LEE KRAMER'S ROOM: With Views

[jbsliverer]

Seems like an ordinary and common article of today in the US. It wasn't but yet it was.

...pitted against one another at the bottom rungs...

...years after the last riots, Phoenix and surrounding towns ignited once again.

Amid a week-long bout of looting, arson and clashes...

...killed in this patchwork of poor Black townships...

Interviews with nearly two dozen people — including victims, their family members, community leaders, politicians, business owners and others — were laced with disbelief. Decades of work had been put into building a peaceful coexistence. All wondered the same thing: How had it unraveled so suddenly?

...failure to truly heal the divides...

The country may have christened itself the Rainbow Nation, but high walls of income and opportunity still divide each of its stripes.

The wave of looting that swept across the metropolitan areas...

The television news had been broadcasting live shots of mostly Black crowds streaming out of department stores and warehouses with whatever they could grab. Interspersed with such footage were interviews with mostly White...

...men in relatively affluent neighborhoods who said they had armed themselves in case the looters came for their homes.

We came across a group of ... men who told us that we could not pass there and turned us away...Then they accused us of being part of the group of people who had been looting and started beating us.

...ordered the deployment of thousands of reserve soldiers to the area...

...residents began setting up checkpoints...

Problems started when people at checkpoints turned to vigilantism and started racially profiling people, preventing them entry into the suburb...adding that the targets were “mainly African people.” ...did not explain why so few police were available to intervene, leaving an opening for vigilantism.

Tensions quickly rose...Shots were fired, people spread out and recriminations took place...

We are concerned about the potential outbreak of racial tension going forward...

...other cases against a smattering of people accused of spreading inflammatory misinformation online.

The debate over private gun possession...

Discussions about guns are highly emotional, and pro-gun groups are mostly conservative and White and similar to the National Rifle Association...

...recently pushed for a ban on licensing firearms for private citizens but has faced enormous pushback from gun owners.

There was clearly a failure in policing, ... In those instances, people may feel justified to use vigilantism.

Court proceedings are underway against dozens of alleged perpetrators of the violence...

...emphasized that the killings should not drive a wedge between communities that had come to rely on each other for jobs and services.

“We must not allow the incidents of the past weeks to divide us...We are one people. We need to build a nonracial, united...

...a country that had been strictly divided by race in almost all walks of life...

The White community...population, was relatively untouched by July’s violence, an indicator of how much more separate they remain from the rest...

What has happened here again is a blight on humanity and it shows the failure of the democratic project...

...quest for racial justice...

We didn’t get freedom,” she said. “We only got democracy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com