No More Long, Hot Summers?

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's Mike Seate, in a recent column, expressed regret that some white folks had been speculating as to what would happen if Obama did not get the Democratic nomination for president. In short, they thought that blacks would riot. Seate is very troubled by this notion, and offers it as evidence of residual racism and stereotyping. Blacks rioting because of some real or imagined slight in the political or social arena is a thing of the past, right? As is the credibility of any _threat_ to riot -- i.e. the traditional "It's gonna be a long, hot summer" line. Right. The only problem is, the Rev. Al Sharpton has a "rent-a-mob" that follows him wherever he goes, to protest whatever trivial offense strikes his fancy on that particular day. And yes, the demonstrations are typically "peaceful", if a bit disruptive, but Rev. Al has a few not-so-peaceful notches on his social activism/race mongering belt. When enough people gather in one place to protest something, and when that particular class of people has a history of boiling over on those occasions, I don't think it's being overly paranoid or "racist" to speculate that there might be a bit of unpleasantness connected with something like, say, Hillary stealing the nomination from Obama -- which she has, apparently, wisely decided not to do. I'm not even convinced that O.J. wasn't acquitted because the jury could hear the faint undertone of chanting coming from the street outside the L.A. County Courthouse. Which is better, to let off a psychopath who killed a couple of sleazeballs, or to see half of L.A. go up in flames? You make the call -- no pressure! No, I am not at all convinced that the era of the long, hot summer is entirely over. Furthermore, I think we can expect the Obama candidacy to reheat some of those old grievances, maybe to the spillover point, maybe not -- but to claim that it's impossible is to be just a bit Pollyanna-ish. And the point he misses is that we're not talking about all blacks, or a majority of blacks, or even a substantial minority of blacks. It doesn't take that many. Sure, call them the radicals, the soreheads, the troublemakers. But if they're the ones holding the Molotov cocktails, all the tut-tutting of the all the preachers and "community leaders" in the inner city isn't going to make much difference. And yes, those grievances are still being stoked on a regular basis -- by the likes of Rev. Al, Rev. Wright, Rev. Jackson, and probably scores of other "Rev.'s" across the land. We know this because of what comes out in political dialogue, in the media, and -- yes -- in things like "rap", hip-hop, and so forth. It's still an open wound, even if the person insists on repeatedly opening it himself. It's going to be very interesting, in fact, to see how Obama deals with this issue over the next few months. Will he take advantage of the lumpen proletariat, in view of his mentorship by communists and/or radicals? Or will he really try to be a unifier? You can't play the race card on every hand and also claim you're for unification; it has to be one or the other. Both he and the Clintons threw the race card around like a frisbee during the primary campaign -- mostly at each other, of course. So is he going to clean up his act, or sink further into the Black Panther-hued mire? I can promise that the more he does of the latter, the more his prospects of winning will sink as well.