@Ron @patrickrhone First, Patrick, thank you for sharing. It is so important to have those kinds of first person accounts, to be able to bear witness, from whatever distance, through your eyes and also to your experience.

Ron, Your comment about your wife's question made me think of my wife, who is also from another country, and conversations that she and I have had over the years. One thing I learned from her asking very similar questions to yours about “What African Americans want?” (which also included questions like "Why do they always make everything about race?”) is that it can sometimes take a long time for people from other countries--where the racial/ethnic power dynamics and the history behind those dynamics are different--fully to understand the historical, cultural, political, and socioeconomic context which anti-Black racism in the US is and which also gives that racism its particular shape.

In my wife's case--and I want to be clear that I am not trying to generalize from my wife to your wife--this has been especially true because in her own country she was among the privileged majority, in ethnic terms if not political ones, and it took her a while fully to inhabit what it means that here, in the US, she is seen as a woman of color. One difference, of course, is that the racism and xenophobia my wife experiences, offensive as it is, is not baked into the fabric of our cultural, political, and socioeconomic institutions—and law enforcement is only one of them—in the same way that anti-Black racism is.

It's not just, for example, that the killing of George Floyd by law enforcement has a history that goes back 400 years to the beginnings of slavery in this country; it's that this history is with good reason very much alive in Black communities in the United States today in a way that it is not for, say, a white guy like me, living in the relative comfort and safety of my (unfortunately) gentrifying, very diverse neighborhood in New York City. It's hard enough for all too many people who were born here--most, but not all us white--to wrap our heads around this fact (for which we can thank the impoverished way we teach the history of our own country). It can be even harder for people like my wife, who were neither born here nor grew up here, to do so, even as they fully understand the injustice of what Derek Chauvin did to George Floyd.