It is perhaps the most beautiful piece of political prose ever written, rivaling one of Shakespeare’s sensational sonnets. Whilst the opening sentence is memorable for its own contextual significance, it is the second sentence – crafted on July 2nd, 1776 – that resonates throughout the fabric of humankind.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Source: United States Declaration of Independence. Formally adopted on July 4, 1776.

When Thomas Jefferson, with the help of Benjamin Franklin, crafted those immortal words the notion of all men only referred to ‘white’ men since after all a black enslaved man was only considered to be worth three-fifths of a white man. Ninety-two years later (after the 14^th Amendment was ratified in 1868) blacks were placed on that same elevated pedestal and granted equal rights status with whites. Yet one hundred and forty-eight years after that ratification Blacks in America are still fighting to lay claims to more of those ‘unalienable Rights’ and testify to those ‘self-evident truths that they too are created equal’. But why has it taken so long, and where did it all go wrong for Blacks in America.

Black America is in her third phase of the fight for freedom. The first occurred during the period of enslavement. That battle was initially won on January 1, 1863 with President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. It signaled White America’s willingness to go to war to guarantee Blacks those ‘unalienable Rights’. That phase ended with the full abolition of slavery upon the ratification of the 13th Amendment on December 6, 1865.

However, while some political rights were won with that freedom fight the real battle for economic survival and social acceptance ensued. And like all forms of human oppression throughout the history of man, the subjugation of one form of oppression only leads to the rise of another. Post-slavery Black America had to fight against many Black Codes and Jim Crow laws and the then-prevailing legal doctrine of ‘separate but equal’. This implied (and in some cases was overtly stated) that whilst blacks may have been legally equal, they were to be socially and politically separated from White America. This second phase of the fight for freedom that was led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. sought to achieve an end to de jure (or legal and overt) racial segregation, and promote equal access to social institutions such as hospitals, schools, hotels, restaurants, public transportation, and even the ballot boxes. By 1965 it was achieved via the enactment of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s the form of racial oppression that many blacks now face has morphed into more de facto forms. It is the subtle forms of racism, economic deprivation, police brutality, attitudinal biases, unequal treatments under the law and within the courts. It is easy to fight racism when it manifests itself in overt forms equipped with shackles or official tags such as segregation or apartheid. However, when those labels are removed the struggle becomes harder for the public to embrace. This is the third phase, the battle for the hearts and minds of all whites (and some blacks too) to the ongoing fight for full and complete equality.

If the first phase of the struggle for racial equality could be categorized as a battle for freedom (Liberty) and the second a battle for equal access to social institutions (pursuit of Happiness) then the third phase of the struggle must deal with the fight against unjust killings and could surely be viewed as a battle for equal social, political and economic treatment (a battle for Life, or its worth).

America’s pursuit of the democratic ideal has been a long endearing struggle. Democracy remains under development in this country as it took black men ninety-four years after Thomas Jefferson’s pantheonic words to gain the constitutional right to vote (1870), and another ninety-five years after that for Congress to make it universal across the country (1965). It took white women one hundred and forty-four years before they won their constitutional right to vote (1920), and while African American women earned suffrage at the same time as their white counterparts it wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that their rights were fully enshrined. Finally, it took one hundred and ninety-two years for the first Americans – Native American Indians – to earn full civil rights (in 1968), despite earning citizenship in 1924. And despite these gains Native Americans still do not have universal voting rights throughout the country.

We the People are continuing to form a more perfect Union here in these United States of America. It hasn’t reached full perfection yet, but with each sub population receiving its own slice of those ‘unalienable Rights’, America will eventually define what true democracy looks like. Let us hope that at the conclusion of this third phase Black America will have been blessed with her full complement of inalienable Rights.

Keith Thompson is a Senior Economist in Transfer Pricing with an agency within the US Department of the Treasury, and an adjunct Economics professor with Ramapo College of New Jersey.

The horrific assassinations of 8 police officers over the past two weeks (5 in Dallas and 3 in Baton Rouge) have emphasized just how racially divided this country is becoming. Let’s be clear the targeted assassinations of police officers have no place in our society and must be unequivocally condemned. Despite the fact that the perpetrators were ex-military who may have had psychological problems what they did cannot be tolerated or justified.

Unfortunately, the climate that those murderers operated in cannot be ignored either. So venomous is the rhetoric and animosity on both sides it seems that neither side is truly listening to the other to hear what they are really saying. If they did they will realize that many proponents of the ‘Blue Lives Matter’ movement are justifiable fearful every time their fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, uncles go out to work. Police officers are our family members, friends and neighbors and like our brothers and sisters serving in the armed forces in foreign lands many of these police officers are waging legitimate war here at home against criminal elements. The risk is great that some of them will not return home and yet it appears many in our society don’t fully appreciate the work that they do.

Likewise, the Black Lives Movement is not arguing that all cops are bad, nor are they advocating violence against cops. Far from it, many members of the black community celebrate the presence of police officers within our neighborhoods, and applaud them for the outstanding work that they do. It is the police who protect many of these black communities from the scourge of drugs, gangs and other criminal behavior. It is the police who organize many of these local athletic leagues to keep our children out of trouble, and even volunteer coach in them. However, what seems to get lost in the message is the fact that some of those supporting the police officers seem to be tone deaf to the cries of the black community that their young African American brothers especially are being targeted at an alarming and unjustified rate. Yes, there are some undesirable criminal elements within the black community but many of the killings against African Americans are directed towards innocent men and women. In what universe would a civilized society tolerate that level of injustice to individuals who did no wrong. The cries for justice and respect from both sides are growing louder, yet not being heard.

I’m an African American man who has thankfully never had a negative encounter with the police. Yet it didn’t always feel that way. In the late 1990s I lived and worked in New York City (lived in the South Bronx, a few blocks from Yankee Stadium, and worked on Wall Street). While my interactions with the police were always courteous I frequently felt a sense of unease, especially when I worked late and was commuting back home.

Things hit a crescendo for me when my first son was born in late 1998 and so at the first opportunity (in January of 1999) I moved out of the South Bronx into a safer section in the northern part of the borough. That proved to be very prescient as exactly one month later on February 4, 1999 four police officers fired 41 shots at an unarmed young black man named Amadou Diallo, killing him instantly outside his South Bronx apartment. That brought things into sharp focus for me. At the time of his killing Amadou Diallo’s immigrant status was unknown to those cops. Neither were his educational levels, work accomplishments, nor community involvements. All that the four police officers knew was that he was a black man who they viewed with suspicion. I started to view myself in a similar light. It didn’t matter that I had multiple graduate degrees, or graduated from the most prestigious university in New York City. It didn’t matter that I worked as an economist or a financial analyst. That’s not what the police see when they first see me. They see me as black, and that means I’m a threat whether its real or imagined.

Immediately after 9/11 I moved my young family over to northern New Jersey because, among other things, I could not – in all good conscience – subject my son to living in a world where the city’s political leadership appeared to be fighting a war against blacks. The then mayor would defend the actions of his cops even when they were clearly in the wrong and that was intolerable for me. It shouldn’t matter what color you are, right and wrong should be absolute in certain areas, especially when it related to the sanctity of life.

Since living in New Jersey I’ve lived in predominantly white communities and while I’ve been stopped on a number of occasions, primarily for speeding – I’m now a reformed speedster – the contrast between policing in northern New Jersey to that which I experienced in New York City could not have been any starker. My interactions with the police in northern New Jersey were courteous and always professional on both sides. In fact, for the last eight years or so I’ve served as a volunteer coach for my sons’ local sports teams in my town and on many occasions I’ve been fortunate to work with local police volunteers. They were always gracious, diligent and a pleasure to work with. We’ve never had an issue, and I know that that’s true for many other communities as well. I just wonder why police officers everywhere cannot adopt the same attitude of servitude and respect, however, I’m not naïve to the realities in other communities.

Data from The Washington Post’s project on fatal police shootings showed that of the 1,502 people that have been shot and killed by on-duty police officers since Jan. 1, 2015 (including the recent killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, LA and Philando Castille in Falcon Heights, MN) some 381 were black (representing 24% of all Americans). Most troubling, exactly 50 of the slain victims were unarmed blacks, the same number as were white. However, given the fact that there are nearly 160 million more white people in America than there are blacks shows that unarmed black Americans are nearly five times as likely as unarmed white Americans to be shot and killed by a police officer.

As alarming as those killing statistics are equally disconcerting is the fact that only 10 of those cases where an unarmed black person was killed by the police resulted in the involved officer(s) being charged with a crime according to data from http://mappingpoliceviolence.org, and in only 2 of these instances (deaths of Matthew Ajibade in January of 2015 and Eric Harris in April of 2015) were the officers involved convicted.

Maybe the leadership shown by the civic and political leaders in the respective communities has a lot to do with the quality of policing we observe across the country. While the political leadership in New York City during the late 1990s may have perpetuated the divide between cops and the black community we have also seen positive leadership like the ones we observed in Dallas in the aftermath of those undeserved officers’ slayings, and in northern New Jersey where I live. It’s not a perfect harmony but the civic and political leadership are clearly committed to making it work.

Since January 2015 – according to The Washington Post’s data – Police have shot and killed 175 young black men (ages 18 to 29); 24 of them unarmed. This compares with 172 young white men shot and killed by the police over that same period, 18 of whom were unarmed. The data shows the gross disparity when adjusted for population, blacks – both armed and unarmed – are being killed at rates disproportionate to their percentage of the U.S. population. Of all of the unarmed people shot and killed by police in 2015, 40 percent of them were black men, even though black men make up just 6 percent of the nation’s population.

Despite arguments made by certain ill-advised segments of our society (spewing the same divisive rhetoric as they did during the late 1990s) most of those police killings are not the result of the increased violence within those black communities.

A recent article published by The Washington Post citing independent analysis of the same police shooting data and conducted by a team of criminal-justice researchers concluded that, when factoring in threat level, black Americans who are fatally shot by police are no more likely to be posing an imminent lethal threat to the officers at the moment they are killed than white Americans who were fatally shot by the police.

According to Justin Nix, a criminal-justice researcher at the University of Louisville and one of the report’s authors, “The only thing that was significant in predicting whether someone shot and killed by police was unarmed was whether or not they were black. Crime variables did not matter in terms of predicting whether the person killed was unarmed.”

“This just bolsters our [view] that there is some sort of implicit bias going on,” Nix added. “Officers are perceiving a greater threat when encountered by unarmed black citizens.”

Police officers in every community should be trained to properly assess threat levels and respond appropriately, not simply react to perceived threats with implicit acts of bias. It is unacceptable to kill someone just because one feels threatened by them without the victim having committed an overt act to justify that threat. Early in this country’s history the worth of blacks was constitutionally enshrined as being less than that of whites (click here to read more). However, with time we all hoped that those attitudes had changed. Unfortunately, the continued needless killings have caused many to question whether black lives have increased in worth over these past 240 years. The Black Lives Movement needs to see black lives valued more highly. What I believe the Black Lives Movement really wants is change on two critically important fronts.

First, we demand that the black members of society not be shot at first then asked questions of later. Properly assess the threat levels before shooting at us. Many blacks know that most police officers (maybe as much as 99% of all cops) are decent law-abiding citizens who conduct their jobs with dignity, decency and respect for all Americans. Those officers, unfortunately are being unfairly lumped in with the other unscrupulous elements who while they are few in number cause the bulk of the infractions and cast a bad eye on the entire police force. Maybe increased training can reduce the number of incidents of unnecessary killings, but we also need to see the cops involved in these unarmed shootings removed from the police force. If consequences do not follow actions, then bad behavior will not change and the good cops will unfortunately continue to be stigmatized with the bad ones.

Secondly, for change to be lasting the Black Lives movement needs to see those cops who exhibit fatally bad judgments – who many believe are in the minority – be punished. It cannot be that with so many unjust killings so few of the officers are prosecuted. America needs to purge herself of these few bad cops so that the many good ones can continue their jobs in relative peace and harmony. The future of the Republic lies in removing those few bad cops. Increasing the prosecution of bad behavior will undoubtedly reduce the number of unnecessary killings. If not, we are creating a form of Moral Hazard within our police communities.

Let us begin the process of racial healing by first removing those cops involved in these unarmed shootings from the police force. Some mistakes are worse than others, and for officers to get a promotion after killing an unarmed person is unconscionable such as what occurred in 2015 when Kenneth Boss – one of the officers involved in the Amadou Diallo killing – received a promotion to the rank of sergeant. Secondly, we cannot be throwing individuals in prison for simple crimes and not prosecute others for unjustly taking a life. Law and order requires that all of us in America be held to the same level of justice, otherwise justice is not blind. After 150 years of Emancipation from slavery it is time for Black Lives to matter too.

Keith Thompson is a Senior Economist in Transfer Pricing with an agency within the US Department of the Treasury, and an adjunct Economics professor with Ramapo College of New Jersey.