians who simply tinker with the system rather than uproot it altogether. And they are more offended by the "tone" in which people protest than the situation which gives rise to such protest!
The German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller's poignant lament is often quoted in these contexts of comfortable middle-class lethargy:
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out -- because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the communists
and I did not speak out -- because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out -- because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me --
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.