Back to School At South Philly High

Run, kids. The mayor's not gonna protect you, and the cops won't stop objectifying women long enough to do so.

The Asian students at South Philly High (where several square-dance friends went to school, decades ago) were beaten senseless by the black kids in a clear case of racial targeting that the school refused to label as such. They threatened to form their own school in Chinatown, and only then did the mayor do something. After all, if all the Asian kids left, think of how far those standardized-test scores would plummet!

A couple of you wrote in to ask my opinion on this. Rather than putting them in an organized, paragraphed form, like an industrious blogger would do, I'm just going to list my thoughts in bullet points:

• Philadelphians are shocked, shocked that the allegedly "post-racial" (there's no such thing, but people sure seem to love that term!) mayor didn't do anything. OF COURSE HE DIDN'T! Put yourself in his place, as mayor of a city where your choice of breakfast is seen as racially charged. Are you going to piss off the racial group that makes up 45% of the city so you can defend a racial group that makes up 5% of the city? Hell no!

• Almost any other configuration of races in this scenario would have resulted in a much better ending. Why? Because had it been anyone other than the Asians being beaten, there would have been teachers, administrators, and politicians of said race in and around the school. The Asians are the only group without that.

• People in this city, for whatever reason, are simply terrified of black teenagers. Once they turn 21 (or, in many cases, 18), they lose their power and we're just fine with incarcerating them, but for whatever reason, we won't stand up to black kids when they misbehave en masse in the schools. It's a major, systemic problem: we can't have a city where there's one standard of behavior for every-racial-group-but-the-blacks, and then another, far lower standard of behavior for black kids. We're shortchanging these kids, and that's but one part of the reason this city is the ghetto hellhole it is.