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As the United States prepares to replace a relatively successful, and still remarkably popular, two-term African-American president, the nation has been seized by a terrifying spasm of racial violence.
Two separate videotaped incidents appear to show police officers unjustifiably killing African-American men. They have inspired further “Black Lives Matter” protests around the country. The protest in Dallas, Texas, became the scene of a mass shooting when a black sniper ambushed police officers, killed five and wounded seven others.
American society is deeply shaken by these convulsions. They are not like terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists, which are seen as intrusions from the outside, or by ultra- right fanatics, a familiar fringe in American society. They aren’t like violent rampages by deranged individuals either.
All of those are experienced as encroachments from fundamentally alien entities distinctly outside of, and opposed to, mainstream American culture.
Instead, the current paroxysm of racially-inflected killings seems to erupt from the very core of American society, culture and history.
In Barack Obama’s America – which not only aspires to be, but to many often feels as if really were, a post-racial society – this is a particularly nasty and unwelcome return of repression.
African-Americans, however, were never under any illusions. The Black Lives Matter movement emerged after the killing of several young black men, particularly Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.
The retort from many sceptical white Americans has been that “all lives matter”, an irrefutable but fundamentally irrelevant and even supercilious response. The Black Lives Matter movement has been trying to communicate that young African-American men are regularly confronted with brutality, sometimes including deadly force, at the hands of law enforcement officers and vigilantes under circumstances that would simply never happen to other people.
Moreover, it is extremely rare that the culprits in these crimes, particularly police officers, are punished at all, let alone in an appropriate manner.
Obviously all lives matter. But it is specifically the lives of young black men that are, in encounters with American law enforcement, still routinely treated as fundamentally disposable and indeed irrelevant.
The videos of the past week stunningly illustrated the validity of this campaign.
A video taken by a bystander on July 5 appears to show police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, summarily executing Alton Sterling, 37, while he was pinned to the ground.
The next day, the second video, which depicts the death of Philando Castile, an unarmed 32-year-old man who was shot four times by police officers at a traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, because his car had a broken tail light.
The footage, which is almost unendurably poignant, was taken by his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, who was with him and her four-year-old daughter during the ordeal. She berates the police officers for killing him without cause, and says that he was merely reaching for his licence and registration documents as requested.
Such incidents are agonisingly familiar to African-Americans, who routinely express profound alarm about how quickly young black men can be killed in what should be inconsequential encounters with police. No other constituency in the United States can honestly say that it’s easy to imagine a routine traffic stop of an unarmed man with his girlfriend and a four-year-old child instantly degenerating into a brutal homicide.
Fears of such incidents are common among young black men. But, for almost all other Americans, they are just unthinkable. That is an almost unbridgeable gulf in experiences and perceptions.
However, with the rise of mobile phones and other technology, activists say they have crucial new tools to hold police accountable. The recent videos certainly convey the Black Lives Matter message to non-African-Americans with unparalleled potency.
However, the killing of police officers in Dallas by an African American sniper, Micah Johnson, a military veteran who said he wanted to kill as many white people as possible, threatens to deepen the divide rather than bridge it.
The presidential campaign of Donald Trump has provided an unprecedented platform for the public expression of overt bigotry and “anti-political correctness”. Explicit racism towards African-Americans and Latinos, white nativism and anti-Semitism – long driven to the disreputable fringes of American popular culture – have been re-legitimised by his campaign.
Yet anti-Trump sentiments at protests have also proven irrationally enraged and, at times, violent. Hate has been confronted by more hate.
The United States has never truly overcome its original sin of slavery and mutual suspicions between black and white Americans have never been fully exorcised, while large new Latino, Asian, Muslim and other growing communities have greatly complicated the ethnic and cultural landscape.
Americans can be proud to have twice elected Mr Obama president. There are very few countries that have elevated anyone from a similarly small, historically victimised and still often polarising minority group to national leadership. But there are also very few countries as racially charged as the United States, and even fewer in which such divisions are as central to the national essence.
In both its history and the present day, the United States has much to teach the world about race, including exactly what should, and precisely what shouldn’t, be done.