From time to time we hear the lament that our inner cities are food deserts because grocery stores have abandoned the area, we're also told that there are no job opportunities for young people in our urban areas because businesses won't open in African-American communities. The lack of stores and jobs are both attributed, of course, to white racism.
Perhaps a better explanation is to be found in the dysfunctional community that is Ferguson, MO which might be viewed as a general type that's all too common in the U.S.
A store owner is robbed by an African-American thug, the robber is subsequently shot by police in what are still murky circumstances, the other young thugs in the town seize upon the episode as a pretext for rioting and proceed to burn and trash dozens of shops in the neighborhood.
If you were a businessman trying to eke out a living would you want to open a business in this neighborhood? Of course not. So more stores, including food stores, will decide it's just not worth the risks one must incur to operate in such places, and urban blight and abandonment metastasize.
And, we may count on it, the cause of the exodus of businesses from the neighborhood will be said by such luminaries as Al Sharpton to be the racism of whites who don't want to live and do business in black neighborhoods. Maybe it would be good for African-Americans to stop blaming whitey, to ignore the demagogues, to reject the liberal nostrums which have gotten the mass of blacks nowhere in the last fifty years, and start looking at themselves for the source of their problems and for the solutions to them.
Liberals will say - they always do - that this is just blaming the victim. Perhaps, but sometimes the "victim" is truly at fault, and sometimes the victim is victimized by himself.
