David Greenberg’s Riot Act – The last century’s racial disturbances have a common cause: police brutality [Slate.com] provides a good discussion of the past century of riots by black citizens and its links to the white supremacist corruption of the police department and justice system. On the other hand, it has a lingering problem: it attempts to cast all race riots as black people rioting and attacking white people. This neglects the truly vicious white supremacist assaults on blacks in towns such as Tulsa and St. Louis. The article even tries to lump the 1919 Chicago white supremacist riot as a black-initiated race riot similar to Watts, L.A., or Cincinatti.

Yes, I know the article is an attempt to show how the rioters were provoked by massive police brutality and that oppressive police treatment of blacks has got to stop if we want to end the violence. But it has a subtle effect in reinforcing a few dangerous premises. It reinforces the conviction that racial problems mean black problems, and don’t have anything to do with the active brutality of whites. And similarly, it makes it seem as though racial violence is something that blacks initiate, even if we see that initiation as justified. In the vicious race riots of the early 20th century, that simply was not the case. All of this leads to a continuing view of blacks as a problem to be solved, as the (Greenberg’s words) the violent and the lawless element of a race riot.; What about the white thugs in Tulsa who dropped dynamite on black ghettoes from airplanes? What about the white St. Louis rioters who raped and tortured black women and men by the thousands? Blacks are not the only racial troublemakersof the twentieth century.

Paul H. Rosenberg posted an excellent article to the L.A. Independent Media Center which both puncture’s David Horowitz’s hollow martyr pose and makes a strong case against his claims about reparations in the "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks – and Racist Too" ad. Among other choice tidbits, Rosenberg points out:

Of course, Horowitz himself is an old hand at silencing people he disagrees with. In the late 1980s he spearheaded the campaign to shut down the news program "South Africa Now," carried on many PBS stations. His rationale? It was "communist propaganda," because its producers worked with members of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, which included communists in its ranks. (Southern segregationists in the 50s and 60s used the same tactics against Martin Luther King.)

The Dallas Observer has an interesting profile on Paul Kerr, a gringo leader in the immigrant amnesty movement. Last year he organized the largest street demonstration in Dallas’s history, with about 10,000 rallying to downtown Dallas for immediate amnesty for undocumented immigrants.

More for the In a Stunning Development file: an internal audit commissioned by Chief Charles Ramsey, it has been found that 10% of the officers on the D.C. police force have sent e-mail containing hate slurs, including ethnic and racial slurs, sexually inappropriate content and offensive comments about homosexuals. Some of the e-mails also included content about illegal drug use by officers, sexual activity on the job, and evidence of racial profiling. Malcolm X once said that white hatemongers had traded in the hoods and sheets — well, some of them have traded in the hoods and sheets — and taken up blue uniforms. The sad thing is how often the news continues to prove him right.

In a stunning development, studies have revealed that drug war rhetoric about crack babie might just be overblown and based more on anti-black sentiment than on reality. What a shocker!