Earlier by Eugene Gant: “What Will Come Of The Race War That Roils The Streets Of Baltimore?”

An exchange from the opening scene of David Simon’s 2002–2008 hit television program, The Wire, which chronicled crime in Baltimore:

Detective Jimmy McNulty: So your boy’s name is what?

Witness: Snot.

McNulty: You call the guy Snot?

Witness: Snot boogie ... yeah

McNulty: Snot boogie?

McNulty:  You like the name?

Witness: What?

McNulty: Snot boogie? This kid, whose momma went to the trouble to christen him Omar Isaiah Betts, you know, he forgets his jacket, his nose start runnin’, and, some ***hole, instead of giving him a Kleenex, he calls him Snot. So he’s Snot forever. Doesn’t seem fair.

Witness: Life just be that way I guess.

McNulty: So … who shot Snot?

Witness: I ain’t goin’ to no court.

Inevitably, as riots and anarchy spread through The City That Bleeds, leftist intellectualoids brought up The Wire, with the moonbatty Salon offering this:

Throughout the very real death of Freddie Gray at the hands of the Baltimore police and the protests and outpouring of anger following, the HBO show ‘The Wire,’ which aired its final episode more seven years ago, continues to echo throughout the social media conversation. There are two dueling notions: “Well if you watched ‘The Wire’ you shouldn’t be surprised” vs. “White people think all you need to do is watch ‘The Wire’ and you understand Baltimore.”

You won’t learn everything you need to know about Baltimore from “The Wire,” but it’s a start, by Scott Timberg, April 28, 2015

How many people actually do believe this is unknowable, but Salon’s Timberg [Email him] is right about one thing: Five minutes of watching “The Wire” explains the riots, because five minutes of watching “The Wire” paints a highly accurate portrait of the city’s blacks.

Thus the Snot-Boogie conversation is at once enlightening and mystifying. It enlightens because it reveals how stupid and crazed the city’s blacks are; it mystifies because anyone with a decent high school education, black or white, must wonder how any group of people could be that stupid and crazed.

Snot Boogie died because he repeatedly grabbed the cash from the pot in a crap game. He took beatings when they caught him, but eventually one of the players had had enough. McNulty’s witness on the stoop didn’t think stealing from a crap game merited death, and when the detective asked why they continued to permit Snot Boogie to play, the answer came: “Got to. This America, man.” Thus, the conversation was thus internally dialectic, concomitantly nonsensical and revealing.

In general, The Wire dissected the “urban” mind—urban being Main Stream Media code for black. It portrays a mish-mash of madly dashing desires and brooding resentments, devoid of a conscience. The only morally opprobrious acts for the blacks in The Wire are snitching and blowing a drug deal. Occasionally, a character’s conscience briefly flickers, and he shows remorse—say, when a friend dies in a hurricane of lead. But the other characters quickly smother such normal feelings.

Knowing this is important to discussing the Baltimore riots. It wasn’t a case of life imitating art. The art told the truth.

Many of us former residents remember that Baltimore, named for the Irish Catholic Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, was a pretty good place to live until the black population swamped that of the white.

Return to 1968. Imagine how terrified Baltimore whites were when black rioters set the city ablaze after Martin Luther King was murdered. That was the precipitating event, but the roiling current of black unrest in the city was always evident no matter where you went.  Liberals like to say that racism in whites “bubbles just beneath the surface.” But even as a small kid, I knew that violence and mayhem bubbled just beneath the surface in militant blacks. They seemed to be waiting for an excuse to lash out.

One might say that a callow white kid picked that up from parents and other adult whites who disliked, distrusted and feared blacks. But when the city exploded in 1968, it would have been obvious to any white kid, if only subconsciously, that parents and their friends were right.

I remember my parents’ fear that my big sister would not come home alive from her job at a major employer in what, to this day, is in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city. And they worried too about my other sister, who completed her student teaching requirements at an inner-city school. My father was furious about the assignment.

The grade-school I attended was still safe then, but it was just on the outskirts of a danger zone. Today, walking about the school and parish church at night would be suicidal.

Yet even without the MLK riots, the city’s blacks were menacing—again, it was a volcano “just beneath the surface” was waiting to erupt. When my mother went shopping at the Lexington Market, we had to arrive early in the morning. She didn’t want to be anywhere near the neighborhood in the late afternoon as the sun was going down.

Forget going to the Hippodrome Theater, where I once watched a Bruce Lee film in utter terror. Being surrounded by that many blacks left me petrified until we got out of the war zone. Was it me, or was it the dilapidated neighborhood and loud, obnoxious, threatening manner of the other movie-goers?

Point is, to a young white kid in the city, young blacks, who were bigger and more muscular generally, exuded danger. They looked morose and brooding, and were always loud, which frightens normal people.

And they weren’t any less menacing as they, and I, got older.

