Baltimore and the Betrayal of Black Dignity
May 5, 2015 09:29:23 #
The real losers in the Freddie Gray riots.
Baltimore is the latest American city to become a stage for the farce that is our national racial discourse. The swift, politicized indictment of 6 police officers for the death of Freddie Graywhich brought down, for now, the curtain on this performance by abandoning all the canons of procedural justice is a fitting end to this sorry spectacle.
The winners of this shameful display are obvious, as they always are after these riots. Local thieves, gangsters, and thugs; bourgeois white anarchists out on a lark; junior-high posers indulging adult-sanctioned destruction; well-heeled black politicians fanning the flames and leveraging the violence for career advancement; race-baiting vultures like Al Sharpton, and the sensationalist national media all benefitted. Most important, the false narrative of a national conspiracy of racist cops itching to murder innocent black men was yet again perpetuated by race hustlers and their progressive enablers.
The losers are the local black businessmen, the law-abiding black residents, the blacks trapped in ghetto hellholes, and the principle of social order as the necessary foundation for individual autonomy and advancement. Worst of all, black Americans have been betrayed by yet another spectacle that reinforces every racist stereotype blacks fought against during the decades of Jim Crow.
Legal segregation was based on the same rationale as slaverythe false assumption that all blacks were by nature incapable of achieving the level of civilization necessary for political freedom and personal autonomy. They were unsuited for freedom and autonomy because they lacked enough rational capacity to exercise impulse control and avoid the destructive behaviors that characterize barbarism, particularly sex and violence. As Aristotle, an important ancient source for this idea, put it, He who participates in rational principle enough to apprehend, but not to have, such a principle, is a slave by nature. Thus it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master.
Black Americans battling racism understood that their oppression was founded on the white assertion of their inability on their own to exercise virtue, especially self-control. Thus in their daily lives they strived mightily to explode these stereotypes by their own behavior. Education, deportment, proper speech, churchgoing, dignified public behavior were all daily challenges to the racist assumption that blacks could not be civilized because they lacked by nature civilizing virtues. In doing so blacks were not acting white, for many whites behaved in disorderly ways that bespoke a lack of virtue. Hence the Progressive eugenics movement in the early 20th century, speaking the language of Darwin rather than virtue, targeted poor whites and immigrant peasants as well as blacks. No, black people were acting civilized, and they refused to cede to whites the notion that civilization was color specific and exclusive.
Segregationists understood what blacks were doing, which is why they targeted black dignity, and attacked blacks who acted uppitywhich included not just defiance, but speaking English properly, using a sophisticated vocabulary, displaying knowledge, and generally comporting themselves in a civilized and virtuous fashion, all of which made blacks dignified. If segregationists did not challenge that dignity, then the foundational idea of their racism was bankrupt. Blacks could be civilized, more so than many whites, and thus they deserved the political freedom and personal autonomy that defined American civilization.
That was an intolerable contradiction for racists, one battled not just with violence, but with daily ridicule and contempt. In contrast, black excesses of sex and violence, or vulgar and clownish public behavior, may have annoyed segregationists, but it did not challenge the justifying ideas of racism. Rather, such behavior was comforting, for it confirmed the notion that blacks acted that way because they lacked by nature the capacity of rational self-control. Long before the Civil Right movement, millions of American blacks had to fight every day for their dignity, and to assert their equal capacity to be civilized by behaving in ways that often called down on them contempt and humiliation.
But just at the moment the 1965 Civil Rights Act codified in law that idea for which blacks had struggled, for millions of blacks cultural developments began to undermine that achievement. Abetted by a decline in religious faith, the notion of virtue and self-control, reinforced by shame, guilt, and religious sanctions, began to retreat before the therapeutic hedonism epitomized in the chant, If it feels good, do it. As a result, impulse control, the most important virtue necessary for poor and historically disadvantaged people to improve their lot, was discarded, replaced by an idealized hedonism that glorified behaviors like sexual promiscuity and drug use guaranteed to hold back those trying to advance.
