Baltimore Protests: What America Does Not Understand

http://www.alternet.org/united-states-amnesia-what-white-america-doesnt-understand-about-baltimore-protests?akid=13050.294211.VJHsoB&rd=1&src=newsletter1035618&t=1

Baltimore’s young people responded to the police theft of Freddie Gray’s life with protests that eventually grew into a spasm of violence. While the direct motivator, Gray’s death is not the only direct cause of the uprising. The protests and violent exhalations by Baltimore’s black youth (and others) are the result of a long pattern of police abuse, harassment and violence toward that city’s African-American community in the context of systemic class inequality, custodial citizenship and mass incarceration.
The causes of black urban unrest in the United States are not “unknown unknowns.” Rather, they were described in great and compelling detail by the 1968 Kerner Commission, which was tasked by President Johnson with determining the causes of the urban riots during the 1960s.
The reasons young people in Baltimore and other parts of the United States have been moved to street protests in response to police violence are only mysteries to those American policymakers and members of the public who choose to live in a state of denial.

However, much more important questions will not be asked by pundits and politicians.
How are America’s police pathological in their violence, racism and brutal killings of black people?
Are America’s police deranged in how they imagine unarmed black and brown people as some type of imminent threat to be dispatched with due haste and extreme prejudice?
Is America’s police culture sick and pathological in how citizens have been tortured to death, sexually assaulted and otherwise violated and abused by police officers?
If there are only a few bad apples in America’s police departments, why don’t the good cops throw them out en masse?
Are America’s police more like a street gang than public servants?
It is easy for the mainstream news media to opine and lecture about “pathological” black communities that are supposedly plagued by “bad culture.” It is far more difficult to talk about America’s broken police and its culture of violence and disrespect toward non-whites and poor people that led to the killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and so many other black men and women across the United States of America.