As Missouri officials brace for violence that could follow a grand jury decision in the Michael Brown shooting case, they also confront a widespread sentiment that rioting by disaffected African-Americans is a legitimate response to racial grievances, says a scholar with the conservative Manhattan Institute.
"It certainly seems to be the trump card that American society continues to confer on blacks," Manhattan Institute fellow and writer Heather Mac Donald told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner on
Newsmax TV on Wednesday.
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Mac Donald criticized what she called "a sense of entitlement that has extended from the period of the '60s that blacks get to riot when they're unhappy with something."
She argued that "pretend" civil-rights leaders such as the Rev. Al Sharpton have wielded that entitlement in the Brown case and let it hang over legal proceedings in Missouri, where grand jurors are weighing the fate of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.
The threat of rioting is "powerful," said Mac Donald, "and I guess . . . so-called civil-rights leaders of today — who have utterly betrayed the legacy of Martin Luther King — have an interest in having that as sort of the secret weapon."
Protests erupted in Ferguson and continued for weeks after Wilson, who is white, shot the unarmed Brown, 18, who was black, in a confrontation on Aug. 9.
Some demonstrations — heavily covered by national media — boiled over into looting of storefronts and physical clashes with heavily armed police. Demonstrators and law-enforcement authorities have traded charges over whose actions were more provocative.
Supporters of Brown have called him another casualty of a racially biased law enforcement culture that targets black people by default and routinely subjects them to excessive police force.
News leaks from the grand jury hearings have indicated, however, that Wilson's claims of self-defense may be borne out by evidence, including witness testimony and autopsy findings.
Mac Donald, who has written about the Ferguson case and the role of race in law enforcement, said
violence should under no circumstances be condoned or excused, implicitly or otherwise, in the event that a grand jury declines to indict Wilson.
"Anybody out there who wants to pretend they're a civil-rights leader should be out in Ferguson today saying, 'Do not riot,' " said Mac Donald. "This is not a prerogative of black people, and it is as much a violation of the civil rights of people who have lost property — businesses who are absolutely struggling to survive now because they're under such siege.
"Yet the civil-rights leaders in this country are absolutely silent and are, in fact, provoking people with the assumption that a conviction or an indictment is the only possible just resolution for the grand jury, when, in fact, as we know, the evidence strongly suggests that the shooting was provoked," she said.
Told by "MidPoint" host Berliner that some might call her comments racist, Mac Donald said, "There are many, many blacks in this country who respect the law, who are appalled by criminality of any race. They are not heard from."
"We're not worried about police riots if Darren Wilson, the officer, is indicted," said Mac Donald. "We're not worried about white riots. But somehow the entire society has been complicit in somehow white-washing the appalling expectation [of violence] here [in Ferguson], calling it 'unrest.' No, it's outright violence."
Mac Donald said that "there is nothing more terrifying than the breakdown of civil order, because human beings live on a powder keg of irrationality — all human beings — and when respect for the rule of law and other people breaks down, that can be a fuse that is very hard to squelch."