Turn on the television today and you see conservative blacks talking about dealing with the problems in their community. Maryland’s Lt. Gov., Republican Michael Steele, talks about 130 kids aged 13-16 in the Baltimore Detention Center, waiting to go to jail, when they should be waiting to go to school. We can fix this, Steele says, it doesn’t have to be this way. He grew up with a single mother making $1.50 an hour in the most segregated city in the world, Washington D.C. His dad was a drunk, died at 36.
Some day I want to turn on the TV and see a panel of progressive Jews talking about the issues in their community. How the entire culture was captured by a nationalist ideology that, deriving its worldview from Israel’s problems with its neighbors, promulgated a view of Arabs as degraded bigoted violent people whose lands ought to be occupied. An ideology that caused a lot of suffering. One of them will lean to the mike like Steele and say, We can fix this, we don’t have to be this way…
