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Someone asked why Americans tolerate police brutality. There are many reasons, but here is a start: Because the United States is a Potemkin democracy, where in practice, the citizenry have very little say in how they are governed. How is it a Potemkin democracy? 1. We do not have direct national elections for federal officer holders. We are governed by gerrymander, the electoral college, an undemocratic senate, and a Supreme Court where a majority of the justices were nominated by presidents who lost the popular in the first runs for the office. 2. Our courts allows officeholders to choose their own voters, which is frankly embarrassing and bizarre. Dystopian too. 3. We have legal bribery which is called “dark money”, campaign contributions, and lobbying. 4. If we were to be honest, the U.S. is a limited democracy, because of constitutional design and the power of money. 5. Our first amendment treats bad-faith misinformation and disinformation as deserving of the same protections as all political speech, despite the fact that misinformation and disinformation contributed to the death of 1.1M Americans in the recent past. 6. The nation was founded on the premise of liberty and equality, yet the founders owned slaves, and violated them. 7. As a society, we abhor intellectuals, and deride those seeking positive change as “Marxists” or “UnAmerican”, even though the people who are seeking to reform America are often pragmatic idealists who are brave enough to call a spade a spade. 8. The United States has never atoned for slavery and the apartheid of African-Americans. Any mentioning of horrific treatment of African-Americans is called “woke” as a means of demeaning their suffering. African-Americas were enslaved for 10 generations from 1619-1865. They suffered legal apartheid from 1865-1964. They couldn’t legally vote until 1968, which was not that long ago, but many of their fellow countrymen tell them to “get over it”, which is frankly impossible, especially when you’re still be treated as second-class citizens, and you’re still suffering systemic, de facto racism at a societal level. Some explanation for why, in practical terms, African-Americans, for the most part, couldn't legally vote until 1968: Passed in 1870, the 15th Amendment gave African-American men the right to vote, but it wasn't enforced in many areas of the United States until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In many parts of the country, African-Americans were prevented via local and state laws from exercising their right to vote. In addition, African-Americans faced racial terrorism from organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, which had the backing of local government elites, of which many of them were members too. From 1882 to 1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the U.S., according to records maintained by NAACP. The Emmet Till Anti-Lynching Act was signed into law on March 29, 2022, by President Joe Biden. It took 120 years for Congress to pass an anti-lynching act. Republican House members Andrew Clyde (R-GA), Thomas Massie (R-KY), and Chip Roy (R-TX) voted against it. 9. The United States has never atoned for for the genocide of Native Americans, indigenous peoples who lived in the Western Hemisphere, from the Bering Strait to the tip of South America for thousand upon thousands of years. Colonists and settlers exterminated Native Americans with disease, war, and intentional deprivation in the name of God, country, and profit. To this day, Native Americans suffer disproportionately compared to the rest of the U.S. population. Again, this is just a partial list, but it explains how we got to where we are today.