"You've damaged your own race," said Mayor Michael Nutter to the black youths of Philadelphia whose flash mobs have been beating and robbing shoppers in the fashionable district of downtown.
"Take those God-darn hoodies down," the mayor went on in his blistering lecture. "Pull your pants up and buy a belt, 'cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt."
And the mayor had some advice for teenagers looking for work.
"You walk into somebody's office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back and your shoes untied and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won't hire you?"
"They don't hire you 'cause you look like you're crazy."
Nutter is African-American and the first leader to speak out about the racial character of the flash mobs attacking people in one American city after another. And where are our other leaders?
At the Iowa State Fair last August, black thugs beat a white man so savagely he was hospitalized. Police only began to look into the possibility of a racial attack and hate crime after fair-goers said the thugs were calling it "Beat Whitey Night."
After Memorial Day, Chicago cops had to close a beach when a flash mob formed, attacked people and knocked cyclists off bikes.
In Miami Beach, there were beatings and shootings that same weekend. In D.C., flash mobs of black youths have turned up a half-dozen times in stores to loot clothes and merchandise and flee.
The media almost never identify the race of the thugs. Their reticence would disappear were a white mob in some Southern city to be caught beating up on black shoppers at a mall.
But the flash mob scourge hitting U.S. cities has been eclipsed by the pillaging and burning of London and other British cities in the worst violence visited on that nation and its capital since Goering's Luftwaffe executed the "Blitz."
Thousands of hoodlums, thugs and criminals have firebombed buildings, looted stores and stripped, beaten and robbed people for no reason other than that they were white.
Overwhelmed cops virtually surrendered the city for three days. By the fourth night, the rampage had taken on a multiethnic caste as Asians and white trash appeared to join in the festival of criminality.
Asian and black store owners, too, are victims. In Birmingham, three Pakistani men defending their neighborhood were run over and killed by a truck reportedly driven by a black rioter.
In a country-and-gospel tune recalled often in the '60s, the one that gave James Baldwin the title of his polemic, this couplet appears:
God gave Noah the rainbow sign,
No more water, the fire next time./i>