If You're Black in America, the Rules are Different

"A report by the Baltimore Sun last year found that the city paid out $5.7 million since 2011 over lawsuits related to police violence.

"Officers have battered dozens of residents who suffered broken bones -- jaws, noses, arms, legs, ankles -- head trauma, organ failure, and even death, coming during questionable arrests," the newspaper reported..." (World Socialist Web Site)

Now that's what I call violence, not a couple broken windows or a few smashed up cars. Now check this out from Interfluidity:

"In theory, a peaceful political process is absolutely the right way to solve the problems of brutality and exclusion. In practice, it hasn't happened, it isn't happening, there is no sign that it will happen...Riots do severe, immediate, harm, they are an escalation, they are violent, they are prima facie bad. Yet the fact that rioting sometimes happens, the uncomfortable possibility of it, has historically and may again create urgency and motivate political change that is ultimately good." ("There is a name for this," Steve Randy Waldman, Interfluidity)

Well put, but what's important to remember is that the violence in Baltimore didn't emerge from nothing. It has its roots in injustice. Treat people fairly and the problem goes away. Use the rioting as an excuse to implement loony martial law strategies, and reap the whirlwind. That's the choice, isn't it?

And we know which way the government has chosen to deal with it -- through provocation, escalation and aggression -- the same way the US deals with everything. The governor has deployed two thousand National Guard troops onto the streets to accompany the hundreds of robo-cops that have transformed downtown Baltimore into a war zone so they can see how effective their new tools are in terrifying the public into submission. And who's helping the governor and the city kingpins in their crackdown on the protestors?

The elites in the black establishment, that's who. An article in the World Socialist Web Site sums it up perfectly:

"In her press conference Tuesday, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake repeatedly referred to young people expressing their anger over police violence as 'thugs' in announcing the imposition of a curfew and the calling in of the National Guard. She was flanked by Patrol Chief Darryl De Sousa, the City Council President Bernard C. 'Jack' Young, and City Council member Brandon M. Scott, all of whom were black, with the latter two also calling the demonstrators 'thugs.'

"In its response to the eruption of police violence over the murder of Freddie Gray, the black political establishment, headed by the first African-American president, has shown itself exactly for what it is: corrupt, self-interested and utterly hostile to the interests and aspirations of the poor and workers, black and white." ("The social eruption in Baltimore, Maryland", Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore, World Socialist Web Site)

Will there ever be justice for Freddie Gray?

Nope. The people who own this country wouldn't allow it.