Second, the idea of Western civilization as a set of universal ideals and rights that transcend the accidents of race and ethnicity was attacked by identity politics. Now the particularities of race, ethnicity, and various spurious cultures were promoted by multiculturalism. An authentic identity could come only from the values, habits, and mores unique to one culture and incompatible with others. Hence the saying, Its a black thing, you wouldnt understand. No matter the differences of privilege, education, region, or wealth, melanin and hair texture melded all blacks into one identity, just as the one-drop rule did to blacks under Jim Crow.
Moreover, Western civilization now was uniquely oppressive, marred by slavery, imperialism, colonialism, capitalist exploitation, and endemic racism. As such, assimilation to Western civilization became a betrayal of racial identity, and learning its language, history, and foundational ideals yet another act of cultural oppression. Once W.E.B. Du Bois spoke of reading Shakespeare and Aristotle as crossing the color line. Now its Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go, as the privileged students at Harvard and Berkeley chanted. Those who attacked America whether through ideas or violence were romanticized as revolutionaries fighting for racial liberation, as well-heeled racial commentators have done after the Baltimore and Ferguson riots. Or consider the new social media fad in which middle-class black kids stomp on American flags, in imitation of New Black Party college student Eric Sheppard, the self-proclaimed terrorist toward white people currently being sought by the authorities.
Finally, this new black identity assumed that being a victim was the core of blackness. No matter how rich or educated, every black American is still a victim who deserves some sort of redress, whether racial preferences and government jobs, or some form of redistributed federal tax money. Hence in the aftermath of riots like those in Baltimore we hear calls for massive investments in urban communities, as Obama puts it, despite the fact that Baltimore has been run by blacks for decades, and has enjoyed billions of dollars of federal aid. But even more dangerous, to predicate identity on victimhood and demands for reparations is to put inferiority at the heart of black identity, for it inculcates dependency, destroys autonomy, and frees people from personal responsibility and accountability. For as the African proverb has it, The hand that gives is always above the hand that receives.
The footage from the recent protests and riots all reflect this betrayal of respectable black Americans. Of course, there were peaceful demonstrations led by respectable community leaders, but they were obscured by the rioters and the race-baiters who peddled the old melodrama of evil white racists and helpless black people who lack the character to fight against joblessness, drugs, promiscuity, vulgarity, crime, and the slaughter of their black brothers. What we saw were images that would have warmed the heart of an old-school racist, and confirmed his belief that black people are barbarians, incapable of virtue and hence of civilization. That white leftists and privileged black opportunists enable and justify this narrative is a betrayal of black dignity.
By Bruce Thornton
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/bruce-thornton/baltimore-and-the-betrayal-of-black-dignity/?utm_source=FrontPage+Magazine&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=49c98d2d18-Mailchimp_FrontPageMag&utm_term=0_57e32c1dad-49c98d2d18-157014321
Baltimore is the latest American city to become a stage for the farce that is our national racial discourse. The swift, politicized indictment of 6 police officers for the death of Freddie Graywhich brought down, for now, the curtain on this performance by abandoning all the canons of procedural justice is a fitting end to this sorry spectacle.
The winners of this shameful display are obvious, as they always are after these riots. Local thieves, gangsters, and thugs; bourgeois white anarchists out on a lark; junior-high posers indulging adult-sanctioned destruction; well-heeled black politicians fanning the flames and leveraging the violence for career advancement; race-baiting vultures like Al Sharpton, and the sensationalist national media all benefitted. Most important, the false narrative of a national conspiracy of racist cops itching to murder innocent black men was yet again perpetuated by race hustlers and their progressive enablers.
The losers are the local black businessmen, the law-abiding black residents, the blacks trapped in ghetto hellholes, and the principle of social order as the necessary foundation for individual autonomy and advancement. Worst of all, black Americans have been betrayed by yet another spectacle that reinforces every racist stereotype blacks fought against during the decades of Jim Crow.
