I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street

by Matt Taibbi

On one side sat a group of mostly nonwhite Americans who believed (or knew from personal experience) that institutional racism is still a deathly serious problem in this country, as evidenced by everything from profiling to mass incarceration to sentencing disparities to a massive wealth gap. On the other side sat an increasingly impatient population of white conservatives that was being squeezed economically (although not nearly as much as black citizens), felt its cultural primacy eroding, and had become hypersensitive to any accusation of racism. These conservatives blamed everything from the welfare state to affirmative action for breeding urban despair and disrespect toward authority—in other words, these conservatives saw themselves as victims of malevolent systems and threatening trends but thought that nonwhite Americans were fully responsible for their own despair.