Tavis Smiley: In Baltimore, Obama hands-off on 'hands up' We don't need another commission; we need leadership, and we need to act.

Tavis Smiley | USATODAY

For some, the death of Freddie Gray is yet another example of police brutality in a season that has seen too many dead black bodies stacking up too high in America's morgues.

Others cite national crime statistics to justify their claim that this is just another "isolated incident" of police misconduct, not an assault on the lives of black men and boys.

Fair enough, but how many isolated incidents equal a pattern?

Every time another precious black life is lost under mysterious circumstances and we regard it as just another "isolated incident," we demean the unnecessary death and disrespect the dignity of black fellow citizens.

There is a pattern here. It might well be a pattern that we have yet to acknowledge or come to terms with, but there is a pattern.

A pattern of unconscious bias where black boys are more likely to be mistaken as older, perceived as guilty and face police violence if accused of a crime, according to the American Psychological Association.

A pattern that causes black men and boys to be demonized and end up dead even when they pose no threat to the life of the arresting officer. Is Gray dead for merely making eye contact with an officer and running away? Is that a crime? Did running away warrant the death of an unarmed Walter Scott in North Charleston, S.C.?

A pattern that leads to predatory policing rather than community-based policing in neighborhoods of color.

A pattern of citizen disbelief that for decades has deemed the stories of victims suspect, until the advent of video, which now regularly proves that police aren't always so virtuous.

A pattern in which every time this happens, we engage in a faux national conversation about police misconduct and race relations until the looters stop looting, until the fires have been doused. And then we return to business as usual.

What's tragic about these riots in Baltimore is that they will be used once again by the chattering class to suggest that African Americans don't respect police authority.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Indeed, because black folk are the disproportionate victims of violent crime, black communities across America welcome community-based policing that protects and serves them.

What black residents oppose is police mischief and police abuse.

Especially when the mayor and the police in Baltimore can't explain how Gray wound up dead in their custody. A black mayor and a black police commissioner, I might add.

Whether the power structure is white or black, the humanity and dignity of Freddie Gray and others is still being contested. After recent municipal elections, they now have black elected officials in Ferguson, Mo., too, but if the pattern of predatory policing doesn't change, what does it matter?

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. abhorred riots because he saw violence as both impractical and immoral. But he also said this: "You can't blame non-violent demonstrators who are demonstrating for their constitutional rights when violence erupts. This would be like blaming the robbed man for the evil act of robbery because his possessions of wealth, money, precipitates the act. Society must always condemn the robber and protect the robbed."

King went on to say, "If our government cannot create jobs, it cannot govern. It cannot have white affluence amid black poverty and have racial harmony. The turmoil of the ghetto is the externalization of the negro's inner torment and rage."

King was talking about Detroit then; clearly his words apply to Baltimore today.

Police misconduct is nothing new. Riots are nothing new.

What's new would be a meaningful and sustained conversation about how to make America better, by making its politically, economically and socially disenfranchised citizens less embittered.

President Obama is right to urge the nation to do some "soul searching," but we also need moral leadership. These national crises such as Ferguson and Baltimore show the limits of the president's "hands off" approach to a "hands up" crisis. We have to be intentional; we have to be engaged. We don't need another commission or task force to study the problem, offering recommendations that are never heeded or enacted.

"Ignorance is not genetic. A lack of courage allows us to remain blinded to our own history and deaf to the cries of our past," poet Maya Angelou said. "History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again."

Do we have the courage?

Tavis Smiley is host and managing editor of Tavis Smiley on PBS, and author of My Journey With Maya.

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