On Being a Black Male, Six Feet Four Inches Tall, in America in 2014

[Donald Ian Rankin]

8. Possibly worth noting that this is not a rational fear.

Kamau scrupulously presents this purely as a statement about his psychology, not about the world in which he lives, and I think that's fair enough - that may well be how he thinks.

But in case his audience aren't so careful, I think it's probably worth noting that his fear is clearly not rational.

Every year, out of 100,000 black men in the USA:

1 will be shot dead by a cop, most but by no means all of them criminals.
16 will be shot dead by people who are not cops (including suicides); again, criminals will be overrepresented, but much less so.
About 1000 will die in total.

So placing "being shot by the police" high among your list of fears, or avoiding it high among your motivations, is not rational, even if you are a young black man in the USA.

The fact that for white men the number is probably over 1 in 1000,000, possibly higher, certainly indicates room for improvement, but if you're thinking in terms of "bad things that might happen to me" rather than "social problems that should be fixed", "being shot by the police" should not get a look-in.