BALTIMORE: THE WINNERS AND THE LOSERS

Bruce Thornton, writing for frontpagemag.com, has just put out a superb commentary titled “Baltimore and the Betrayal of Black Dignity”,  which encapsulates just about everything I have been saying, for the past two weeks regarding Freddie Gray\’s death and its aftermath.

Here are the first three paragraphs:

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 Gray–which 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.

That is as close to perfect a description of Baltimore\’s winners and losers as there is. 

If I could, I would plaster these paragraphs (and please use my link to read the rest of Mr. Thornton\’s piece), on every wall in every public place – including every school – in Baltimore, and every other major city where the same sequence of events is always just one incident away.

We are continually told that there has to be a discussion of race in this country -as if no one has discussed it until now.  In reality, of course,  there is an ongoing discussion of race every day….but on the terms of the people Bruce Thornton describes so well.

 Here\’s a thought:  how about discussing race issues not orchestrated by the sharptons, holders and Obamas of the world but the ones Mr. Thornton has brought up?  When does that happen?