`Death By Racism': Part of America's DNA from the start?

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a black man or woman living in America in 2020. How could you not believe that racism kills?

If you are black, you need not imagine anything. You know it very well.

You don’t need to see the video of George Floyd, a police officer’s knee on his neck as he struggled for his dying breaths, to know that black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than are white people.

You don't need to hear the racial statistics on COVID-19 to know that black people have been affected disproportionately -- the same is true of eight of the 10 leading causes of death in the United States. Even before the pandemic, black life expectancy was 3½ years shorter than white.

Many blacks are redlined into densely packed, crime-ridden urban areas. Stuck in underfinanced, substandard schools. Subjected to silent environmental catastrophes, like lead hidden in pipes and on walls.

“It’s not just how could you not believe that racism is killing you if you are black,” said Brittany Packnett Cunningham, founder of Campaign Zero, which fights police brutality. “How could ANYBODY not realize the lethal nature of racism?”

This is all true 401 years after the arrival of the first slaves on these shores, 165 years after they were emancipated, more than six decades after the passage of the voting rights acts. If whites are surprised, Cunningham said, it is only because they view the world through rose-colored, Caucasian glasses.

“I think white people were spared the truth of what was happening so they could believe there was progress being made,” she said.

But recent events like the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man chased and killed by armed white men as he jogged through a south...