The intent of Hacker News is to be news of particular interest to the "hacker" (defined in a somewhat unclear and unusually broad way, but still) community, not particularly news of general interests that is of interest to members of that community for generally the same reason and to the same extent as of the more general community.

There are plenty of other forums with different intended purposes where such discussions are less ephemeral than on HN.

I argue that a good hacker would be interested in these things. First, hackers care a lot about issues of justice, power and bias. Here people are being strangled on camera and their murderers are getting away with it. And, even the 'body cameras on all cops' idea we were clamoring for didn't help. That's a conversation we have to have: bodycams won't be helpful if America keeps on working this way.

Plus, how can we talk about wanting to have a 'diverse' Silicon Valley and ignore black people getting killed in the streets?

Previous discussions about why not to discuss current issues in politics in HN have included the conclusions a) they are off topic and b) usually result in low quality discussion, sadly.