Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's Desperate Warning : Many More Baltimores

Writing for Time Magazine, Kareem Abdul-Jabber makes a deep emotional appeal to the roots of social injustice, at least as he sees it, and attempts a prophetic utterance "Baltimore Is Just the Beginning"

What happened in Baltimore isn’t just a one-and-done situation. This wasn’t just a slight sprain in the ankle that we’ll be able to walk off by morning. This was a violently shattered bone that will have America limping forward on crutches for months to come, maybe even years.

One thing that history has taught us is that civil unrest is rarely just about what incites the incident. From what information the public has been given, Freddie Gray’s death seems like a malignant cocktail of negligence and abuse, and the charges brought against the six officers seem to confirm that. But we’ve seen this all before—many times.

So why now? Why Baltimore? Why Freddie Gray?

Why indeed. Before Freddy it was Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, or anyone else that the press and our President can latch on too, rushing to judgement and agenda before the facts are known, before the police or prosecutor has a chance to make a case. It's NOT about the individual, whether victim or perpetrator, it's about the agenda and public perception and keep the myths and legends alive to exploit them. It is a racialist agenda, and Jabbar is either a proponant or a tool, I'll leave it to you to decide.

The Baltimore uprising isn’t just about Freddie Gray. The image of the cops carrying him, his legs dangling uselessly, his neck crooked awkwardly is a visual manifestation of the impotence many African Americans have felt over the past year as death after death of black people at the hands of police keep adding up. After each death there is the usual flurry of outrage, protests, political promises, celebrity tweeting, and condemnation of protestors. Then nothing happens until the next death, which is often tragically close behind. About 70 unarmed blacks have been killed by police between 1999 and 2014. The only thing that seems to change is that the list of the dead keeps getting longer.

It has to be a racist element you see, it can't be anything else, blind to injustices toward anyone other than "unarmed black youth/men" (whether in the commision of criminality or not) we MUST focus on the "unarmed black youth/men" - nothing else sells air-time, papers, or blog-space, and besides, no matter how many BILLIONS you spend on the injustices, nothing really ever changes.

... For African Americans, it feels as if we are all gathered together in the path of giant steamroller. We shout up at the driver to put on the brakes, but he keeps shouting for us to get out of the way. But there’s no place to go. We keep backing up and backing up. In Baltimore, it felt as though everyone’s back was against the wall, and there was no place to back up to anymore. If shouting doesn’t get the driver’s attention, maybe something more drastic will.

Jabbar rambles further, comparing the Baltimore riots to Boston Tea Party in 1773, to the 200,000 people at the Washington, D.C. National Mall to hear Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964. He decries the inequitity of black vs white wage earnings in Maryland, the unemployment rates of blacks vs whites in Maryland and Baltimore. He even throws in life expectancy, almost as though all this justifies the violence and destruction Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake gave space for. He does make some valid points, despite the obvious hyperbole and racialism, America was indeed born out of protest, and many social injustices have been addressed by protest, but rioting and willful destruction of the property and businesses of innocents who had nothing to do with Freddie Gray's death is NOT protest, sorry to disagree with Jabbar.

What’s even more frustrating for African Americans across America witnessing the events is the blatant attempt of some in the media to portray this as (1) the result of “thugs” who want to exploit Gray’s death to stock up on some free TVs and (2) an anomaly that doesn’t represent America. Both attitudes exhibit the kind of racial profiling that is at the heart of the problem in the first place. ... Protestors want to promote a political agenda, while looters want swag. Clearly, looters are criminals hurting the cause of the protesters and should be arrested and prosecuted. But when you lump them together and call them all “thugs,” you don’t have to listen to the real issues. It’s the adult equivalent of jamming your fingers in your ears, closing your eyes, and humming loudly. ... I suggest we all pay attention to what’s happening in Baltimore, because it’s very likely that unless the economic and injustice issues raised there are addressed in a meaningful way across the country, we will be seeing many more Baltimores throughout the election season. Read more here