The title of this essay comes from Randy Newman’s 1977 song “Baltimore“.
As something of a wanna-be pundit, I find the recent “civil disturbances” in Baltimore (triggered by a fatal police incident) very frustrating because it is so difficult to digest and say anything useful about. Ditto for Ferguson, New York, Berkeley, Cleveland, and the other sites of current unrest over police shootings. The 1960’s (especially 1967) were a time of many civil disturbances in major cities (Detroit, Newark, Watts, Roxbury, etc.), where African American communities vented similar anger about aggressive police actions. It was fairly clear back then that the triggering police acts were just a spark that ignited a volatile underlying anger, which stemmed from a multitude of unjust social and economic conditions faced by black communities. And it seems reasonable enough to conclude that the same applies to the angst and frustration expressed by African-American leaders and communities responding to more recent police shootings involving unarmed victims such as Amadou Diallo, Michael Brown, Kimani Gray, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sean Bell, Trayvon Martin, et al. Police bias is certainly a part of it, but is far from the extent of it.
Unlike the 1960’s, however, it is more difficult for the nation as a whole to grasp the overarching social and economic injustices involved, and to see what can be done to fix them. The starting point for those who decry these injustices is racism, of course. The many fatal police incidents in and of themselves allegedly prove that racism is alive and well in the American criminal justice system, and thus by implication is rampant throughout all of our social institutions, large and small.
Unfortunately, however, when you look at the details of at least some of these police incidents, the alleged racist inspirations become more and more difficult » continue reading …