America has done much, perhaps more than any nation in history, to try to expunge racism from our public life, but all those efforts are eroded every time stories like this one about groups of young blacks beating, robbing and killing appear in the news, which they do with alarming frequency. One rarely reads of white mobs beating black victims, but the reverse seems almost a daily occurrence.
Of course, whites are not supposed to take notice. It's racist, we're told, to observe that such savage behavior is disproportionately a phenomenon indigenous to black communities. We're to pretend that there's no racial correlation, but the fact is that there is, and the problem will only get worse unless people start confronting it and stop calling people racist for pointing it out.
There's something very deeply wrong in the black community and people are tired of being told, after fifty years of bending over backwards to give blacks every advantage, every opportunity, that the problem is white racism. Nobody except a few left-wing fringies really believes that anymore. The problem is the inability of too many blacks to function appropriately in a civilized society and until prominent black leaders start acknowledging the problem and stop blaming the larger society for the barbarisms perpetrated by other blacks, the problem will never be solved.
Moreover, all the progress made in changing white attitudes toward blacks over the last sixty years, the progress made in teaching whites to see blacks as just like themselves and to treat them with the same dignity and respect they want to be treated with, is almost certain to unravel.
The era when blacks are given a pass for behavioral and intellectual inadequacies that would not be excused in a white person is coming to a close. When mobs march through an American city (Peoria) shouting "kill all the white people" more and more angry and exasperated whites are going to ask what's wrong with these people. When that question begins to be asked, and answered, openly racial animosities and prejudices that have been suppressed for fifty years in the white community are going to bubble back to the surface of our common life.
It will be a tragic day in America, to be sure, one that I fervently wish we'd never see, but when it comes it'll be primarily the result of whites being no longer able or willing to ignore the intolerable levels of hatred and violence in the black population.