Who is talking about the legal system? This is the political system.

The political system doesn't work like this either. All governments and political bodies are capable of dealing with multiple issues simultaneously. As far as I'm aware, none will deny you your rights or restitution just because "hey look, some people who look like you have done bad things, too."

> All governments and political bodies are capable of dealing with multiple issues simultaneously.

If that were true there would be equally prominent protests and proposed legislation on both issues simultaneously.

> As far as I'm aware, none will deny you your rights or restitution just because "hey look you've done bad things, too."

You're talking about the legal system again.

In what way does being capable of considering multiple issues simultaneously require protest for all of these issues, or equal prominence for all of these issues? I have no idea what point you're trying to make, really.

> In what way does being capable of considering multiple issues simultaneously require protest for all of these issues, or equal prominence for all of these issues?

Because that's what considering means. It takes more than just declaring that something is under consideration while not really paying attention to it or doing anything about it.

We don't actually consider all issues at once equally. That's why it makes sense to question their relative importance.

You're assuming that care for every issue is expressed in the same way, and also that whether or not something makes front page news or gets people riled up is a fair measure of how much they care, as opposed to a measure of simply how flashy or exciting that issue is.

> that whether or not something makes front page news or gets people riled up is a fair measure of how much they care

That seems like a pretty good metric for whether the political system is grappling with something.

What metric are you proposing as an alternative? Does it show a different result?

The political system is always grappling with lots of things simultaneously. Some of those things will always be getting more publicity and arousing more anger than others at any point in time, but so what? That doesn't necessarily mean anyone's moving the needle on those issues to a higher degree than on other issues.

I'd put it like this: The insitutionalized legal and political system can address lots of things simultaneously. The public attention (news cycle etc) has strong limits how many topics it can consider simultaneously. The focus of public attention is also important because it influences the political system (democracy and all).

Currently the focus is on systemic racism and police violence. Trying to move focus to violence between blacks would absolutely take resources away from fighting racism (which is often the intention of those bringing up the topic).

What are the numbers? Ten times as many black people die from black-on-black homocide as police killings?

Even if it were just twice as many- I think it would be reasonable to wonder, if you were being utilitarian, what approach would save the most lives.

An uncharitable reading of your comment might interpret that fighting racism is so relatively important it's worth sacrifing some net black lives for it.

Is there any evidence that reducing the public's focus on fighting racism will increase its focus on fighting black-on-black crime, reducing poverty, reforming prisons, etc.?

I doubt it. Some issues are great for publicity, and others are much more difficult to get into the hyper-competitive limelight. In fact, I'd bet that there are spillover effects where attention and donations to other pro-Black causes increases while BLM is in the spotlight.

Maybe. I think one problem is the idea of racism itself, which has at least three meanings:

intent (i.e. if you want to genocide [race], you're a racist),

facts/beliefs (you could imagine someone with no hatred or ill-intent who believed things about e.g. population statistics- you might call those beliefs racist even if there was no 'racist intent' behind them)

And outcomes (something ends up disproportionately impacting one racial group, not necessarily with any racial animus involved at any point. You might call this structual racism).

If we had different words for these three things, I think it would make it a lot easier for people to agree to get stuff done. As it is, they all get mixed up- and an approach that assumes racism no.1 won't help 2 or 3, or might exarcerbate things. If I had to guess, I'd say a lot more of what's going on is 3 than 1, but I could be wrong.

(And calling 3 'structural racism' probably won't do the job, because it's that's too easily conflatable with 1, so a lot of people won't support it.)

I don't know. I'm personally interested to see what'll happen if more police precints get abandoned/burned down, and people set up more anarchist/warlord-controlled areas across the U.S.