Is it time for that conversation on race?

Commenting of the rioting in England and the flash mobs in the US, Dorothy Rabinowitz opines:

The looting-bankers defense turns out to have been popular across the ocean as well. Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy had also divined—in a column last Tuesday titled "From London to Philadelphia, youths erupting over the theft of their futures"—that the bankers and their kind were to blame for the rioters in Britain and the flash mobs in America.

Think of their actions in both places, he advised, as the "alley version of the Wall Street bum rush and rip-off." First, explained Mr. Milloy, "there were flash mobs of bankers and mortgage lenders picking pockets, looting businesses, taking over homes." Now the young were using "a crude version of the same tactics" as they struck out in anger.

Mr. Milloy was apparently offended, too, that the black mayor of Philadelphia, Mr. Nutter, had advised young black men, after the flash riot there, that they would do well to find jobs. But, Mr. Nutter told them, they couldn't come to interviews with hair uncombed, a pick in the back, shoes untied, full arm and neck tattoos, and their pants half down. They weren't going to be hired looking like that, the mayor noted, "because you look like you're crazy."

Mr. Milloy, who described the mayor's remarks as even "nuttier" than others he had heard, had evidently found the remarks insensitive to these young. Youngsters who rioted and took part in flash mobs felt disrespected—that was why, Mr. Milloy explained, they were "threatening to destroy what they can't have. And why not?" It was a strategy that had worked, he added, for tea party anarchists.

For some reason, Mr. Milloy neglected to mention a key element in the violence of these youths—namely that it has been entirely and indisputably racial in its targets. The attackers are invariably young blacks, the people they assault invariably whites. This was true in Philadelphia as it was in Wisconsin, in Chicago and everywhere else that has seen these mobs.

And in the comments:

(a)The police in Cambridge questioned a man trying to break into a home (Henry Louis Gates and what turned out to be his own home) led to weeks of mainstream media reporting, a "national conversation about race," vilifications by President Obama and the "beer summit."

and yet (b) Marauding gangs of black youth beating whatever white people they come across in a number of cities across the country has elicited ... nary a peep. The race-obsessed New York Times ran for weeks with unsubstantiated (and ultimately probably untrue) claims of racially tinged comments by Tea Party members. This? Nothin'.

Indeed.