Baltimore Crisis: It's the Fault of Lead Paint

This is the dumbest thing you will read all day, maybe all year.  It is not a culture stripped of family structure, marinated in high-risk/self-destructive behavior and short-term gratification, and a political elite maniacally focused on the spoils of power rather than on social well-being...

No...it' s lead paint.

The problem is not black culture. It is policy and politics, the very things that bind together the history of Ferguson and Baltimore and, for that matter, the rest of America.

Specifically, the problem rests on the continued profitability of racism. Freddie Gray’s exposure to lead paint as a child, his suspected participation in the drug trade, and the relative confinement of black unrest to black communities during this week’s riot are all features of a city and a country that still segregate people along racial lines, to the financial enrichment of landlords, corner store merchants and other vendors selling second-rate goods.

This might as well be filed under the heading "Higher Education Bubble' as this guy is a college professor. 

Life is too short to fisk the numerous and egregious inanities of this argument, but newsflash for the professor, lead-based house paint was banned in 1978.  Everybody older than say 35 had exposure to lead-based paint (I did) but we all seemed to turn out OK.  It is a virtual certainty that Freddie Gray had minimal exposure to lead paint, and it is a virtual certainty - because the lead paint-cognitive development link is bunk cooked up by the plaintiffs bar - that Freddie Gray wasn't held back in life because of lead paint.  Just because his family was involved in a lawsuit over lead paint, doesn't mean it played any role.  Trial lawyers notoriously recruited poor inner city residents to feed their lead paint lawsuit industry, promising scraps to people like the Gray family so they could bully major corporations into expedient settlements that mostly enriched lawyers.

If the poor black community and their media apologists want to white wash the serious social pathologies of the inner city with conscience-salving distractions like lead paint, expect nothing to change.