Legal segregation was based on the same rationale as slaverythe false assumption that all blacks were by nature incapable of achieving the level of civilization necessary for political freedom and personal autonomy. They were unsuited for freedom and autonomy because they lacked enough rational capacity to exercise impulse control and avoid the destructive behaviors that characterize barbarism, particularly sex and violence. As Aristotle, an important ancient source for this idea, put it, He who participates in rational principle enough to apprehend, but not to have, such a principle, is a slave by nature. Thus it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master.
Black Americans battling racism understood that their oppression was founded on the white assertion of their inability on their own to exercise virtue, especially self-control. Thus in their daily lives they strived mightily to explode these stereotypes by their own behavior. Education, deportment, proper speech, churchgoing, dignified public behavior were all daily challenges to the racist assumption that blacks could not be civilized because they lacked by nature civilizing virtues. In doing so blacks were not acting white, for many whites behaved in disorderly ways that bespoke a lack of virtue. Hence the Progressive eugenics movement in the early 20th century, speaking the language of Darwin rather than virtue, targeted poor whites and immigrant peasants as well as blacks. No, black people were acting civilized, and they refused to cede to whites the notion that civilization was color specific and exclusive.
Segregationists understood what blacks were doing, which is why they targeted black dignity, and attacked blacks who acted uppitywhich included not just defiance, but speaking English properly, using a sophisticated vocabulary, displaying knowledge, and generally comporting themselves in a civilized and virtuous fashion, all of which made blacks dignified. If segregationists did not challenge that dignity, then the foundational idea of their racism was bankrupt. Blacks could be civilized, more so than many whites, and thus they deserved the political freedom and personal autonomy that defined American civilization.
That was an intolerable contradiction for racists, one battled not just with violence, but with daily ridicule and contempt. In contrast, black excesses of sex and violence, or vulgar and clownish public behavior, may have annoyed segregationists, but it did not challenge the justifying ideas of racism. Rather, such behavior was comforting, for it confirmed the notion that blacks acted that way because they lacked by nature the capacity of rational self-control. Long before the Civil Right movement, millions of American blacks had to fight every day for their dignity, and to assert their equal capacity to be civilized by behaving in ways that often called down on them contempt and humiliation.
But just at the moment the 1965 Civil Rights Act codified in law that idea for which blacks had struggled, for millions of blacks cultural developments began to undermine that achievement. Abetted by a decline in religious faith, the notion of virtue and self-control, reinforced by shame, guilt, and religious sanctions, began to retreat before the therapeutic hedonism epitomized in the chant, If it feels good, do it. As a result, impulse control, the most important virtue necessary for poor and historically disadvantaged people to improve their lot, was discarded, replaced by an idealized hedonism that glorified behaviors like sexual promiscuity and drug use guaranteed to hold back those trying to advance.
Second, the idea of Western civilization as a set of universal ideals and rights that transcend the accidents of race and ethnicity was attacked by identity politics. Now the particularities of race, ethnicity, and various spurious cultures were promoted by multiculturalism. An authentic identity could come only from the values, habits, and mores unique to one culture and incompatible with others. Hence the saying, Its a black thing, you wouldnt understand. No matter the differences of privilege, education, region, or wealth, melanin and hair texture melded all blacks into one identity, just as the one-drop rule did to blacks under Jim Crow.
Moreover, Western civilization now was uniquely oppressive, marred by slavery, imperialism, colonialism, capitalist exploitation, and endemic racism. As such, assimilation to Western civilization became a betrayal of racial identity, and learning its language, history, and foundational ideals yet another act of cultural oppression. Once W.E.B. Du Bois spoke of reading Shakespeare and Aristotle as crossing the color line. Now its Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go, as the privileged students at Harvard and Berkeley chanted. Those who attacked America whether through ideas or violence were romanticized as revolutionaries fighting for racial liberation, as well-heeled racial commentators have done after the Baltimore and Ferguson riots. Or consider the new social media fad in which middle-class black kids stomp on American flags, in imitation of New Black Party college student Eric Sheppard, the self-proclaimed terrorist toward white people currently being sought by the authorities.