At night, the no-go zones around my grade school crept outward to areas that were generally safe during the day. One night when I was about 20, a friend of mine and I were in his Alfa Romeo, clutching third of fourth gear out of the heart of darkness toward the city line. We were passing an empty parking lot, when I glanced to my right to see four or five blacks surrounding a white girl. They were closing in on the retreating, terrified girl. My friend U-turned, and we barreled into the parking lot, casting headlights on what appeared to be an impending gang rape—the kind you won’t read about in Rolling Stone.

I hopped out of the car. “What’s going on?” I demanded. The girl was crying; I ordered her into the car. The leader approached, mumbling something about trying to help the girl. We didn’t wait to hear the rest, and burned rubber to get out.

On the way home, the girl told us she was dating either one of the blacks or someone they knew. What the truth was I will never know. The story epitomizes the naiveté among white women when it comes to black men. Somehow, they just don’t get it. But it also shows how menacing blacks in a group can be. The girl was backing up from this pack for a reason. And it wasn’t because they were trying to help her.

That was nearly 40 years ago, before big business opened the sewer pipe of black pathology and emptied its toxins into the culture at large. Today, the slovenly attire, including the prison look, ludicrous bling, dental grills, violent misogynist “music” and open anti-white racism in song and prose, makes blacks even more threatening. Because they know whites will not protest intellectually or fight back physically, they are much more dangerous.

Why the sudden upsurge in anti-white violence? Two reasons:

• First, demographic shift.

Today, blacks not only run the city but also comprise most (63%) of its population. The demographic decline of Baltimore startles even me, and I lived through it. Between 1950 and 2010, Baltimore lost nearly 75 percent of its whites, down from 723,675 to 183,830. It lost 35 percent of its total population from 1950 to 2010, but the total whites who went missing exceeded the total drop.

As the white population, 76 percent of the total, dropped 60 percent from 1950 through 1990 to 287,753, the black population doubled, from 226,053 to an all-time high of 448,261 in 1990.

The black population dropped from its high in 1990 to 418,929 in 2000, and then to 395,781 in 2010. But blacks still outnumber white more than 2-1.

• Second, political weakness.

But demographics aren’t the only difference. Today’s blacks knew they would get away with the riots. In 1968, they didn’t know it, and they didn’t get away it.

Writing in National Review, John Fund recalled what Gov. Spiro Agnew did when the blacks went ballistic after King was shot:

In 1968, blacks had achieved near-parity with whites, but whites were still in charge, and even Democrats and moderate Republicans such as Agnew did not tolerate black lawlessness [ The Fires Last Time: Lessons from the 1968 Baltimore Riots, April 28, 2015].

Now, whites surrender to black leaders and writers, who openly encourage anti-white racism and violence and say riots were justified. President Obama himself has been encouraging this behavior for months, albeit tacitly. Baltimore’s buffoonish black Democrat mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake [Email her]  told cops to stand down and give space to those who wanted to raze the city. Maryland’s white Republican governor practically apologized for calling in the National Guard to restore order.

The usual Leftist websites urged the protesters to keep looting and burning. Here is a headline from Salon: “Baltimore’s violent protesters are right: Smashing police cars is a legitimate political strategy.” Salon lifted that piece from an estimable website called “Radical Faggot.”

The ludicrous Ta-Nehisi Coates offered this in a piece titled “Non-Violence As Compliance:”

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is "correct" or "wise," any more than a forest fire can be “correct” or “wise.” Wisdom isn't the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the community.

The Atlantic, April 27, 2015

The leftist Vox website offered this at its Twitter feed:

This is the perfect response to anyone calling for nonviolence in Baltimore http://t.co/XRZjjSLCfN pic.twitter.com/d57iLszUGV

— Vox (@voxdotcom) April 28, 2015

Ironically, at David Simon’s own blog, a commenter on the television writer’s thoughts about the riots suggested the unsayable, and indeed, unthinkable. “I don’t want it to be so, but maybe it’s time to revisit Segregation,” Mark Drysdale wrote.

There was an interesting article in Slate magazine a year or two ago that suggested that black people in the 50’s & 60’s civil rights era never wanted Integration, which was a goal imposed on them by white liberals. All they really wanted was Jim Crow laws abolished + voting rights + equal dollars-per-public-school-pupil.[VDARE.com note: He probably meant How the left’s embrace of busing hurt the cause of integration, by Tanner Colby, February 3, 2014]

Simon was livid:

You f*****g revisit it. I don’t want to live around white people with opinions like the one you just offered. [Expletive deleted]

Apparently, Simon has no trouble living around black people who rape, rob, loot and murder.

Thus began a long thread with another commenter who repeatedly tried to explain to Simon that commenter Drysdale was merely thinking out loud, not advocating anything. But Simon was implacable. Commenter Drysdale was anathema.

It’s a microcosm: The problem in Baltimore isn’t just blacks. It’s liberals who refuse to see that blacks are the problem—even though the liberals write fiction that shows blacks are the problem.

Eugene Gant [email him] no longer lives in Baltimore.