The Baltimore riots, like those last year in Ferguson, and others likely to come elsewhere, are especially tragic because they leave us with nowhere to go.
Police brutality will always be with us because it's rooted in human fallibility. It is inevitable that those we trust to enforce the law will occasionally exceed their authority and violate it. Periodic police reforms might reduce the frequency of such abuse, but can't eradicate it altogether.
But the broader point coming out of Ferguson and Baltimore is that rioting and other forms of violence are being increasingly legitimized as a response to alleged racial oppression. The police are always guilty, even if many of us know they're really not, because the liberal narrative of pervasive racism requires it. "Hands up, don't shoot" might have been a lie, but it was a useful one for those interested in exacerbating racial conflict.
So where, precisely, does this leave us?
Should we withdraw the police from our inner cities and allow the residents there to police themselves, as some are suggesting? If the police are a racist "occupying army" in such places, then shouldn't those occupations end?
But how would black lives in our inner cities be improved by such a radical step? The predators would certainly get more leeway, but what about the rest, the overwhelming majority who are law-abiding and want safe neighborhoods in which to raise their kids? Doesn't turning things over to violent thugs (yes, the appropriate word is "thug") produce exactly what we saw in Baltimore, when its mayor disgracefully gave them space "to destroy"?
In a broader sense, we are told yet again (and again ... and again!) that the solution to it all is to end racism, because it is from racism that police brutality and the broader, dismal plight of black America flows.
If so, how, precisely, do we go about doing that, as if we haven't been trying, and trying hard now for decades?
Overt racism has now become so rare that even trivial expressions of it become national news. The private phone conversations of NBA owners and the chants of drunken cracker frat-boys in Oklahoma thus become de facto evidence of pervasive racism rather than simply expressions of human stupidity. For our mass media, every "teachable moment" on race is an opportunity to teach about incorrigible white racism.
We've spent trillions of dollars attempting to revitalize our inner cities since the start of the Great Society and federal social spending has swollen to the point of producing a national debt nearly as large as our gross domestic product.
We've also had in place for decades now a ubiquitous system of racial preferences in public employment and private businesses and in the admissions processes of our colleges and universities. We've elected our first black president, with many voting for Barack Obama in the (now hugely disappointed) hope that it would finally allow us to move beyond race.
So what has all of this gotten us in terms of race relations and black progress? And why would anyone believe that more of the same will help?
Some are suggesting that the next step should be reparations for slavery, an idea likely to get a fuller hearing as the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination tacks leftward in the primaries.
But apart from the dubious justice inherent in taking money from people who were never slave-owners and giving it to people who were never slaves, purely on account of their skin color, how, exactly, would such reparations work to improve black lives? More specifically, how would the effects of such a bestowal of largesse be any different from those flowing from the kinds of welfare-state transfer payments we've been making for decades now?
Would reparations put the black family back together again and boost black educational achievement? Would it produce economic revitalization in inner-city neighborhoods and a decline in black illegitimacy and black crime rates in such places (most of the victims of which are also black)?
The segregated lunch counters and separate drinking fountains were left behind long ago. But more intractable social and cultural obstacles have now replaced those legal and institutional barriers to racial equality.
At the least, we should be honest enough to admit that what we've been doing for the past 50 years or so hasn't worked, and that much of it has made things worse.
America knew where to go on race in 1960 because we generally agreed as a society on what the problem was. But we don't agree any longer, not at all.
The hunch is that white Americans are tired of hearing about white racism, because they don't see themselves as racist. Rather, they see most black problems as self-inflicted, with racism used as an ever-convenient excuse.
One also suspects that black Americans see things the opposite way, having been incessantly taught to blame all their misfortunes on racial oppression. Just about every aspect of our political culture reinforces the idea that blacks are helpless victims of forces beyond their control.
So what, exactly, in the pursuit of racial equality and justice, do we do now?
------------v------------
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 05/11/2015