Much has been said about the protests in Baltimore following the death in police custody of 25 year old Freddie Gray and, of course, much of it is centered on how black people should better themselves so as to avoid deadly confrontations with the police and discrimination in general. You know the drill: Pull your pants up! Stay in school! Stop having babies out of wedlock! Stop being so angry!
I’ll just paraphrase something I posted on Facebook a while back about that:
An African-American man graduated with honors from Columbia University. He went on to become a community organizer and then to attend Harvard Law School, where he was the editor of the prestigious Law Review. Afterward, he worked as a civil rights attorney and as a lecturer at University of Chicago Law School.
In 1992 he married a woman who was an accomplished attorney and they had two daughters. They have been married ever since and are the model of an intact and stable family. He was elected to the Illinois State Senate and then to the United States Senate. In 2008 he was elected President of the United States. It does not get any more respectable than that.
And yet.