Political Cartoon: The Statue of Liberty can’t breathe

We’re all in this together, but not all in this equally. By “this” I mean life in America. The statistics vary somewhat, but black Americans are about three times more likely to die of the coronavirus than white Americans. Overall, more whites are killed by police in America but black men are more likely to die in encounters with police at a whopping rate of 96 out of 100,000 deaths, compared to 39 out of 100,000 for white men.

For anyone starting to sputter, “But, but, but...there are underlying conditions!" So right. As the book by my bedside—Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns about the great migration of southern blacks north from the former Confederate states—brilliantly describes, the underlying condition was slavery before the Civil War and a brutally enforced economic and social system based on race-based inequality afterw. George Floyd’s death after a violent police stop in Minneapolis reminds us that migrating north did not mean migrating to equality for black Americans.

Editorial cartoons from this week include: