MANCHESTER, Conn.

Horrible as the murder of George Floyd, a black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis was, the explosion of chest-thumping self-righteousness is making it worse.

People are demanding change, but what change exactly? Minneapolis today is not like darkest Mississippi and Alabama 60 years ago, where the rules of decency were lacking or mere formalities and most white people were indifferent even to the murder of black people. In Minneapolis the necessary rules long have been in place and most people are outraged by Floyd's murder. The officer who killed him was fired and charged criminally within hours.

There always will be misconduct in every occupation. Now that video cameras are almost everywhere, getting away with it is much harder for police. But no rules would have prevented Floyd's murder. A cop simply decided to break the rules.

"Stop killing us," black people demand of the police. But black people are a thousand times more likely to be killed by other blacks than by police or white people. Even as the protests of Floyd's murder convulsed the country, scores of blacks were being killed by other blacks in the poverty factories of the cities. The occasional neighborhood rallies against violence there make the storefront preachers feel important with their bullhorns but the murders continue anyway.

Blacks and whites alike chant, "Black lives matter," but this is insipid, since hardly anyone disagrees. After all, not long ago the country twice elected a black president, and it well might elect another one if the major parties could stop nominating their most repulsive, corrupt, and insentient leaders.

In response to Floyd's murder many people are parading what they imagine to be their moral virtue, perhaps silliest among them the members of the University of Connecticut's women's basketball team, who issued a statement deploring oppression, endorsing justice and love, and concluding self-righteously and laughably, "We are woke." Congratulations, Ladies, but platitudes delivered from your mountaintop of college privilege change nothing either.

Not just silly but also dangerous was the statement from UConn men's basketball coach Dan Hurley. "All I can feel is sorrow," Hurley said, "and, because I am a white man, I also feel incredibly ashamed." Hurley should be ashamed for reviving the concept of racial loyalty and racial responsibility, as if every white person shares guilt for every white person's crime and every black person shares guilt for every black person's crime. Racial guilt is bigotry that leads back to darkest Mississippi.

The proximate problem in Minneapolis and elsewhere is police administration. But the underlying problem is far bigger, and no, it is not "systemic" or "institutional" racism, for most systems and institutions today are politically correct to the point of dogma and paranoia.

The underlying problem remains poverty and social inequality. Despite progress blacks and Hispanics are still disproportionately poor, less educated, less healthy and less able to get ahead. This pushes them into more trouble with the law, and police brutality is not its cause but a mere symptom. The cause is something else -- the long failure of poverty, welfare, education and public-health policies and the refusal to acknowledge that failure. It's the same problem underlying the disproportionate minority casualties in the virus epidemic.

This problem would remain if Floyd had not been murdered, and the pious posturing in response to his murder suggests that nothing about the problem will be changing any time soon.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.