Black culture is not the problem, says N D B Connolly in an oped in the New York Times.

… we take our eye off the circumstances that created the event. We forget, for instance, about how officials, in their fear of black youth, issued what witnesses said was a pre-emptive riot-police blockade hemming in students around Mondawmin Mall, where looting erupted.

The problem is not black culture. It is policy and politics, the very things that bind together the history of Ferguson and Baltimore and, for that matter, the rest of America….

What we do not prosecute nearly well enough, however, is the daily assault on black people’s lives through the slow, willful destruction of real estate within black communities. The conditions in West Baltimore today are the direct consequence of speculative real estate practices that have long targeted people with few to no options.…