Institute better police-intelligence procedures to head off such episodes in the future. Yet well-meaning white leaders, acting on good intentions and political correctitude, don't get it. African Americans in their cities want jobs, better schools, decent housing, health care, nutrition, good public transportation and public safety for their families. They're not looking to defend thuggery and, except for a noisy few, want thugs prosecuted and put away. Whenever we talk race, we seldom talk about Asian, Latino, Native American or other group progress, or lack of it, in America.
Race means black and white.
It means talk about slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, discrimination and their aftermath. It means trying to overcome these things as a country so that we all truly can be free at last. Other immigrants to America, after all, came voluntarily and in search of individual opportunity. African Americans came involuntarily and in group servitude. It seemed in the 1960s that we had broken through on race.