Chauvin will be convicted and rightly so – but I still balk against the idea of collective responsibility. It is collective responsibility that has been used as a blunt rhetorical weapon by demagogues since the beginning of time. You’ve written with your usual excellence and fiery passion but that doesn’t make it morally correct. All anyone need do is reverse the races whilst reading to see the problems inherent with collective responsibility.

Treating large groups of people like a homogeneous unit has never led society anywhere good – that has been the trick that white people have used as a tool of suppression of BIPOC. Parroting the same trickery back in reverse isn’t progress, the absence of such rhetoric from all sides is progress.

It’ll lead, as you’ve indicated, to a second civil war. That may be what America needs but I hope not for the sake of your country. It is always the poorest folk who pay the price for the lofty idealism of their upper and middle class rhetoricians. I still, as always, respectfully appreciate your motives – but question your methodology.