Chicago, Illinois

The wealthy white neighbors had often complained about the Harrises’ layabout no-good ways, including their monopolizing the nearby children’s playground with their menacing pit bulls. Only recently, though, did the whites stumble upon what is becoming the nuclear bomb in racial turf wars: animal rights.

Famous athletes, whether black, white, or brown—such as Kobe Bryant, Ben Roethlisberger, or Mark Sanchez—routinely escape prison time when charged with sexual assault. But God forbid that a superstar abuse a canine bitch. Quarterback Michael Vick spent 20 months in prison for dogfighting. A high-testosterone, lowbrow kid from the projects, Vick likely pictured himself, in his own dim way, as a Hemingwayesque sportsman. Yet in today’s convoluted racial climate, Vick would have been safer raping a blonde.

Thus, when one of the Harris pit bulls keeled over while being walked, neighbors pounced, reporting them for cruelty to animals.

The 40-cop raid on the Harris compound certainly looked spectacular: “I felt like I was on ‘The Wire!’ Fantastic,” exulted an award-winning mommy blogger who lives nearby. It turned out to be a damp squib, however, yielding only misdemeanor pet-related charges such as “Possession of Unsterilized Dog by a Felon.” Still, the cops let in a building inspector, and he wrote up dozens of violations such as clogged gutters. The house was declared uninhabitable and the black clan told to scram.

So why did my in-laws turn out to be naïve in assuming that the middle-class blacks who first integrated their West Side neighborhood would remain the norm? Regression to the mean. As a neighbor commented about the Harris patriarch, a now-elderly striver who bought the properties in 1970 for $65,000, “He allowed his extended family to freeload off of his good heart, and now, 40 years later, you have 30+ people, good and bad, living in very poor conditions and, in many cases, victimizing their neighbors.”

How far will today’s white liberals go to cleanse poor blacks from the neighborhoods they crave? Pretty damn far, evidently. These aren’t inarticulate working-class whites who can be guilt-tripped and pushed around like it’s 1967. These whites are Obama voters.