Walter Russell Meade Discusses Black Flash Mobs

American Tinderbox.

An excerpt or two:

For some time now, residents of some US cities have noted occasional incidents of seemingly random, racially motivated violence in which young Black males are involved. The hot weather and bad economy seem to be combining to generate a small but possibly significant uptick this year. The national media are doing their best to avoid looking too closely at this disturbing phenomenon, and perhaps for good reason. What the United States doesn’t need is a media firestorm that triggers copycat violence.

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Given America’s history and the lurid attraction race still holds for the public mind, the racial dimension of (many but not all of) these incidents makes this an even more compelling story. Certainly if random mobs of white kids were attacking peaceful Blacks going about their daily business the media and the commentariat would be deeply engaged. The articles I’ve linked to have been carefully couched and worded in ways that downplay the drama and the human interest. It is understandable and even meritorious that this is so; as I suggested at the beginning of this post no sane person would want to increase the chance that what is still a marginal and occasional pattern of behavior would go viral and enter the mainstream — and to vary the metaphor still further, mainstream media attention is like oxygen for this kind of potential firestorm.

But to a significant number of Americans out there, this restraint looks like just another case of an anti-white elitist media bending over backward to hide the real truth from the American people. Should this phenomenon grow and should the media continue to downplay both the extent and the racial nature of the violence, look for a deep and angry response. Many American whites are young, angry, poorly educated and male. So are many Spanish speaking immigrants. These guys also know how to organize a mob on Facebook.

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The conditions for a Category 5 hurricane are all there; it is easy to see a political reaction taking shape in this country that would make the Tea Party movement look like a PTA bake sale. They say that great storms start with trivial causes: a butterfly waves its wings and, when conditions are just right, the wind begins to grow.

The country is so angry now that it would not take much more than the right butterfly in the right place to take us to the next stage of struggle over the Great Society legacy. Just as the urban riots of the 1960s played a role in the hasty adoption of the sixties policy complex, so a rash of small urban confrontations that caught on à la française could dramatically accelerate and intensify the current upheaval in American politics.

If that happens, the result is very unlikely to be a strengthening of the foundations of the Great Society state.