Osler's Razor

In July, 1967, 24-year-old Willie Horton was already a star of the Detroit Tigers. He was one of 21 children, and grew up in Detroit. He went straight to the Tigers only two years after leaving high school.

He hit a homer in a double-header, and in the locker room he heard about the destruction of the riots on the west side of town. He went straight there, still in his uniform, and tried to stop the damage. It didn't work.

That uprising, like the one here right now, was born of police violence in black communities. I was only four years old, but I loved our family and my friends and our little house on the east side of the city on Harvard Rd.

The damage of 1967 was still there when I moved back to the city of Detroit after law school and a clerkship in 1991. By that, I mean that the damage was literally still visible-- you could go see buildings that were boarded up in the summer of 1967 that were still boarded up and vacant, and others that were the same burned ruins, a few charred walls in a grown-over field. I was there for nine years that second time, always in the shadow of those dark days.

That's why my walk at lunch yesterday was so hard. I work in downtown Minneapolis, and what I found was stores, restaurants, and entire office buildings being boarded up.

Maybe the boards will come down next week. Or maybe they will come down later in the year, when the pandemic subsides. Or maybe after that. But, please, please, not never. I can only take that once.

To fix it all, we have to address the underlying racial problem-- and it's about time we finally took that task seriously.