The major upshot of this unpleasantness in Baltimore is this: Not a lot is going to change for black people in this country unless one thing in particular changes. They have got to start doing better in school. For one thing, their low level of academic achievement means that vast swathes of the job market are closed to them. The obvious exampe is 'STEM' jobs-- those involving science, technology, engineering, and math. These are well-paying jobs, jobs with a future in a rapidly segment of the job market, yet there are essentially no blacks in these jobs. Why? Because they lack the qualifications for them.
A few years ago, Jesse Jackson gave a speech to a group of Silicon Valley bigwigs in which he said it was their responsibility to 'groom' blacks for these jobs. In addition to the rather obvious fact that this is simply not the way life works-- at least not in this country-- it would be impossible to groom anybody for anything if they lacked basic skills in literacy and numeracy.
But look at it from the other end. Let's say you're fourteen or fifteen years old and are reading at a fourth-grade level, can't write a coherent sentence in idiomatic American English (which you also can't speak), and can't figure out how to make change for a dollar. What kind of future can you envision for yourself? Unless you're one of that tiny, tiny, tiny number of people who can actually expect to earn a living singing or dancing or playing basketball, you have two choices: some kind of menial-labor job, or crime. In that situation, crime becomes a viable option. This is especially true if you don't personally know any adult males who actually get up in the morning and go off to a real job, and if you see guys on your block who are already in 'the life.'
And this gets us back to Baltimore. Criminals, for some reason, seem to have many more interactions with the police than law-abiding citizens do. Although some curbs may be put on out-of-line police behavior as a result of these incidents, they are still very likely to occur over time as black men commit crimes at rates way out of proportion to their numbers in the population.
And there's one other distinct downside to low black academic achievement. It's only going to reinforce the central racist stereotype about blacks: that they're intellectually inferior to other people (and not just whites). In fact, if this situation continues for another couple generations, that stereotype will become firmly embedded in the popular consciousness.
