Baltimore

White people's knee-jerk reactions to recent events in Baltimore seem to be a pretty accurate barometer of their level of racism. There are those whose immediate reaction to another black man being killed in police custody is to blame the dead man. He shouldn't have been disobeying the law. 

 Except, what if he wasn't? What if, as apparently in the case of Freddie Gray, there was no probable cause for him to be arrested? And yet, police stopped him on the street, handcuffed him, manhandled him, dragged him to a police van and threw him in, failing to obtain medical help for what seemed to be obvious injuries. 

 And then the man dies of his injuries. 

 But for people who blame the victim, the police are always right. They are never guilty of overstepping their bounds, of unnecessary violence. It's the Fox News theory of race relations and it is all summed up very succinctly by Tom Tomorrow in This Modern World.

 (Hat tip to Daily Kos.)

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