Albert Camus is a world renowned absurdist fiction author that focuses his writing on abjuring, abstraction, and extremism. With his moralist leanings he would have found the struggle between police and minorities absurd. He would have believed the struggle was not between the two entities, but the question was of freedom itself. Camus wrote “there are only stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch. We must choose to live in this world and to project our own meaning and value onto it in order to make sense of it.” (Aeon Newsletter). This means that people are free but they are burdened by it. With freedom there is a terrible responsibility to live and act authentically.

            Camus believed the conflict between justice and freedom required constant rebalancing political moderation, and acceptance of our humanity in The Rebel, Camus wrote “to live and let live in order to create what we are” (The Rebel). In this society, under capitalism and in poverty most minorities cannot be considered free they are continually alienated by their oppressors, which in this discussion is law enforcement in general. 

            In The Plague Camus showed that even though everyone was well off when it came down to it and people were dying, all their wealth and holdings meant nothing. When wealthy people start dying alongside those people who are poverty stricken they all die the same. For instance, the wealthy were given all medical advances and medical treatments that were available while poor people and minorities were left untreated, to die horrific painful deaths. 

            This correlates to the situation we find ourselves in today with minorities and law enforcement. We do not see wealthy white men or women being followed, targeted, and profiled by law enforcement. We do not see wealthy white Americans pulled from their vehicles are gun point for minor traffic violations. We do not see wealthy white Americans given maximum sentences for crimes of nonviolence.

            Camus would have thought that police brutality is absurd but he would not be surprised by the unlawful actions occurring in our country today. As Camus sees it, the biggest problem is a political society is the conflict between freedom and justice he believed that these values could not be reconciled and that men trying to do so was fundamentally absurd. Camus believed that good political systems guaranteed freedom and justice equally in individual pursuits of authentic happiness. Camus would have seen, in this day and age, that the efforts of the underclassed were futile. That regardless of how you act and what you do you simple end up back where you started. 

            In his book The Myth of Sisyphus he wrote “we wake up, we toil, we sleep; we wake up, we toil, we sleep; we push the boulder up, it rolls back down, we start again.” (The Myth of Sisyphus). This is what makes the mundane cycle of the human condition absurd. Camus would see that our political and socioeconomic system is designed to keep minorities down. The system was made to control the masses the sheer number of our population who are poor and/or minority far outnumber the wealthy white Americans. The only way to keep this population of people from revolting is to keep them downtrodden, uneducated, and in poverty.