Finally, this new black identity assumed that being a victim was the core of blackness. No matter how rich or educated, every black American is still a victim who deserves some sort of redress, whether racial preferences and government jobs, or some form of redistributed federal tax money. Hence in the aftermath of riots like those in Baltimore we hear calls for massive investments in urban communities, as Obama puts it, despite the fact that Baltimore has been run by blacks for decades, and has enjoyed billions of dollars of federal aid. But even more dangerous, to predicate identity on victimhood and demands for reparations is to put inferiority at the heart of black identity, for it inculcates dependency, destroys autonomy, and frees people from personal responsibility and accountability. For as the African proverb has it, The hand that gives is always above the hand that receives.
The footage from the recent protests and riots all reflect this betrayal of respectable black Americans. Of course, there were peaceful demonstrations led by respectable community leaders, but they were obscured by the rioters and the race-baiters who peddled the old melodrama of evil white racists and helpless black people who lack the character to fight against joblessness, drugs, promiscuity, vulgarity, crime, and the slaughter of their black brothers. What we saw were images that would have warmed the heart of an old-school racist, and confirmed his belief that black people are barbarians, incapable of virtue and hence of civilization. That white leftists and privileged black opportunists enable and justify this narrative is a betrayal of black dignity.
By Bruce Thornton
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/bruce-thornton/baltimore-and-the-betrayal-of-black-dignity/?utm_source=FrontPage+Magazine&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=49c98d2d18-Mailchimp_FrontPageMag&utm_term=0_57e32c1dad-49c98d2d18-157014321
May 5, 2015 09:45:05 #
JFlorio
Loc: Seminole Florida
I think giving able bodied people free stuff is evil. If you are going to give an able bodied person government benefits at least make him/her work for it. Try and instill some pride. If you gave someone able to work but not willing to work a free lunch everyday for six months then stopped ,do you think that person would praise you for the six months of lunches or curse you for stopping?
JMHO wrote:
b The real losers in the Freddie Gray riots. /b ... (show quote)
May 5, 2015 10:02:38 #
May 5, 2015 10:08:19 #
May 6, 2015 08:27:13 #
May 6, 2015 08:36:45 #
Just read this:
"Moynihan Report After 50 Years
Comment
As Baltimore smolders in the wake of Ferguson, Trayvon Martin and unprovoked black mob attacks on nonblacks in cities across America, it's time to consider the possibility that the promise of the civil rights movement of the 1960s has been betrayed.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of what has become known as "The Moynihan Report," actually titled in 1965 "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," an official publication of the U.S. Labor Department written by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who later became a U.S. senator from New York.
Moynihan was a sociologist and Democrat who focused on the root causes of black poverty and concluded that the destruction of the nuclear family was at the heart of the problem. He suggested that neither economic nor political equality could ever be achieved without addressing the advantage of families with both mothers and fathers present in the home.
Moynihan noted that attacks on the black family began during slavery and grew more intense during the Jim Crow era. But what surprised everyone who read his report was that America's "war on poverty" had turned into a war on the black family one worse, in some ways, than even slavery.
As he observed later, "the work began in the most orthodox setting, the U.S. Department of Labor, to establish at some level of statistical conciseness what 'everyone knew': that economic conditions determine social conditions. Whereupon, it turned out that what everyone knew was evidently not so."
What Moynihan discovered has still not been acknowledged by the very people most adversely affected by the problem: Rates of black male unemployment and welfare enrollment, which had always run parallel, started to diverge in 1962 in a way that would come to be called "Moynihan's scissors."
In 1965, Moynihan foresaw the coming destruction of the black family because the black out-of-wedlock birth rate was 25 percent. Americans were shocked by that statistic 50 years ago. But today the number is over 72 percent among blacks. Among Hispanics, it's more than 53 percent. And it's more than 29 percent among whites. By contrast, in 1965, the rate of out-of-wedlock births among white Americans was at 3.1 percent.
Not only has the black family been destroyed as Moynihan predicted but also the whole of the American family has been.
