"Now Are We Willing to Face Our Own Hypocrisy?"
That is the question asked yesterday by
Goldie Taylor, Senior Editor for Blue Nation Review.
It's a harrowing essay, beautifully written and poignant. It is hands down the best and most important thing I have read so far about Baltimore and the nature of Why we are where we are right now.
Tough questions. Few answers.
Below are the requisite three paragraphs, but honestly I recommend you ignore everything below the fold and simply go and read her piece.
As a society, we have supported public policies that create deep pockets of poverty and need. We built interstate highways that cut off entire communities, producing dead-end streets and drug traps. We permitted institutions to crumble without investment, and then wonder why families fall by the wayside. We redlined whole cities, allowing predatory payday loan, title pawn, and check cashing stores to flourish. Today, they are more prevalent than liquor stores and churches.
We burn bridges to meaningful opportunity then blame the people we isolate when they fail to embrace the “American Dream.” When families struggling on the margins cry out for help, we turn a blind eye. We stand safely beyond the walls of containment we erected and cast moral aspersions to assuage our own complicity. That is the enduring legacy of Jim Crow, segregationist policies that kept people locked up and locked out.
From the comfort of our living rooms, or from behind a computer keyboard, we watch the unrest unfolding in cities like Ferguson and Baltimore. Why can’t they be like us, we ask, with no small irony. Why can’t they be like Dr. King?