Rioters in Ferguson and Baltimore Hurt Law-abiding Black Americans: Deroy Murdock ****
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417768/black-thugs-hammer-black-citizens-deroy-murdock?target=topic&tid=3269
What a massive disservice you black hoodlums have inflicted on your home town.
Dear Black Thugs: To each of you I echo what actor Terrence Howard’s character told his gangbanger brother in the Academy Award–winning film Crash: “You embarrass me. You embarrass yourself.” From Ferguson to Baltimore, the whole world is watching as you run wild. Thanks to you, plate-glass store windows shatter into shards. You pry ATMs from walls to drain them of cash. One of you joy-rode a car through flaming debris along a smoldering street. You set homes, workplaces, and shops ablaze. You burned a 60-bed nursing home for seniors, still under construction, and literally knifed Baltimore firefighters’ water hoses as they tried to douse this inferno. And you enjoyed a 100-percent-off shopping spree — damn the consequences. How does ripping off a bottle of whiskey from a smoldering liquor store help us overcome?
In 1850, French economist Fredric Bastiat, of whom you bums probably are oblivious, wrote an essay titled That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen. You can see the devastation that you have created: You burned to the ground 17 businesses worth an estimated $4.6 million in Ferguson. You torched a CVS Pharmacy in Baltimore. Thanks to your violence, the Orioles beat the Chicago White Sox inside an empty Camden Yards stadium Wednesday. For safety’s sake, the next three Orioles home games, against the Tampa Bay Rays, will shift to St. Petersburg, Florida.
What you don’t see are the CVS Pharmacies and other businesses that never will open in Baltimore, Compton, East St. Louis, and other predominantly black communities. Why not? Because derelicts like you have taught companies to think long and hard before operating where your ilk might turn their money into cinders. You don’t see the unpaid bills of those lucky enough to have jobs but who cannot perform them, thanks to relocated ball games, conventions, and special events. You don’t see the positions that never get created in these areas — where they are needed most. Baltimore’s unemployment rate is 8.2 percent versus 5.5 percent nationwide. According to the latest Census data, an astonishing 37 percent of Baltimore’s black men between ages 20 and 24 were jobless in 2013. Did you hooligans consider how your crimes would make life miserable for your black neighbors who simply want to earn honest paychecks?
And this likely will be no short-term problem. Detroit, Newark, Watts, and the poorer parts of Washington, D.C. suffered severe riots when the black thugs of the 1960s thought it would be brilliant to incinerate their own neighborhoods. Some of those places took decades to recover. Even today, Detroit struggles to stand on its feet. And now, Baltimore will suffer. What a massive disservice you black hoodlums have inflicted on your home town. Long an underappreciated city, Baltimore’s urban core has blossomed. The restaurants, shops, bars, and historical buildings around the Inner Harbor and Fell’s Point are fun, beautiful, and inviting. As tourists plan their summer vacations, thanks to you bums, they will consider these places to avoid.
Do you think this makes life better for black people? Do you even care? Indeed, you punks only have made black people look bad from coast to coast. Decent, honest, law-abiding blacks have begged for calm and stood protectively between your sorry selves and the police. Toya Graham famously disciplined her rampaging son, who earned her slaps across his face. But, alas, the far more prominent images from Ferguson and Baltimore feature blacks who could not control themselves and turned serious questions about police conduct into mass theft, beatings, and arson.
This carnage utterly backfired as political expression. As the New York Post’s Kyle Smith observed, “CVS’s efforts to sell aspirin and shampoo did not have a lot to do with the death of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old Baltimore man whose funeral Tuesday, after he died with a broken spine while in police custody, precipitated the unrest.” According to a prisoner who shared a police van with him, the Washington Post reported Wednesday night, he heard Gray “banging against the walls” and thought he “was intentionally trying to injure himself.” If Gray’s eventually fatal wounds prove to have been self-inflicted, this entire pathetic affair will wither into a museum-grade case of “never mind.” The only winners here are white racists. You hoods have handed them all the ammunition they need to keep preaching their lies: e.g. “Blacks are genetically savage, violent, and dangerous.” While you have thrown fresh gasoline on their flames of hate, you also have lit pilot lights of doubt in the minds of some whites who don’t hate blacks but, perhaps, wonder if a black candidate is quite right for that job. Or how about the young black couple eyeing that new house? Or the black businessman seeking that commercial loan? Or the amiable black guy trying to hail a cab and meet his sister and friends at a birthday dinner? After Ferguson and Baltimore, some whites now will wonder, “Is it really safe to bet on those blacks?” From blatant bigotry to quiet concerns, you black criminals who turned the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray into pageants of bedlam have given white Americans new reasons to look at black Americans at least slightly differently than they did just a year ago. Thanks for nothing, black thugs. — Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University.
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