Moynihan's report concluded that the structure of family life in the black community constituted a "tangle of pathology ... capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world" and that "at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time." Further, the report argued that the matriarchal structure of black culture weakened the ability of black men to function as authority figures.
He concluded in his report, "The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States."
Did anyone listen?
Yes, but expansion of welfare programs continued unabated. In fact, they exploded exponentially, as did the breakdown of the black family and the entirety of the American family.
Is this phenomenon worth re-exploring 50 years later, with our cities more dysfunctional than ever before and some of them in flames?
Yes.
What are the chances America will make an effort to put the American family back together at the very moment the national dialogue obsesses over the urgent need for "same-sex marriage"?
Slim to none.
But there are people making just that last-ditch case.
Moynihan is gone. But Phyllis Schlafly has been beating this drum on the national stage since the 1960s. Her newest book, "Who Killed the American Family?", is there for us to read and embrace. Of course, nobody can force Americans to look reality in the eye and accept it. Many Americans today weren't around 50 years ago to remember "the good old days," and they were better for nearly everyone black or white.
Paul Kengor has also provided new insight into the death of the American family, with his newest book, "Takedown." It reveals the active and successful effort to systematically destroy the American family not just the black family.
But it takes more than facts and knowledge to turn things around. It takes will. It takes hard work. It takes fighting the inertia of doing the same old thing over and over again expecting different results."
Joseph Farah
"Moynihan Report After 50 Years
Comment
As Baltimore smolders in the wake of Ferguson, Trayvon Martin and unprovoked black mob attacks on nonblacks in cities across America, it's time to consider the possibility that the promise of the civil rights movement of the 1960s has been betrayed.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of what has become known as "The Moynihan Report," actually titled in 1965 "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," an official publication of the U.S. Labor Department written by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who later became a U.S. senator from New York.
Moynihan was a sociologist and Democrat who focused on the root causes of black poverty and concluded that the destruction of the nuclear family was at the heart of the problem. He suggested that neither economic nor political equality could ever be achieved without addressing the advantage of families with both mothers and fathers present in the home.
Moynihan noted that attacks on the black family began during slavery and grew more intense during the Jim Crow era. But what surprised everyone who read his report was that America's "war on poverty" had turned into a war on the black family one worse, in some ways, than even slavery.
As he observed later, "the work began in the most orthodox setting, the U.S. Department of Labor, to establish at some level of statistical conciseness what 'everyone knew': that economic conditions determine social conditions. Whereupon, it turned out that what everyone knew was evidently not so."
What Moynihan discovered has still not been acknowledged by the very people most adversely affected by the problem: Rates of black male unemployment and welfare enrollment, which had always run parallel, started to diverge in 1962 in a way that would come to be called "Moynihan's scissors."
In 1965, Moynihan foresaw the coming destruction of the black family because the black out-of-wedlock birth rate was 25 percent. Americans were shocked by that statistic 50 years ago. But today the number is over 72 percent among blacks. Among Hispanics, it's more than 53 percent. And it's more than 29 percent among whites. By contrast, in 1965, the rate of out-of-wedlock births among white Americans was at 3.1 percent.
Not only has the black family been destroyed as Moynihan predicted but also the whole of the American family has been.
Moynihan's report concluded that the structure of family life in the black community constituted a "tangle of pathology ... capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world" and that "at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time." Further, the report argued that the matriarchal structure of black culture weakened the ability of black men to function as authority figures.
He concluded in his report, "The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States."
Did anyone listen?
Yes, but expansion of welfare programs continued unabated. In fact, they exploded exponentially, as did the breakdown of the black family and the entirety of the American family.
Is this phenomenon worth re-exploring 50 years later, with our cities more dysfunctional than ever before and some of them in flames?
Yes.
What are the chances America will make an effort to put the American family back together at the very moment the national dialogue obsesses over the urgent need for "same-sex marriage"?
Slim to none.
But there are people making just that last-ditch case.
Moynihan is gone. But Phyllis Schlafly has been beating this drum on the national stage since the 1960s. Her newest book, "Who Killed the American Family?", is there for us to read and embrace. Of course, nobody can force Americans to look reality in the eye and accept it. Many Americans today weren't around 50 years ago to remember "the good old days," and they were better for nearly everyone black or white.
