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During the summer of riots that followed the death of George Floyd, a particular political belief among anti-police activists became a religious dictate among liberals: that the only possible explanation for racial disparities among the victims of police violence was racism.

If you lived in a big metropolitan area in the United States, any other explanation was regarded as heresy. It wasn’t safe to ask whether the reason that so many more suspects killed by the police were black may be that so many more criminals themselves were black. It wasn’t prudent to wonder whether there were aspects of black culture that were driving criminality among black Americans — factors that may be distantly connected to America’s long history of racism, but that were not racism itself.