Welcome to the post-racial society

[Adam]

Amid Violence, Factions and Messages Converge in a Weary and Unsettled Baltimore

A couple of the young men wore bandannas to hide their identity. The young men identified themselves as members of the Crips, Bloods and Black Guerrilla Family street gangs. One of the Crips members, who called himself Charles, wearing a red Chicago Bulls Derrick Rose T-shirt, said the gang members had taken to the street because “there is only so far that you can push people into a corner.”

“We’re frustrated,” he continued, “and that’s why we’re out there in the streets.”

Then he described how he and some Bloods had stood in front of black-owned stores to protect them from looting or vandalism. He said they had made sure no black children, or reporters, were hit by rioters. They pointed them toward Chinese- and Arab-owned stores. Charles said Mr. Gray had brought gangs together.

“I rolled over here on a truck, and I was the only Crip and everybody else was Bloods. And they didn’t do anything to me. We’re together in this.”

Lovely.

[Gingersnap]

Setting your feral friends on your neighbors isn't a good long-term strategy.

For whatever reasons, areas with majority black elected officials and black-run city governments, schools, and courts don't seem to work as well once the population goes beyond the countrified small town model. The solution is not to destroy a system that does work for the vast majority of people (including most blacks) but to determine why it fails under specific conditions.

This is a cultural issue within urban black communities. Whites have also had city governments riddled with corruption, favoritism, white versus white bigotry, bloated government schemes, failing schools, chest-thumping proclamations of righteous fury, criminals terrorizing the city, etc. This isn't peculiar to skin color.

A lot changed when whites who didn't want to live that way demanded rule-of-law. They forced out the corrupt officials, elected people with vision, reduced the criminal element, developed school programs that worked, and developed the expectation that what you did was more important than who you knew or who you could pay off.

It wasn't all Skittles and unicorns after that but most of us aren't enduring the violence and corruption that was commonplace for some of our big city ancestors in 1880 or 1900.

[scott]

Nope, no race war going on there, no sirree.

[JB]

You know this is all Hillary's doing. The woman is diabolical.

She was getting too much press bad press and needed to deflect. Sent some folks from her camp to Baltimore to spark the outrage and she's out of the news cycle for a week and re-grouping. Brilliant.

I am only half-kidding.