How many black cops does it take to commit a racist hate crime? The latest correct answer is ‘five’. That’s the number of policemen in Memphis who have been fired and charged with second-degree murder for the killing of Tyre Nichols.

Last month Nichols, who was himself black, was pulled over by the officers. They proceeded to kick him, pepper-spray him, hit him and repeatedly baton him. He died in hospital three days later.

Of course, if the Memphis officers had been white, American cities would be being burned and smashed to the ground again, as they were three years ago after the death of George Floyd. On that occasion it was asserted that Floyd was killed because he was black – something which, interestingly, wasn’t claimed at the white arresting officers’ subsequent trial and conviction. But if you see everything through the lens of race, that is what you do. Rogue white cop kills black male? Must be racism. How then to deal with the profiles of the officers charged in this latest case?

Easy! You simply assert that five black officers killing a black man is further evidence of white supremacy. ‘Huh?’ you may well ask. Here to explain is CNN’s Van Jones: ‘The police who killed Tyre Nichols were black. But they might still have been driven by racism.’ And how does that work? According to Jones, ideas of black inferiority are so ‘pervasive’ that ‘black minds as well as white’ can fall prey to this racism. ‘Self-hatred is a real thing,’ he said. I don’t know if the same applies to the dozen or so black folks shot by other black folks on an average weekend in Chicago. If that’s all a result of white supremacy then there’s an awful lot of it going around – mostly unnoted.

But when it comes to a black person killed by the police these days, the US goes into a set routine, whatever the facts. After footage of the Nichols arrest was released, President Biden said he was ‘outraged and deeply pained’ by the video. So far so natural. He then added: ‘It is yet another painful reminder of the profound fear and trauma, the pain, and the exhaustion that black and brown Americans experience every single day.’

The President who was meant to heal America has once more shown his brilliance at dividing it. Even his language there is borrowed from the latest generation of American race-hucksters. Whenever racism is brought up by today’s activists, they say that they are ‘tired’ and ‘exhausted’ by it, as though rather than getting a liberal arts degree and spending their days online they are at the forefront of the most gruelling civil rights campaign.

We were also reminded how easy it is for us in Britain to end up as a mere satellite of this particular American culture war. For days on end our news led with the story of the Nichols killing, as if it had happened in Manchester, not Memphis. Breaking news around his death took priority over all that was going on at home.

This is the way now. While the BBC and other UK media pore over every racial aspect of a US killing, they say almost nothing about French police again beating the hell out of protestors during a recent march against pension reform. One of those young protestors had a testicle amputated after he was batoned where it hurts. Likewise, when French police shot two dead on the Pont-Neuf in April last year, it didn’t dominate the British news for several days. That’s because with those stories there isn’t the simplistic ‘wish-it-was-the-civil-rights-era’ racial lens that is put on everything coming out of America.

Our very own David Lammy spotted the opportunity, as he often does. This may be a man who infamously believed Henry VIII was succeeded by Henry VII, but history isn’t the only thing the shadow foreign secretary has back to front. Last weekend he sent out a statement on Nichols’s death saying: ‘It’s traumatic, exhausting and tragic to watch footage of yet another black man killed by those whose duty it is to protect. Tyre Nichols should be at home with his family today. Justice must be served. Police violence against minorities must finally end.’

As it happens, black people are not a minority in Memphis. They are, in fact, a majority (64 per cent). More importantly, Lammy didn’t bother to inform his followers that on this occasion his ‘exhaustion’ comes from watching footage of five black men killing another black man. Doubtless that would run counter to his favourite American-adopted narrative.

The same narrative was followed by a guest on Sky News. In Britain and America, ‘good’ police are ‘the exception not the norm’, the activist Shola Mos-Shogbamimu told viewers. ‘The source of this problem is white supremacy.’ Kay Burley tried to quietly mumble that the arresting officers were black. ‘I’m about to educate some people right now,’ replied Shola, with characteristic humility. ‘White supremacy underpins the policing and criminal justice system both in the United States and United Kingdom.’ This is apparently done through a combination of white supremacist police officers and ‘black and brown’ gatekeepers who are white supremacists too. Gosh.

How is any of this to change? Well, as one final expert on policing, Whoopi Goldberg, suggested on one of America’s most influential TV programmes, The View: ‘Do we need to see white people also get beaten before anybody will do anything?’ As it happens Ms Goldberg, Van Jones, Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, David Lammy and anyone else who wishes can go online and see white people being beaten by US cops from an array of racial backgrounds. They can also watch the snuff movie of police in Dallas killing the (white) Tony Timpa – for which no officer was ever charged. We could all get exhausted. But it’s only this reductive, race-obsessed narrative that actually is.