Middle-class POC have more White Privilege than Poor Whites — or, BLM Logic on Police Killings
If you only see race, you see two facts about police killings in the US:
- Numerically, two times more white people than black are killed by the police. In 2020, 457 white people and 241 black people were killed.
- Statistically, black people are over twice as likely to be killed by the police. “Among Black Americans, the rate of fatal police shootings between 2015 and July 2021 stood at 37 per million of the population, while for White Americans, the rate stood at 15 fatal police shootings per million of the population.”
Fact #2 is the basis for #BLM insisting police killings are all about race. They see that white people are less likely to be killed by the police than black people and conclude that white people are privileged.
But if you also see class, you see more facts:
3. Almost everyone killed by the police is poor. Brian Burghart, creator of the Fatal Encounters database, concluded, “it’s poor people who are killed by police.” Noel Ignatiev, author of How the Irish Became White, said this in a review of police killings, “The present data show that what whites and blacks who are killed by police have in common is poverty.” Ulrich Schimmack, a professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga, found that in the US, “the odds ratio of getting killed by police for poor Black citizens, 3.34 out of 100,000, is similar to the odds ratio of getting killed by police for poor White citizens, 3.64 out of 100,000. The odds ratio is close to 1, and does no longer show a racial bias for Black citizens to be killed more often by police, OR(B/W) = 0.92. In fact, there is a small bias for White citizens to be more likely to be killed. This might be explained by the fact that White US citizens are more likely to own a gun than Black citizens, and owning a gun may increase the chances of a police encounter to go wrong (Gramlich, 2018).”
4. The racial proportions of police killings and US poverty are roughly the same, about two to one. In 2017, for example, 18 million white and 9 million black people were in poverty. In the same year, the police killed 457 whites and 223 blacks.
Add the four facts together, and it’s clear that poor white Americans are far more likely to be killed by the police than richer black people. If race is your only tool of analysis, that means richer black people have more white privilege than poor white people.
For the rest of us, that means Black Lives Matter should be called Poor Lives Matter.
Related: The Privilege of Unpacking “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”
PS. In the comments, people who are used to seeing the problem exclusively in terms of race think I am denying the existence of racism in the US. I am not. There are clear areas where race matters more than class. Police killings is not one of them. If it were, the racial statistics for black and white people in poverty and killed by the police would not be the same.