Posted on 05/03/2015 12:07:27 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The race riots that followed the recent murders of unarmed black men by police in places like Ferguson and Baltimore have liberal commentators and politicians placing the blame on poverty, specifically among inner-city African-Americans. This is an American tradition: progressives wrote similar editorials calling for antipoverty programs, and politicians issued (empty) promises to enact them, after the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles provoked rioting in the South Central neighborhood in the early 1990s, and following the even bigger urban conflagrations of 1968 in Detroit, Newark and Watts.
I grew up poor, and I have struggled financially. I hate poverty; I’m all for any government program that tries to mitigate the pain of not knowing whether one will be able eat, keep the electricity on, or avoid homelessness. Still, the poverty-causes-race-riots tautology is weird. What about the cops?
Baltimore was in trouble long before six police officers arrested Freddie Gray without cause, snapped his spine, gave him a so-called “rough ride” (handcuffed, unbuckled, driven wildly in order to bang you around) in a paddy wagon, and refused his repeated entreaties for medical attention. Too many of its citizens were dark-skinned, impoverished, underemployed, disenfranchised and victimized by gangs and drug dealers.
But it wasn’t a spontaneous outburst of class warfare that caused the riots — it was Gray’s murder by the police, and the authorities’ non-response. Ditto for Ferguson: no killing of Michael Brown by a cop, no riot.
Not that the liberals aren’t onto something: the police in Beverly Hills don’t shoot that many unarmed guys in the back, as they’re running away. Cops in the Hamptons don’t choke fat dudes, who aren’t going anywhere fast, to death on sidewalks in broad daylight. Police don’t mess with you if you’re rich and therefore powerful.
Cops in Baltimore kill unarmed non-suspects because they think they can get away with it. They think they can get away with it because they always have. They always have because unarmed non-suspects in Baltimore are poor.
The victims are poor because they’re black.
Pundits get it wrong when they try to explain the roots of poverty. “The real barriers to social mobility,” writes moderate Republican columnist David Brooks in The New York Times, “are matters of social psychology, the quality of relationships in a home that either encourage or discourage responsibility, future-oriented thinking, and practical ambition.”
In the same newspaper on the same day, Johns Hopkins history professor N.D.B. Connolly gets closer to the truth, pointing to structural racism with its roots in slavery. “The problem rests on the continued profitability of racism. Freddie Gray’s exposure to lead paint as a child, his suspected participation in the drug trade, and the relative confinement of black unrest to black communities during this week’s riot are all features of a city and a country that still segregate people along racial lines, to the financial enrichment of landlords, corner store merchants and other vendors selling second-rate goods.”
But Connolly falls short with his proposed solution when he calls for a “state of emergency” on “the problem of residential discrimination, by devising a fairer tax structure, by investing in public space, community policing, tenants’ rights and a government jobs program.” These would all be moves in the right direction, and I support them, but to pronounce window-dressing reforms “solutions” is ridiculous.
Yesterday, the day Baltimore’s dynamic young black district attorney filed charges including murder against her city’s six killer cops, was May 1st: International Workers Day. Which ought to have reminded editors at places like the Times — which has employed numerous far-right opinion columnists, but never a leftist — that poverty is caused by capitalism.
Liberals believe capitalism is a good system prone to excesses, which they propose to mitigate via reform and regulation: poverty, income inequality and racism associated with class are flaws in an otherwise laudable economic model.
But that’s not true. Poverty, and the racism that goes with it, are features, not bugs. The ruling classes require a permanent underclass to exploit directly, and serve as a warning to workers not to ask for big raises, shorter hours or other improvements in workplace conditions — be quiet, lest you wind up like them.
I needed this clown last month when I put in my garden. What a load of BULL SH$T!
Whoever wrote this piece of garbage is the worst kind of racist!
I quit reading at “The victims are poor because they’re black.”
To which I respond:”BULLSHIT!”
The “victims” are poor because they refuse to get an education, learn a trade and get an honest job!
Has nothing to do with skin color - it is all about CHARACTER!
RATS!
You beat me to it!
So that was capitalist and police rioting ? Man I need new contacts.
Ted Rall, the cruddy cartoonist?
The famous attack on Pearl Harbor?
Caused by Lichtenstein.
The Cruddiest.
Well....let’s take the police and businesses out of Baltimore. Problem solved!
Rall is still around?
Npoe, the riots were caused by criminals and their enablers, the Perpulation
Whoopdie doo! So have I.
Difference is I don't go around looking for others to blame. I pulled myself up by my bootstraps.
Get a clue, Mr. Rall.
No, they were caused by the Democrats’ decades of welfare and social programs that created “the hood” and a society that sits and does nothing but wait for the gub’ment check to arrive. Democrats, after all, need to keep these folks under their wing in exchange for votes. Hopefully blacks are waking up to this fact.
Spoons make you fat.
I stopped reading at “Ted Rall”
CC
He was at Columbia when I was which raises the question: how did this poor boy pay Ivy League tuition? I worked and borrowed a lot of money and got some grants. He was drawing cartoons for the student paper.
He was at Columbia when I was which raises the question: how did this poor boy pay Ivy League tuition? I worked and borrowed a lot of money and got some grants. He was drawing cartoons for the student paper.
The writer must have won a golden medal in some special Olympics event.
Wow...reading some of the weirdest opinions on FR today.
To anyone who tells me that racism against the Negro is the problem, I simply respond with a reference to Mr Thos. Sowell.
Face it—he’s a black man who grew up at *the peak* of Jim Crow and segregation.
Forget MLK, who, at the end of the day, was a Communist race-agitator, the inspiration for modern race-agitators like Al Sharpton & al.
Sowell started out at the bottom, like most black men did in his time, but he didn’t let the racism get to him, and consume his very soul.
I think he, and others like him, ought to be the role models for Negroes today.
__rvx
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