Before You Talk About Baltimore...

...read this open letter (especially if, like me, you're white):

Dear white Facebook friends: I need you to respect what Black America is feeling right now.

..and read this historical overview of how urban black ghettos were born, and why the problem is so much bigger than we like to admit (worth reading for context and understanding no matter who you are):

From Ferguson to Baltimore: The Fruits of Government-Sponsored Segregation.

I believe in an ethic of love, and central to such an ethic is attention to the neighbor in need, the neighbor who is crying out. It is about listening with empathy and compassion. As Julia Blount puts it in her open letter linked above,

If you are not listening, not exposing yourself to unfamiliar perspectives, not watching videos, not engaging in conversation, then you are perpetuating white privilege and white supremacy. It is exactly your ability to not hear, to ignore the situation, that is a mark of your privilege. People of color cannot turn away.

Sometimes, when people don't hear me, I resort to shouting. Sometimes, when the privileged don't listen or listen with only half an ear, the frustration of Black Americans who are suffering under oppressive and marginalizing conditions grows to a point where they find themselves doing the collective equivalent of shouting.

When they do, modern white America often invokes the nonviolence of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the attempt to chastise their black neighbors and urge them to quiet down--as if King's nonviolence were not about shouting, about disrupting the status quo, about becoming so loud that the established powers were forced to hear if not to listen.

King has been sanitized for White America in a way that doesn't do justice to his radical strategy of relentless nonviolent resistance. While he thought rioting was strategically unwise, he understood the motivations behind it. While he found rioting to violate the highly demanding ethic of love that he claimed as his own, it was not nearly as morally problematic as the social and legal and economic forces that drove communities to that breaking point where outrage turns into shattered glass.

What King proposed wasn't that the black community set aside its sense of injustice, its frustration, its impatience. What King proposed was a strategy for channeling all of that into a shout that could not be dismissed or ignored, that forced the privileged majority to reflect on their own moral failings rather than hide from them by pointing fingers at the people throwing rocks.

Before you talk about Baltimore, listen to these words by Martin Luther King: