No it shouldn't. You were not responsible for the past atrocities that happened, you are not responsible for the sins of your proverbial father. You can look back on that time and say "Never again shall we allow that to happen", but we shouldn't feel guilty over something we had no responsibility over.
I don't particularly feel like I am responsible for the generations that came before me, but I am not talking about that. I
do feel like I am partially responsible for the inabilities of my current generation to promote equality and to ensure that crimes against particular racial groups never happen. For example, in Canada, our majority white country has failed to properly investigate the deaths of many hundreds of native women over the past 20 years. A notorious serial killer, Robert Pickford, used this uncaring attitude to murder at least 50 women before he was caught, most of whom were aboriginal - and as many as 200. So yes, I feel that being white should come with a particular responsibility to ensure what happens
today is as fair as possible, because where I come from, there's still way the fuck more white people than anything else, unlike the USA, where white people are getting close to being outnumbered (but still hold the vast majority of political and economic power). This should come with any demographic to which someone belongs.
I do not believe in reparations to descendants of people who were affected by those crimes, but I am fine with the idea of paying it to living survivors of crimes against humanity, such as people interned in the Japanese internment camps or Native-Canadian survivors of the residential school system.
24% of the people shot dead by police in the US this year so far were black.
The WaPo includes 9% of their number as "unknown", so it's more accurate to say "At least 24% of the people shot dead by police in the US this year so far were black." It's also important to note that unlike many statistics, the US government does not keep track of police shootings, so that number is based on information the WaPo can pull from press accounts around the country. Until the US starts keeping proper records on police shootings, we won't have definitive numbers.
Black people make up 13% of the population, and yet they commit around half of violent crimes, such as homicides.
First of all, I don't know where you got "around half". Here's the most recent numbers I got from the FBI:
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/u...he-u.s.-2012/tables/43tabledatadecoverviewpdf
That says the rate was 38.5%, far closer to 1/3rd than 1/2, and easily accurately displayed as 2/5ths. Race isn't everything, of course - inner city poverty has a lot to do with it, and the general rate of incarceration among black men likely helps as well.
Police brutality is bad, but it is not a problem that is almost exclusively linked with African-Americans.
Nobody said it was. Even Black Lives Matter doesn't say it was. They are pointing out that statistically, a black person is more likely to be killed by a cop than a white person. Specifically when that person is not in the commission of a violent crime, such as Tamer Rice, or the two men murdered this weekend for having legal firearms. There's no doubt in my mind that if I am a white guy in an open carry state, I've been pulled over, and I say, to the officer, "Just to let you know, I have a gun on me," before I get my license, I live through that encounter every time. A black guy got straight up murdered for having a legal gun.
Huh, where's the NRA bitching about that guy's freedoms to carry a gun?
