Nicholas Kristof dedicates his New York Times op-ed column to the Baltimore riots today. Even though some people say rioting is good, Kristof explains, rioting is bad. It is bad like the police snapping a man’s neck and crushing his larynx and leaving him to die is bad. The two things are just like each other:

Conservatives have sometimes been too quick to excuse police violence. And liberals have sometimes been too quick to excuse rioter violence.

It’s outrageous when officers use excessive force against young, unarmed African-American men, who are 21 times as likely to be shot dead by the police as young white men. It’s also outrageous when rioters loot shops or attack officers.

So bravo to Toya Graham, the Baltimore mom captured on video grabbing her teenage son from the streets and frog-marching him home. The boy wilted: It must be humiliating to be a “badass” rioter one moment and then to be savagely scolded in front of your peers and sent to your room.

Somehow, by that third paragraph, Kristof has forgotten to keep juggling his premises from on-the-one-hand to on-the-other-hand. Police violence is outrageous, and riots are likewise outrageous; bravo to the mother who stopped her son from rioting, and bravo to... Hmm, wait, there’s no similarly uplifting intervention against the police doing their outrageous things. Maybe the situations aren’t so parallel? (Also: Whose word choice of “badass” is that inside those quotation marks?)

Eventually Kristof gets around to recommending an American truth and reconciliation commission to “explore racial inequity in America.” As he said the last time he brought that proposal up, “[l]et’s talk.”

On the way to this renewed plea for candor, though, Kristof takes a funny detour:

[T]here are crucial underlying inequities that demand attention. The rioting distracts from those inequities, which are the far larger burden on America’s cities.

That also represents a failure on our part in the American news media. We focus television cameras on the drama of a burning CVS store but ignore the systemic catastrophe of broken schools, joblessness, fatherless kids, heroin, oppressive policing — and, maybe the worst kind of poverty of all, hopelessness.

The rioting in West Baltimore, Kristof writes in his New York Times opinion column, distracts attention from the underlying inequities. Why do people riot?

Nicholas Kristof has been writing opinion columns twice a week for the New York Times since 2001. According to a Nexis search, before today, he had mentioned the plight of inner-city Baltimore exactly once, five years ago.

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