One thing I can say for the Black Lives Matter movement is that it really opened up my eyes to ongoing police brutality. I started following the news more carefully and I started watching some YouTube videos about police beating people in situations that didn't lead to death and this didn't make the news, or at least not major news.

Some of these videos are on YouTube channels run by civil rights lawyers, and others just by interested citizens who want to do something about routine police brutality — by exposing brutal police culture to the clear light of day.

And then I started hearing something counter-narrative. Most of the people who run these YouTube channels are very careful to decry racism. They believe that Black lives matter, and they say so a lot. But most of them also try to help people understand the police culture isn't just brutal because it's racist. Police culture is routinely brutal, every day, and results in unacceptable violence every day against all sorts of people.

The channels I watch feature a lot of brutality against Black people because Black people have disproportionately more contact with police in the U.S. than white people have. Yes, obviously, that's a racist problem we must find solutions to.

But the channels I watch also feature a lot of routine police brutality against other groups of people, including white people. I watch lots of bodycam footage of police inventing "officer safety" issues so they can slam suspects against cars, bodyslam them to the ground, jerk them violently while they're handcuffed, to the point of dislocating joints, etc ...

Ordinary people with common senses of decency would not want to see animals treated the way police routinely treat people in the United States. Police culture in the United States really does involve treating people like animals — routinely, day in and day out.

Until we as a society decide to do something to rein the police in, people are going to suffer, and Black people are going to be disproportionately affected.