No, White Supremacy Isn’t to Blame for Tyre Nichols’s Death

Q: What do you call it when five black cops brutally beat a black man to death, in violation of their oaths, their duties, and all respect for the sanctity of human life?

A: White supremacy.

Alas, I am not kidding. In a piece for CNN on Friday, the political commentator Van Jones argued that the killing of Tyre Nichols showed “it’s time to move to a more nuanced discussion of the way police violence endangers Black lives,” and, in particular, time to comprehend that “one of the sad facts about anti-Black racism is that Black people ourselves are not immune to its pernicious effects.” “At the end of the day,” Jones wrote, “it is the race of the victim who is brutalized — not the race of the violent cop — that is most relevant in determining whether racial bias is a factor in police violence.”