Why are so many whites afraid of black people?

“But let me ask you this,” he says. “Do you believe it goes both ways?”

She says yes, but starts explaining about how whites have more power. Spradlin isn’t buying it. “Why are so many people afraid of black people?” he asks. “...Violent tendencies . ... That’s why a lot of the white people are afraid and I don’t blame them.”

Spradlin is speaking, mind you, to a slightly built woman his beefy colleague just assaulted for no reason other than pique. He is speaking to a woman whose heritage includes 400 years of kidnapping, lynching, bombing, burning, rape, riot and, yes, police brutality, at the hands of people who look like him.

But it is “black people” — note that no other qualifier is necessary — who, he says, have these supposed “violent tendencies.”

And let us not ignore Spradlin’s talk of how racism “goes both ways.” Here’s what King was trying to explain when he cut her off:

The black person who doesn’t like white people can call names, maybe even physically assault some individual. But she has virtually no power to express that bigotry with impunity upon multiple victims through public institutions. If she is a cop she cannot, for example, physically assault white motorists for no reason and expect to get away with it. By contrast, do you know how Bryan Richter was “punished” for his brutality?

He had to go for counseling.

Spradlin is not alone in embracing false equivalence, though. A 2011 study by professors Michael Norton of Harvard and Samuel Sommers of Tufts University finds that many whites now identify bias against them as a bigger problem than bias against blacks.

They can point to no statistic to support this — there is none. Unfortunately, the new American ethos, as illustrated last week at the GOP Convention, holds that the truth you “feel” is more authoritative than the truth that is actually, well ... true.

Since the video of Richter’s brutality came to light, the police chief and various city officials have pronounced themselves appalled and there is talk of reform. But this is bigger than police. Police reflect the society they serve. Bryan Richter assaulted Breaion King. By contrast, Spradlin only talked to her, their conversation calm and composed. But make no mistake.

He assaulted her, too.

To gauge the opportunism and hypocrisy that define Donald Trump’s Republican Party, consider this: Imagine the scalding rhetoric that would have boiled from the likes of Newt Gingrich if Hillary Clinton had offhandedly undermined the collective security architecture of U.S. foreign policy since NATO was created in 1949.

Vladimir Putin’s regime is saturating Europe with anti-Americanism, buying print and broadcast media, pliable journalists and other opinion leaders, and funding fringe political parties, think tanks and cultural institutions. Putin is etching with acid a picture of America as ignorant, narcissistic