Posted on 05/03/2015 4:55:05 PM PDT by Second Amendment First
The rioting in Baltimore wasn’t hooliganism. It was a protest against the depredations of the ghetto economy.
Most people can sympathize with the anger on display this week in the streets of Baltimore. It’s relatively easy to feel compassion for people who’ve suffered police brutality and abject poverty, even if you’ve never experienced either. Looting and burning is harder to understand, since torching a CVS store would hardly seem to have anything to do with protesting the actions of the Baltimore Police Department. President Obama decried the Baltimore riots as “senseless violence and destruction.” Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake also despaired at the destruction. “We worked so hard to get a company like CVS to invest in this neighborhood,” she said, “this is the only place that so many people have to pick up their prescriptions.” Why would anyone burn down the only CVS in their neighborhood?
The reason, I think, is likely the same reason that poor black Americans in cities across the country burned “their own” neighborhoods in the late 1960s: They did not experience those places as their own. Then, like now, police brutality was a precipitating cause of the violence, but it was the long-term experience of the indignities of the ghetto that gave shape to the riots. Then, like now, commentators compared the rioters to animals who had run wild and needed discipline. Rioting, to these bystanders, was not proper political protest but the criminal actions of poor people who merely wanted to grab what they could for free. This narrative, which I heard throughout my childhood growing up in Baltimore in the 1980s, put the blame not on the depredations of the ghetto, but on the character of its residents. It completely misapprehends the political economy of our poorest neighborhoods.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Most people can sympathize with the anger on display this week in the streets of Baltimore.
As a black person, I don’t sympathize. Democrat run city and blacks voted for them over and over so why the anger. One gets what one votes for!
I know why it burned.... Gibsmedat.
Wow. Now this article is an example of highly purified, weapons-grade stupidity. You’ll lose 10 points off your IQ just for reading it.
Beware. You’ve been warned.
Dear Mr. Hyman. I would expect you to avoid ethnic slurs such as hooliganism and Paddy wagon. For someone who claims to be sensitive to feelings you are hurting all those from the Hooligan family and all those who named their young male children Patrick. Shame on you.
“They did not experience those places as their own.”
They heard it straight from the top...’You didn’t build that!’ Meaning Private property does not exist. Expropriate the expropriators!!!
Because it wasn’t flame retardant.
The retartet ferals couldn’t have knowd dat tho...
“Not really. Almost all of them are mixed race. “
Well, you have a valid point. American negroes have interbred significantly.
But there’s a large mongolian mix in American caucasians too.
Hybridization is just a characteristic of most American races.
I have called myself a ‘colored gal’ on FR quite a few times.
I am an academic. Many colleges use the term ‘people of color’ as a handy reference to the diversity that is the American campus these days. So, if I am a person of color, am I not a ‘colored gal.’ : ) I like to think it drives the libs nuts. Feminists, too.
I do my part.
Article by Louis (Buster) Hyman.
The race-grievance industry has spoken. Let's go! MSM employees! Make a note: in all your "reports" say "The items had been paid for and the items were merely being picked up by the owners."
In the 1960s the MSM employees said it was not looting.. it was a form of the layaway plan owing to the fact that evil white merchants were overcharging for everything. The items had been paid for already.
Come on, MSM employees, get with it!
I do wish the race-grievance industry would cite sources for all their "police brutality" claims. With one-sixth the population blacks commit an enormace amount of crime according to federal data.
True statistics (both police records and surveys) here:
By the time the federal money rolls in for cleanup and rebuilding, Obama’s amnestied Latino’s will be there to take the jobs and the money.
I don't understand the logic of political correctness. "People of color" is considered perfectly PC, but if you say "colored people," be ready to duck.
Good for you.
The ‘liberals’ want to be stricter on racial identity than Hitler.
That’s because they base their philosophy upon racial distinctions more than he ever did.
There is always some libtard willing to justify the criminal behavior of the ghetto dwellers.
There is always some libtard willing to justify the criminal behavior of the ghetto dwellers.
Funny in all these riots.. they never loot a book store...
Well, I seen the fires burnin’
And the local people turnin’
On the merchants and the shops
Who used to sell their brooms and mops
And every other household item
Watched the mob just turn and bite ‘em
And they say it served ‘em right
Because a few of them are white,
And it’s the same across the nation
Black & white discrimination
They’re yellin’ “You can’t understand me!”
And all the other crap they hand me
In the papers and TV
‘N all that mass stupidity
That seems to grow more every day
Each time you hear some nitwit say
He wants to go and do you in
Because the color of your skin
Just don’t appeal to him
(No matter if it’s black or white)
Read more: The Mothers Of Invention - Trouble Every Day Lyrics | MetroLyrics
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I think it was Ashley Montague who famously opined that "there is no such thing as race". I choose to understand this to mean that race is not categorical, but circumstantial, and always in flux.
There has been a change, of course. At one time no doubt, one could speak of the Welsh and the Scots as races, and I believe that this was in fact the way of thinking, because these were fairly stable breeding populations.
As the boundaries between such populations grew more distant, we were left with the more modern conception of a handful of distinct, more or less continental, races.
But I agree with Ashley Montague's sentiment that these are not categorical distinctions, any more than the distinction between the Welsh and the Scots.
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