The specific criticisms that 'paulhauggis' makes may be true, but I disagree with his assertion that "These sorts of articles do nothing to help the situation and further contribute to the violence against the police and a racial divide in this country." Instead, this is the sort of article we need more of.

Despite the criticisms, this is still one of the least polemic, most accurate, heartfelt, unbiased, personal, and effective articles on race in America that I've ever read. I disagreed with some of the article's specific conclusions, but these are dwarfed by the impact of the article as a whole. Read this article.

It's a poignant, personal account of a English black reporter who has spent a decade of reporting on race in America pondering whether as a responsible parent he has a duty to return to England now that he has a school age son. He's not claiming it's the reason he's leaving, but explaining why one might feel that way:

But while the events of the last few years did not prompt
the decision to come back, they do make me relieved that
the decision had already been made. It is why I have not
once had second thoughts. If I had to pick a summer to
leave, this would be the one. Another season of black
parents grieving, police chiefs explaining and clueless
anchors opining. Another season when America has to be
reminded that black lives matter because black deaths at
the hands of the state have been accepted as routine for so
long. A summer ripe for rage.

This is someone who has thought long about the issues from an outside perspective, but has moved from analyzing race as a reporter to someone concerned about how the realities of race in America will affect his child's future.

While I have been in America, I have not been shot at,
arrested, imprisoned or otherwise seriously inconvenienced
by the state. I do not live in the hollowed out, jobless
zones of urban economic despair to which many African
Americans have been abandoned. I have been shouted at in a
park, taken different routes to school, and occasionally
dealt with bigoted officials. (While driving through
Mississippi to cover Katrina I approached a roadblock that
all the other journalists had easily passed through, only
to have a policeman pat the gun in his holster and turn me
around). These experiences are aggravating. They are not
life-threatening.

Like 'paulhauggis', you should feel free to disagree with it, and to debate the author's logic, but first you should read it.

The altercations in the park, the rerouted walks to school,
the aggravations of daily life are the lower end of a
continuum – a dull drumbeat that occasionally crescendos
into violent confrontation and even social conflagration.
As spring turns to summer the volume keeps ratcheting up.

“Terror,” the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai writes in his
book Fear of Small Numbers, “is first of all the terror of
the next attack.” The terrorism resides not just in the
fact that it happens, but that one is braced for the
possibility that it could happen to you at any moment.
Seven children and teenagers are shot on an average day in
the US. I have just finished writing a book in which I take
a random day and interview the families and friends of
those who perished. Ten young people died the day I chose.
Eight were black. All of the black parents said they had
assumed this could happen to their son.

As one bereaved dad told me: “You wouldn’t be doing your
job as a father if you didn’t.

Read it.