Last week our local Seattle Times, ostensibly covering the Gates story, really ended up illustrating the dilemma of America’ current racial confusion.

On the front page (I think it was last Thursday or Friday) along side the Gates article there was another article that also featured a small photo of a black man. Only this black man was young, 23 and had just cut a swath of murder and mayhem through the Pacific Northwest; looks like he killed two people in Tacoma in the arson of an apt building and then tried to murder with a knife two more people a couple weeks later in Seattle (one died, one survived). All this before the month of July was finished.

Neither Gates, nor the wider black community at large, wants to acknowledge that the real threat to the black (and white) community comes from angry young black males with some kind of brutalized childhood. Seattle has lost ten kids over the past year to killers of this profile. White politicians, journalists and social workers, forget it – they won’t touch this – they would be called racist and effectively bring their careers to an end. I am white and I can talk about it because I live in Seattle’s version of “the hood” and I have a black wife and a black son and I am foster dad to 6 black teens who fit this risky profile (or “at-risk profile” in social service jargon).

Comfy blacks have a built in fantasy margin whereby they can pretend that whites are still like Bull Connor of old – sicking dogs on blacks and spitting in the street when they walk by.

In reality racism in America is an embarassment and a shame to white people and they want to put great distance between it and themselves.

Meantime abused black children, whose drugged out moms abandoned them, whose fathers never stuck around grow up to be lethal bundles of muscle and anger capable of rendering many American neighborhoods Fallujah.

You can take Gates measure by noting which he prefers to do: call black fathers on the carpet or turn squishy liberal whites into Bull Connors.