I don't see how electing more black politicians is supposed to solve anything. I mean, look at all the black politicians that have been elected at every level of government and still nothing has changed. Hell, we even have a black president and to hear black people tell it, they are worse off than they have been since the Civil Rights Movement.
Right, like I said, it remains to be seen whether there will be any meaningful change to the police department or if cars and stores will be on fire again in another twenty years. I think a City Council that more closely represents the population (one of the new officials is also a woman) is a good start, but only a start.
As for whether the situation is worse now than it's been since the '60s, lots of people of all ethnicities think a lot of things are worse than they were, and they're often wrong. Crime, for example, is lower in a lot of American cities than it was years or decades ago. Lots of people are more worried about their kids than ever, yet their kids are generally safer than ever. The best theory for this misunderstanding that I've heard is that because our media access is 24/7, and we get stories from all over the country and world more easily than we used to, stories of mayhem and danger are more frequent even if the events are less frequent.
But I think the exposure all this violence is getting, all these rocks that are finally getting turned over, is ultimately a good thing. The proliferation of video cameras and the ability to make those videos viewable by much of the planet might be the best thing to happen for civil rights since The Civil Rights Movement.
Now what that tells me is that simply electing more black politicians isn't going to solve anything since the black politicians that have been elected so far have shown little to no interest in changing or opposing the status quo.
Except the State's Attorney for Baltimore (who's black) filed charges against the officers there, and the mayor (also black)
invited the Justice Department to conduct a "pattern or practice" investigation on her own police department. Unless that happens all the time and I just haven't heard about it, I'd call that change and opposition to the status quo (because I do believe that the excessive force used by these officers happens all the time and I just don't hear about it). Under Eric Holder, our first black Attorney General, the Justice Department launched official investigations into at least 21 local police departments (it was up to
17 as of September 2011, before Ferguson, Albuquerque, Cleveland and Baltimore). I can't find with a quick Google search how many such investigations were conducted prior to Holder taking office, but there were some; the federal law allowing the DOJ to do this
was passed in 1994, and the first police department to come under federal oversight, Pittsburgh's, was in 1997.
The question is whether this all represents genuine, lasting change, and isn't just a dog & pony show to placate the angry masses until they get distracted and move onto the next thing. If that's what it is, I expect we'll be having this conversation again in another 20 years. I guess Pittsburgh is nearly ripe for seeing where things stand 20 years after one of these federal investigations, if I felt like doing the research. Does anyone here live in Pittsburgh? Do the police there still kick the crap out of people?
I think the fact that much of Baltimore's police department is black highlights what I've believed all along, that it's not "a few bad apples", but that our whole law enforcement system is badly screwed up. I'm sure there are plenty of white police officers who are well-intentioned and well-behaved and who say nothing when one of their colleagues throws a black kid up against the car without probable cause.
And whether you believe the problems with law enforcement are issues of race, or class, or violence, or unchecked authority, it would be foolish to think that black people can't contribute to or participate in a racist infrastructure. That's what
"Uncle Tom" means, which is not a new term (Merriam-Webster says the first known use was 1922). We also have "coconut" and "Oreo", and probably others. I've always heard that some American slave owners appointed slaves to be overseers, probably rewarding them with better food and housing for their families, and of course giving them authority over the other slaves.