The Plight of Black America Looking for Solutions

"[The plight of poor, young black men like Gray living] confined to a box, [one constructed of poor education, lack of employment and racial stereotypes] the box of thinking all black men are thugs and athletes and rappers."
"He had to have been asking himself: 'What am I going to do with my life? He had to feel at age 25 like the walls were closing in on him."
"This is not the time for us as a people to be sitting on a corner drinking malt liquor. This is not the time for us to be playing lottery."
"Get your black self up and change this city. I don't know how you can be black in America and be silent. With everything we've been through, ain't no way in the world you can sit here and be silent in the face of injustice."
"It's easy for the news to capture young people rioting and looting. It's easy to show that, but you ain't ever going to say why."
Reverend Jamal Bryant, New Shiloh Baptist church, Baltimore

REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton    Mourners laid flowers on the casket of Freddie Gray, who died after an arrest by the Baltimore police department, at his burial at Woodlawn Cemetery in Baltimore on Monday.

Does that sound inspirational, urging African-Americans to do something positive for themselves, such as recognizing that they too are responsible for the hideous state of affairs in America where black is the red cape for too many whites. That old adage, that where there is smoke there is also fire, was never more true than in the instance of black over-representation in prisons for the commission of crimes against society.

The culture of gangs, and weapons, of threats, and killings of black-on-black, of drug dealing, of fatherless children and one-parent families, of truncated education, or disinterest in licit employment, of family violence and general dysfunction is not an enviable one. It can be argued, and it is cited often enough, that a disadvantaged people with the background of slavery and social outcasting, of vulnerability and of dreadful discrimination, has led to the general dysfunction.

In Barack Obama's book ostensibly dedicated to his father, but setting out his own history, the issue of black violence was discussed at a time when he was a Chicago-based community organizer and had to battle disinterest and lethargy in the black community to assert their rights in a peaceful and meaningful manner. The danger posed to black men like himself by the lethal presence of black thugs appeared as a sideshow to the state of being black in America.

Black Americans are not taking ownership of their reputations going before them. The aristocracy of educated black professionals throw up their hands in despair at the ignorance and illicit culture of the bulk of the black populations living in ghettos now of their own making. The prevalence of threats emanating from sullen, armed and vicious young black men speak of a counter-culture that unbalances the aspirations of middle-class and aspiring lower-class black Americans to make something of their lives.

Inspiring fear in the larger white population will never give the black American the freedom to forge ahead and be regarded as no different than their white counterparts, for good and for ill. Holding the white population to account for racism, discrimination and wrongs done in the present is a necessary part of asserting equality in a nation dedicated to the notion that all men are created equal. But the lawless violence, the stoning of police, the riots and the looting taking place in Baltimore won't help one iota.

Violent young blacks surrounded a police cruiser to smash it while another cruiser was set on fire. A drugstore, a liquor store and a cheque-cashing store were looted. Young thugs tossed rocks, bricks, boards and pieces of concrete at police. A flyer had circulated on social media calling for violence Monday afternoon beginning at a downtown mall, to move toward City Hall. The riots in response to the death of a young black man while in police custody is another shock to the nation.

Shannon Stapleton/Reuters   Demonstrators threw rocks at Baltimore police officers on Monday during clashes in Baltimore.

Police have asked parents to search for their children and to take them home. Many of the people out on the streets rioting were African-American youths, with khaki trousers, part of a public school uniform, and carrying backpacks. The very demographic that should be taught that civil disobedience does not have to be expressed in violence, in setting fires, in looting, are out there in a thug-fest of defiance against authority.

There's a much, much better way, and it's past time for the African-American community to commit themselves to it. Martin Luther King would not approve of what his people are now committing themselves to. He would want to guide them away from violence and back toward viewing his own actions as a template for their furtherance in American life. And the issue of police brutality is one that must be tackled head on but not by mobs of violent youth.