You're stopping short of spelling out your conclusion.

The aims of the protests are to shine a spotlight on police brutality and qualified immunity / defund the police / ensure that killer cops are prosecuted / damage property in pursuit of anarchy / score a new TV / whatever. It's all fairly clear and makes enough sense.

Your idea, however, leaves us with nothing but a knowing look and an appeal to not trust the narrative. If you can read any broader frustration here, it's because all the "but what about white folks?" people in my social circle have been following the same playbook.

So where does it go? Does your argument conclude that the police should be harsher still towards black people? Does it suggest that police who kill should suffer less scrutiny than they presently do? Is the status quo fine, and the resolution should be that everyone just shut up and go home?

What's your call to action here, and what would be the immediate real-world consequences of your worldview?

Thank you, I haven't been able to articulate this line of thought recently

The playbook is the knowing look and the consistently not reaching conclusions, or perhaps not amongst polite company. They're quite free to think differently to me.

If they had said that the protests were fine but next time we expect a shout-out, then the discussion could move on. Much like in this example.

Thank you for this thoughtful and well-reasoned opinion. I would also like to add a global take into the discussion. Who stands to benefit from the American people being both divided among white / black, male / female, old / young, and distrusting of the media? Certainly not anyone in America.

Not OP. When considering this line of thought, I think of meme's in the original sense of the word. So one could take a mildly-conspiratorial take on it and say that the "meme" itself stands to benefit from this sort of division rather than a nefarious agent or group. It's a self-feeding cycle because I would argue that this cause done in a bad/unfair way sows more racial/gender/etc division and as such creates more reason for itself to exist.

> Police brutality is wrong and there is reason to think that it is a worse problem for black people than for white people. At the same time, we recognize the disproportionate extent to which white people suffer from black violence. We may perhaps disagree about the extent to which the discrepancy is due to systematic racism or socioeconomic issues, but we recognize your concerns. We want to reach across the division and work together to fix all these issues

So you want to dilute the protest which is specifically about police violence against black people into something entirely different? You're essentially arguing to destroy the entire protest for something it's not at all about.

Protesting police brutality against black people is protesting police brutality in general.

I think anecdote, personal experience, and most importantly, history, are valuable when the groups in question (law enforcement) are collecting the data in question. Would you believe a survey taken by Coca-cola about what soda is the tastiest? A lot of the initial reactions of law enforcement to incidents of police brutality start with denial, and they don't change their story until there is video evidence to contradict them. In so many incidents where there isn't publicly available evidence, they get to shape the narrative. No amount of data are meaningful if the source benefits from them supporting certain hypotheses.