I know why so many people don’t believe in the American Dream

Says Joe Scarborough in the Washington Post 

But I know I am blessed to have had the luxury of living fearlessly though the first four decades of my life. Unlike my Post colleague Eugene Robinson, I never had to warn my teenage boys how to behave when stopped by a police officer. And unlike the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, I did not know the fear that arises from being born of “a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing.” As Coates told his son, “Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered.”
The streets of West Baltimore do not allow a child to walk through life carrying a sense of invincibility. Instead, parents harbor an unremitting dread when their child does something as mundane as walking to school.
Fathers across the South Side of Chicago cannot assure their children that a faith in God, a love of country and a life filled with hard work will lead them to The Dream. For millions of Americans, that dream appears to be little more than a white man’s conjuring, designed to conceal a country’s sins and hold its citizens harmless for crimes committed against black humanity over the past 400 years.
President Trump understands better than most politicians the allure of cheap racial absolution. That is why he spent this week defending the Confederate flag and attacking a reporter who asked about the continued killing of black Americans. Just as he preached moral equivalence after Charlottesville, Trump suggested that we ignore the uncomfortable fact that a disproportionate number of black people are killed every year by law enforcement officers.

Scarborough is right that it’s dangerous to war in South Chicago or West Baltimore. I’ve been to both, and got mugged in Chicago. Driving around South Chicago twenty years ago, trying to find the road to Carbondale* Illinois, stopped at a gas station and got mugged on my way back to the car. It was a gentle kind of mugging. The guy “sold” me a broken Walkman, despite my assuring him I didn’t need it and had moved on to iPods. “Oh, you need it”, he says. $25 bucks later, and leaving him with the Walkman to sell again, and we were in our way. 
South Chicago is way more dangerous than that. Murders are common, multiple daily. But here’s the thing. It’s not police doing the murdering. It’s young black men killing other young black men. 

But, according to BLM, the movement, not the belief, the problem is police killings. 

Then again this is not about data. It’s about feelings. And the feelings are that cops kill blacks, in “disproportionate numbers”. Disproportionate by percent of the population. Not disproportionality by number of crimes committed. Of course this is down to problems “upstream”, some of which, maybe even a majority of which, are due to racism. But that’s a society issue and not the police’s, whose remit is to uphold the law.  

Even people on the alert, like Harvard professor Steven Pinker, are savaged for quoting the data on police killings. They tried to cancel him recently…

As others have said: if you bring up your child to believe that you can’t make it in America, no matter what, because the system is rigged against you, that’s the worst thing you can say to your child and virtually guarantees failure. Shame on the Ta-nehesi Coates and their ilk. More power to the Coleman Hugheses and John McWhorters...

*Carbondale: said to be the most boring city in the world. Wouldn’t argue