The Rude Pundit: We're Lucky There Aren't More Riots

[meegbear]

That photo is of police patrolling the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of a night of riots and looting in the wake of the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by a white cop. In that suburb of St. Louis, the population is 67% black, but there are only 3 black cops on the 53 person police force, with 2 other non-whites). What's fascinating about the picture is that the front line of five officers (two from other areas, no doubt) is all black while behind them are roughly a dozen and a half white cops and not a single other non-white one. (Side note: Has anyone written about GOP opposition to Obama as a symbolic castration and its effect on blacks in this country?)

And that's the problem, isn't it? It's that no matter where black men turn, there are always white men with guns right behind them, whether it's asshole cops or asshole gun owners. No matter if there's a black man in the White House; there's always a power structure founded on and fostered by whiteness that exists with little challenge.

What is there to say about the riots, about the looting, about the burning of businesses in Ferguson? Yeah, it's wrong to steal shit and fuck up buildings. It's more wrong to gun down a kid who, according to many witnesses, had his hands up and, according to official reports, was 35 feet away from the police car. If you believe the law is no longer on your side - indeed, if you believe its enforcers are using it to harm you - why the fuck wouldn't you riot? Tea Party assholes march around with their guns out right after mass shootings, and no one shoots them down. Maybe it's time for some Black Panther action.

Frankly, it's a shock that there aren't more riots, in Staten Island and in Dayton, in just the last few weeks of cops killing black men. As Brittney Cooper writes in Salon, "To be black in this country is to be subject to routine forms of miscalculated risk each and every day. Black people have every right to be angry as hell about being mistaken for predators when really we are prey."

The median income in Ferguson is $37,000, ten grand lower than the state average. The state has refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. 92% of people arrested in Ferguson are black, taken in by, as mentioned before, the over 90% white police force. Of course, poverty combined with racism combined with the endless stream of whites killing unarmed blacks for no reason is going to add up to an explosion.

We as a nation have fucked over black Americans in so many ways. We've isolated many in neighborhoods with shitty housing, shitty schools, shitty businesses, and shitty health care. We've demonized affirmative action. We've gutted welfare programs, work programs, and other poverty programs. We've given prisons over to private corporations that demand to be filled with any kind of petty criminal under minimum sentencing laws and the worthless drug war. So we've filled the shitty streets with cops who have been given the right to harass blacks into hatred of the authority they should be able to turn to to stop the crimes that matter. We have made it so that, even if you're not from one of these shitty neighborhoods, you are forever framed by them, forever framed as a thug or a bitch, forever suspect.

Then we've said, "You're an American. You have opportunity. You can pull yourself up by your bootstraps and live the American dream." Goddamnit, the Rude Pundit wants to fuck shit up just writing that. He can't imagine living it.

So, sure, it's a shame that others now suffer economically (mostly) in the wake of the Michael Brown killing. But when when the plants in the ground finally grow, you don't blame the leaves. You blame the people who put the seeds in the dirt and watered them, decade after decade.

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2014/08/were-lucky-there-arent-more-riots.html

[Warpy]

1. Rude Pundit gets it right again

I'm always amazed by the patience of our black citizens. I'm too old to riot these days, but I'd be handing out bricks to everybody young enough to join in. Poverty itself is a condition of sheer rage. Add racist oppression to that and you've got the perfect prescription for riots.

I live in one of those "shitty" neighborhoods and faces here are the whole spectrum of the human rainbow. I can afford to live elsewhere. I really don't want to. Services like doctors offices and a lot of retail are abandoning this part of the city, though, so I don't know how much longer I'll be able to stay. It annoys me because businesses here are profitable. They just want newer and expanded floor space in the glitzier areas.

And I agree about the drug war. It's a failure. Just end it.

[cyberswede]

2. Another K&R for the Rude Pundit. nt

[joeybee12]

3. Yup...knr

[TheKentuckian]

4. Partially correct, too much focus on the number of minorities too little on the system

Being black doesn't prevent one from acting as an agent of an institutionally racist organization.

Reflection is fine but is also an evasion of the root issues. There is a constant pull for do nothing or do as little as can be gotten away with "reforms" that are just the appeasement of a Scobey Doo band aid pasted over the wound.

[DeSwiss]

5. Notice whom they have out front leading the way.

- Yeah. I've seen this movie before.....

K&R

[BronxBoy]

6. LOL...

And the results are always pretty much the same.

[Downwinder]

7. If there were no riot would it still be in the news?

[Spitfire of ATJ]

8. Part of the problem is that some white people are CONVINCED there's gonna be a Race War....

You can spot them easily by their accumulation of firearms and their whine that it's not fair because they never owned slaves and that people like Reverend Al Sharpton are the REAL racists.

They're the types that went INSANE when Obama got elected and felt it's now their DUTY to smack them down and let those (you know the word) know who's boss. And many of them are on the police force.

Remember folks. There are still people who honestly think if a black guy even LOOKS at a white woman he should be killed. No arrest, no trial, just immediately killed in the street like a mad dog. Same goes for a black guy who dares to talk back to a white guy and ESPECIALLY a white cop.

What sad is how many of them think that's what Reagan would do.