TIME: Opinion: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: The Coming Race War Won’t Be About Race

The New Democrat

If there’s any good that comes out of Ferguson besides the Brown family getting justice for what happened to their relative Michael, is that it will hopefully be a wakeup call for America about the problems that we still have with race-relations. Especially as they relate to poverty and crime that when you have so much concentrated poverty in one area of a city, or state and you leave it as is that people can become desperate that they feel they need to turn to crime just to support themselves. Crime goes up as a result and you have cops doing things that they probably wouldn’t normally do like using excessive force and as a result people get hurt and even dying.

Ferguson should not be just a wakeup call about poverty in America, but a wakeup call for law enforcement in how they protect us from predators. And that they need to be involved and work with their communities they are supposed to serve and protect so incidents like this don’t happen in the future. Especially in areas with highly concentrated poverty where the residents tend to be of one race and where the law enforcement tends to be from another race. And when an incident like this happens it just explodes and looks like one race of people is abusing and murdering people of another race.

Don’t expect any major reforms to come from Ferguson. Remember America is not only a country that can apparently tolerate 1-5 Americans living in poverty, (I’m not one of them) can tolerate the War on Drugs, (but less and less everyday)  two-million Americans in jail or prison. Or a sitting U.S. Representative being shot down at a campaign event and all of other gun-related deaths of innocent Americans before any serious reforms are made.