A black radical mendaciously interprets the Baltimore riots as political violence

And that was pretty much his line about Ferguson, too.

Officials calling for calm can offer no rational justification for Gray's death, and so they appeal for order.

To be clear, Coates does not quite openly here attempt to justify the rioting.

But he comes close enough, and no doubt there are plenty of more bold others to cross that line.

In fact, right now, all over the web, other liberal racist spin doctors are declaiming about root causes and what is the real problem in Baltimore, which of course is not that hundreds or thousands are rioting with all the violence and destruction that entails, and not that decades of liberal racist propaganda have legitimated black violence and black hatred of white people.

All the same, Coates himself has made a career of being a black radical propagandist.

That's his role in the media world.

In the present case I note for example these remarks that hide the unhappy and inconvenient truth of which he may, I suppose, be genuinely unaware.

I grew up across the street from Mondawmin Mall, where today's riots began. 

My mother was raised in the same housing project, Gilmor Homes, where Freddie Gray was killed. 

Everyone I knew who lived in that world regarded the police not with admiration and respect but with fear and caution. 

No doubt he is telling the truth, but that truth hides another, that nobody regards the police with respect and admiration, and everybody regards them with fear and caution.

Cops are armed, cops are brutes, cops regularly break the law, and cops get away with murder - literally get away with murder - all the time.

You don't have to be black to know these things or to be on the wrong end of police crime, and anybody of any race with an ounce of sense is glad of efforts that show some sign of correcting any of that in any noticeable degree.

Coates writes in his concluding paragraph,

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. 

But the cases of police violence he cites are cases of entirely banal police brutality, with nothing political about them.

When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. 

But of course, there is no war and there is no aggressor, not even as metaphor.

The black people of Baltimore are not at war with the black city administration or its 43% black police force, nor are any others of the people of Baltimore.

Nor are the black people of Baltimore or all America at war with the lawful authorities, anywhere or everywhere in the country.

Nor are they at war with America's whites, though that is how Coates, himself at least metaphorically at war with whites whom he, along with perhaps most black Americans, hates quite literally, sees the situation.

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. 

Routine police misconduct is not state violence against the citizenry, though state violence against the citizenry may be carried out through the police.

Police misconduct in Baltimore, or indeed anywhere in America, is not state violence against the citizenry.

And the civilian violence in the streets of Baltimore is not directed at the state, not even the violence of criminal gangs that may be seizing the moment to target police out of racism, professional enmity, or just for the fun of it.

The Baltimore riot is not a political act, it is a criminal act and perhaps in a measure also a racist act.

But Coates' claim that it is a political act and his implicit justifications for it as a political act are themselves political acts - specifically, acts of racist political spin-doctoring.

Some people think black riots, especially if spun as political acts, can have political consequences fortunate for some of the worst off black Americans.

Some generalize and make the same claim for black violence more generally, including expressly political violence.

But black racism and black violence in America have never got blacks anything but funerals and more distaste, more contempt, and more political dismissal from white people.

Think of the Panthers, of Malcolm X, of Louis Farrakhan, and of Rev. Wright.

Speaking as one white person, all my life black people have time an again claimed that wrongs done to them or even just to their ancestors by other whites justify special demands on and black violence toward whites in general, and potentially or actually such demands on and violence towards me and mine.

All my life, some whites have endorsed that argument.

Right now, white liberals are doing that all over the web.

But that has not been the reaction of the overwhelming majority of white Americans or whites beyond America.

All the same, when the rioting is over and the black residents and administration of the city assess the damage and then seek money and cooperation from white America (where else?) in coping they will get both.

But it won't be as much as Coates and his supporters think is due, and they will point to that as yet more white racist injustice in the future, when they want to justify more violence or more demands for reparations.

Forever and ever, world without end.

PS.

All over the web, conservatives are blaming the rioting on failed liberalism and proof that the conservative agenda is good for what ails America.

Too, they are making as much as they can of this outburst and of the liberal spinning of it, seizing the opportunity to fish for white votes.

I hear America spinning.

PPS.

And media that live by sensationalism are spinning all this as a colossal race crisis with big, screaming headlines

What could possibly go wrong?