Paul Kengor has also provided new insight into the death of the American family, with his newest book, "Takedown." It reveals the active and successful effort to systematically destroy the American family not just the black family.
But it takes more than facts and knowledge to turn things around. It takes will. It takes hard work. It takes fighting the inertia of doing the same old thing over and over again expecting different results."
Joseph Farah
May 6, 2015 08:38:05 #
robmull
Loc: florida
buffalo wrote:
Right
Talk about a "fundamental transformation," buffalo, it doesn't get much better than that!!!
May 6, 2015 09:10:59 #
Larry Elder's last sentence sums it up:
In watching Baltimore burn, "progressives" run out of scapegoats. Over a week ago, a black man named Freddie Gray died after being arrested. Videotape shows Gray being dragged into a police van. In less than half an hour, his spine was somehow severed and he died seven days later.
Did a police officer or the officers intentionally or inadvertently cause the injury? Did the vehicle suddenly stop, causing a possibly untethered or poorly tethered suspect/passenger to break his neck? Why was Gray stopped in the first place?
Given that he ran from the police, did this provide a basis for pursuit, search and arrest? Does this not underscore the importance of police body cams and car-dash cams?
These are, of course, legitimate questions. And, in addition to the Baltimore police investigation, the Department of Justice announced that it, too, would examine the circumstances surrounding Gray's death.
So, why riot? Unlike Ferguson, where riots also took place, black Baltimore residents do not lack political power and representation.
The mayor is black. The police commissioner and deputy commissioner are black. The police department is approximately 40% black, in a city with a black population of 63%.
The new head of the Department of Justice, Loretta Lynch, is a black female, the second consecutive black person to run the department. And, of course, the U.S. president is black.
There's every reason, therefore, to believe that the investigations will be full, complete and thorough. This does not mean that the results will please everyone, but that the examination will be fair and open. After all, if a wildly popular mayor who received 84% of the vote cannot be trusted, who can?
This isn't Mississippi in 1955, where Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy, was brutally murdered, only to have the obviously guilty killers acquitted by an all-white jury.
This is not the 60s of white-run cities, with nearly all-white police departments policing all-black communities.
In New York City, for example, most officers are people of color. Los Angeles had back-to-back black police chiefs, and as with New York City, the majority of L.A.'s street cops are people of color or women.
And it is not true, as some protesters claim, that "it doesn't happen the other way around."
In Mobile, Ala., in 2012, a black police officer shot and killed a white teenager. The white teen, high on drugs, was completely nude, and still the officer fearing for his life shot and killed the suspect. An investigation cleared the cop and despite public pressure a grand jury refused to indict him. No cameras. No CNN.
Just two days after police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., a "not white" cop in Salt Lake City, Utah, shot and killed an unarmed 20-year-old man whose race has been described as Hispanic. The family of the dead man believes that the cop is a murderer. No cameras. No CNN.
So why riot in Baltimore? The answer is, for some people, facts and reason don't matter. It's about anger, excitement, disruption.
But the 800-pound elephant in the room is the absence of fathers responsible, involved fathers.
Obama has said that a child growing up without a father is 20 times more likely to end up in jail. Today over 70% of black children are born to unwed mothers compared to 25% in the 1965.
To earn their near-monolithic 95% black vote, the Democratic Party repeatedly tells blacks of their continued oppression. In 2012, Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, accused Republicans of seeking to "literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws."
So, when a questionable white cop/black suspect takes place, some, conditioned to react with anger and distrust, lash out it's "us against them" and "they're trying to oppress us."
Come election time, Democrats exploit this anger. Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., for example, said this: "Everything we believe in, everything we believe in (Republicans) hate. They don't disagree they hate. ... Some of them believe that slavery isn't over and that they won the Civil War."
This is how Democrats get 95% of blacks to vote one way by telling them the other side is evil, that "the system" is corrupt and racist. So when a Freddy Gray, in police custody, turns up dead under suspicious circumstances, some will take to the streets to vent that "slavery isn't over."
