I lived in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, from 1984 to 1991. From '86 to '91 I owned a house on Euclid Heights Boulevard near the bohemian Coventry distinct. I loved it: the Arabica coffee house where I hung out to read, write and play chess; eateries such as Tommy's and Irv's; shops like Passport to Peru; the used bookstore Mac's Backs.
The chess scene was especially vibrant with strong masters floating in and out among the patzers. International Master Calvin Blocker once kibbitzed on one of my games: "You'd be lucky to be mated" as I already mentioned in a short entry on the man. Blocker and I got to be friends of sorts to the extent that that is possible with someone so eccentric and prickly. Chess, as Siegbert Tarrasch once remarked, is like love and music: it has the power to make men happy. The good grandmaster neglected to mention, however, that protracted and intense dalliance with Caissa also has the power to introduce a certain eccentricity into one's orbit. But I digress. I want to get back to our wonderful 'conversation' about race.
That big old three-story Tudor on Euclid Heights Boulevard was the first house I bought. A man I knew whose wife had been mugged by a black thug* at University Circle warned me about buying in an area that was about 40% black. But the blacks and the whites seemed to be getting along well enough, and not being a racist, I proved it by buying the beautiful old house for $72,000. (Talk is cheap; if you want to know what a person really believes, observe how and where he spends his money.) There had been some 'white flight' in the '60s but the Coventry neighborhood seemed stable, and the price was right in part because of the racial integration.
By the way, the man I just mentioned, a professor of Religious Studies at Case Western Reserve at the time, and a liberal from the Bay Area, took to packing heat after the thug knocked out several of his wife's teeth and absconded with her money. And all of that in perfect illustration of the conservative adage, "A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged." He suddenly took a keen interest in crime, something he hadn't thought about too much before, a hallmark of liberals being their casual attitude toward criminal behavior. Upscale liberals would do well to sally forth from their lily-white gated communities from time to time to see what the rest of the world is like and how well their liberal bromides hold up.
One of the many attractions of the Coventry district was the annual summer street fair. The ones I attended went off smoothly, but recently there has has been trouble from 'flash mobs' of 'teens.' The rioting and violence of the 2011 event and threats of violence in 2012 and 2013 have resulted in decisions to cancel the event for two years running.
I now come to my point. There can be no worthwhile conversation about race (or anything else) with people who refuse to state the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. The 'teens' that rioted were mostly black. But that was not reported. Why not?
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*'Black thug' is like 'deciduous tree.' Not all trees are deciduous; not all blacks are thugs. But some are. And, sad to say, more are, proportionally, than whites are.
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