Black journalist Erin Aubry Kaplan writes for the Los Angeles Times:
For much of our history it’s been impractical, virtually impossible and often illegal to regard blacks as people, black men especially. How to think first of Michael Brown’s welfare, his individuality, when black men are the very definition of criminality and sub-humanness, when black life was once so degraded, when the public lynchings of black men were family-friendly events suitable for postcards? We may congratulate ourselves on how far we’ve come, but the fact is that we still live that legacy of degradation, a legacy most vividly expressed in these high-profile clashes between blacks and police.
With the encouragement of the various Jesses, blacks could make a bad miscalculation. Angry, poorly educated, and living in concentrations that make them seem more numerous than they are, they may miss some important points. They are only thirteen percent of America. Food does not come from Safeway, but from remote farms owned by whites in truck driven by whites. If Jesse and Al and the Black Panthers got their race war, blacks would lose it hugely. The country would not recover.
I doubt that our televised commentators have any idea what they are dealing with. Nor do academics. Whites with university educations, who read five books at once, who have never been in a police car, cannot know who the rioters are, cannot imagine how the world seems to them. Black physicists d not loot shoe stores. Those who do tend strongly to be functionally illiterate. The rest have probably never read a book in their lives. They live in a mental world unknown to most whites. They will never live amicably with white cops.
The feds have turned police into low-brow SS, but racial conflict would exist even if this weren’t true. As long as white policemen work in black neighborhoods, Fergusons will continue.
White cops tend to be from the lower middle class, often former military, with the accompanying values. Theirs is a conventional morality of obedience to the law, birth within wedlock, mowing the lawn, neat clothes, making sure the kids do their homework, orderliness, and avoidance of obscenity in mixed company. They are quietly but intensely contemptuous of the blacks of the deep city, whom they see as slovenly, criminal, shiftless, parasitic, and violent.