Yes, Martin Luther King Jr. said, "A riot is the language of the unheard."
When he said that, none of America's major cities had a black mayor. The country did not have back-to-back black attorneys general. The country did not have a black president.
Baltimore's riot is the tragic language of the modern welfare state.
In watching Baltimore burn, "progressives" run out of scapegoats. Over a week ago, a black man named Freddie Gray died after being arrested. Videotape shows Gray being dragged into a police van. In less than half an hour, his spine was somehow severed and he died seven days later.
Did a police officer or the officers intentionally or inadvertently cause the injury? Did the vehicle suddenly stop, causing a possibly untethered or poorly tethered suspect/passenger to break his neck? Why was Gray stopped in the first place?
Given that he ran from the police, did this provide a basis for pursuit, search and arrest? Does this not underscore the importance of police body cams and car-dash cams?
These are, of course, legitimate questions. And, in addition to the Baltimore police investigation, the Department of Justice announced that it, too, would examine the circumstances surrounding Gray's death.
So, why riot? Unlike Ferguson, where riots also took place, black Baltimore residents do not lack political power and representation.
The mayor is black. The police commissioner and deputy commissioner are black. The police department is approximately 40% black, in a city with a black population of 63%.
The new head of the Department of Justice, Loretta Lynch, is a black female, the second consecutive black person to run the department. And, of course, the U.S. president is black.
There's every reason, therefore, to believe that the investigations will be full, complete and thorough. This does not mean that the results will please everyone, but that the examination will be fair and open. After all, if a wildly popular mayor who received 84% of the vote cannot be trusted, who can?
This isn't Mississippi in 1955, where Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy, was brutally murdered, only to have the obviously guilty killers acquitted by an all-white jury.
This is not the 60s of white-run cities, with nearly all-white police departments policing all-black communities.
In New York City, for example, most officers are people of color. Los Angeles had back-to-back black police chiefs, and as with New York City, the majority of L.A.'s street cops are people of color or women.
And it is not true, as some protesters claim, that "it doesn't happen the other way around."
In Mobile, Ala., in 2012, a black police officer shot and killed a white teenager. The white teen, high on drugs, was completely nude, and still the officer fearing for his life shot and killed the suspect. An investigation cleared the cop and despite public pressure a grand jury refused to indict him. No cameras. No CNN.
Just two days after police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., a "not white" cop in Salt Lake City, Utah, shot and killed an unarmed 20-year-old man whose race has been described as Hispanic. The family of the dead man believes that the cop is a murderer. No cameras. No CNN.
So why riot in Baltimore? The answer is, for some people, facts and reason don't matter. It's about anger, excitement, disruption.
But the 800-pound elephant in the room is the absence of fathers responsible, involved fathers.
Obama has said that a child growing up without a father is 20 times more likely to end up in jail. Today over 70% of black children are born to unwed mothers compared to 25% in the 1965.
To earn their near-monolithic 95% black vote, the Democratic Party repeatedly tells blacks of their continued oppression. In 2012, Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, accused Republicans of seeking to "literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws."
So, when a questionable white cop/black suspect takes place, some, conditioned to react with anger and distrust, lash out it's "us against them" and "they're trying to oppress us."
Come election time, Democrats exploit this anger. Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., for example, said this: "Everything we believe in, everything we believe in (Republicans) hate. They don't disagree they hate. ... Some of them believe that slavery isn't over and that they won the Civil War."
This is how Democrats get 95% of blacks to vote one way by telling them the other side is evil, that "the system" is corrupt and racist. So when a Freddy Gray, in police custody, turns up dead under suspicious circumstances, some will take to the streets to vent that "slavery isn't over."
Yes, Martin Luther King Jr. said, "A riot is the language of the unheard."
When he said that, none of America's major cities had a black mayor. The country did not have back-to-back black attorneys general. The country did not have a black president.
Baltimore's riot is the tragic language of the modern welfare state.
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