When you’ve lived
over seven decades in America, the news about another race riot is really not
news. It’s just another race riot.
The latest is
Baltimore and the theme for this one is police violence against an unarmed
black youth. This was the theme of the Ferguson, Missouri riots last year and
has been a fairly common theme since the arrival of the new century fifteen
years ago. Such events included riots in Cincinnati in 2001, the Oakland riots
in 2009, and the two most recent.
A December 2014
article in Real Clear Politics by Jack Kelly
put the statistics in perspective. “Young black males are 21 times more likely
to be shot dead by police than are young white males, Pro Publica said. But
because more than two-thirds of police officers are white and blacks commit
about half of violent crimes, it stands to reason most police shootings would
involve a white cop and a black suspect.”
Largely unreported
is that “Black cops shot black suspects at essentially the same rate as white
cops…”
For those of us
outside of the black community and living in safe suburban zones surrounding
our cities, the riots might as well be taking place on Mars. Why anyone would,
as is often the case, destroy their own neighborhood, loot and burn down
businesses (often black-owned) defies an answer.
Because riots offer
television news dramatic images of violence and destruction, one can depend on
coverage for a long as it lasts. Being photographed looting or engaging in
violence against police and others seems to be one of the “perks” of rioting.
Baltimore’s riot dominated the news on every channel Monday evening to the
point one might conclude that nothing else of any importance was occurring anywhere
in the world. The earthquake devastation in Nepal had to fight for the very few
minutes of coverage it received.
It is astonishing
to recall that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was able to lead many civil rights
marches with so little violence, but it was the years concurrent with and
following the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964 and
1965 that saw large riots such as several in 1964 in Philadelphia, Chicago, and
New York. There were three just in New Jersey that year.
Having achieved the
goals of the civil rights movement, historic federal laws, one might have
concluded that rioting was no longer needed to call attention to the ills of
the post-civil rights era.
You would have been
wrong. The one that got national attention was in the Watts area of Los Angeles
in 1965. The pattern continued with riots in 1966 and 1967. In April and May
1968 after Dr. King was assassinated, there were riots in 125 cities. The 1980s
and 1990’s had their share of riots.
Just add Baltimore’s
Freddie Gray’s name to the list of those who died either during an arrest or in
police custody, sparking a riot. In the past the public generally backed the
police, but now they are being depicted as undisciplined killers. The reality
is that the police are the thin line of defense between us and the criminals
whose job is theirs to arrest and detain. That occurs all the time. Police have
more reasons to act in their own defense in a week than most of us will have in
a lifetime.
As we learned from
Ferguson, the original allegations against the police officer were totally
false. Let it also be said that is not the only reason riots have occurred. A
lot of them just seem to reflect feelings of alienation, anger, and
dissatisfaction that bubble below the surface in black urban enclaves. Nothing
is likely to change that.
So, as Baltimore
cleans up the mess left behind by the latest riot, be assured that another is
right around the corner somewhere. There is a core of law-breakers and angry
blacks for whom virtually anything is excuse enough for a riot.
We had to pass
through a Civil War to resolve the race-based ills of that era. Americans
elected the first black American as President in 2008, but his race has not
reduced riots during his time in office.
The lesson that we
can draw from this is that, if you put enough people together in close
proximity in a city where there is both wealth and poverty, where there are
economic disparities between whites and blacks, you need only wait a while for
the next riot.
Alan Caruba, 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment