When the perpetrators of social dysfunction became its "victims"

If blacks and Hispanics in the generality “conformed” to the stereotypes that many (hell, most) white people (and Asians perhaps to an even greater extent) hold, then this country would really be in “deep shit.” But the fact that the vast majority do not is the “problem,” because if they are not in jail or should be in accordance to their alleged “nature,” then they are competing for college admissions, jobs, seats on public transport, etc.

Yet we shouldn’t allow this truth to be used by the wrong people to disguise the occasional proverbial wolf inside sheep’s clothing. I have encountered many people who think they are perfectly justified in being rude, loud, and contemptuous of the rights of others in expressing their “right” to call anyone offended by it a “racist,” sometimes with the implied hint of physical retribution. Yet we are confronted by stories like that of a white University of Texas student named Haruka Weiser, who was murdered by a black “teenager,” her body showing evidence of “assault” although police are not saying of what nature. It is interesting to note the degree of “sensitivity” given to the killer in an apparent attempt to avoid appearing “racist”—a rather hypocritical response given the way the media reports murders that involve certain other demographics (like immigrants) that inspire hate rather than “understanding.” According to the Associated Press:

Weiser grew up in a tight-knit community in Oregon, where she attended an arts magnet school and danced with the Portland Ballet.

By contrast, Meechaiel Khalil Criner, the 17-year-old runaway arrested in her death, was intellectually disabled, abandoned by his mother as an infant and in Texas foster care, his uncle, Leo Criner, told The Associated Press on Saturday.

So there, a young woman of privilege and a black youth of under-privilege born of the sacred black “matriarchy,” such as it is. One cannot help but feel a sense of cynicism, besides the fact that having the education level of a ten-year-old “excuses” the killer as being “intellectually disabled.” It is one thing to grow up in a social media atmosphere in which he is allowed to harbor hatred for those of privileged means, but it is quite another to act out “vengeance” in this way. For every outrage over a police shooting, there are probably at least one hundred senseless killings of this sort, although the vast majority of the victims share the same race as the perpetrators. It certainly arouses a sense of irony on many levels, among them that “commonplace” homicide only seems to be of interest to the media if a white female is the victim (ironic mostly because white females are by far the least likely demographic to be the victim of a homicide), but mainly because there seems to be no sense of incongruity by the media in juxtaposing the opposing and competing images of black “victims” and black perpetrators. How are people expected to judge this? And is it “racist” to say that all lives matter—including black lives taken by other blacks?

Incidents like the Texas killing are red meat for television crime shows like “Law and Order” for whom all of the victims of violent crime are attractive white females, and their killers are all white males. This of course plays into gender victim politics, and at the same avoiding the conundrum of race—any program where half the perpetrators of violent crime and half the victims are black may be an accurate reflection  of reality, but the blowback from black activists would be obviously be tremendous, plus it would lose ratings. More often, we see cases like that of former NFL player Will Smith, enjoying a stable life with family in his retirement, needlessly shot and killed in an alleged “road rage” incident by the thug driver of the vehicle that rear-ended him into another vehicle in what one witness described as a “crash, boom, bang” where the mere exchange of words (certainly justified on the part of Smith) was enough to inspire the shooter to unload six to eight shots, also wounding Smith’s wife.

Thus media and activist propaganda would like us to simply ignore these incidents as merely “ordinary” business, and shootings involving police are not. The fact is that for every completely innocent victim of police abuse of lethal force, like Amadou Diallo, there are at least five Michael Browns, who had just committed a strong-arm robbery and did physically confront a police officer attempting to detain him. Yet while the Diallo case attracted some media attention, and the coverage in general was relatively restrained, the Brown case was the stuff of “outrage” throughout the country, with some media outlets trying to outdo each other in finding a “racist” component in it, conveniently setting aside the perspective of the officer, confronted with what seems to be a growing contempt for the law by certain people. 

What happened in between cases like that of Diallo and that of Brown? The Trayvon Martin case. Here, both whites and blacks found a convenient demographic to vent “outrage” without allowing the facts to speak. First, a self-righteous white media and self-serving black activists controlled the message from the start, ganging up on a Hispanic, who was demonized and dehumanized, unlike white and black mass killers for whom there is a desire to “humanize” and “understand.” Despite the fact that the evidence supported George Zimmerman’s account of events and not the distorted and even deliberately falsified narrative provided by the media, and that Martin was indeed a common criminal, for a full year the media pitched the line that Zimmerman was a gun-crazed racist, while Martin was merely an “innocent child.”  

There was no mention, for example, that Zimmerman’s neighborhood had been terrorized by young male “transients,” who were mainly young black males. There was no mention of a Hispanic mother hiding in terror with her infant in a closet while two black males were ransacking her home. There was no mention that in response to an increase in crime in the prior year, the Sanford police chief recommended that each neighborhood appoint its own “neighborhood watch captain” to help police, and that Zimmerman was asked to “volunteer” by those in his neighborhood. Nor was it mentioned that two weeks prior to the Martin incident, Zimmerman had contacted Sanford police about a “suspicious” black male who appeared to be casing a residence, but agreed to the suggestion that he not do anything until police arrived; they never did, and it was reported by the owner of the residence the next morning that their house had been broken into and a computer stolen.

Nor was it mentioned that Martin had not been an “innocent child” for years, but apparently on a career path of crime that could have been reversed if appropriately dealt with from the beginning. Rather than be merely suspended from school three times, for breaking and entering into his school, in possession of stolen jewelry from a near-by residence, and selling pot on school grounds (and there were other incidents, such as assaulting a gym teacher and school bus driver for which he was not suspended), he should have spent time in detention, his freedom curtailed like any unrepentant young criminal striving for the “gangsta” life. Yet there is this desire to cut such persons a “break,” thinking it will be a “learning” experience. Instead, it just teaches him greater contempt for civil norms. 

The night of the Martin shooting, the 7-Eleven video showed that clerk on duty did seem to suspicious of Martin’s protracted presence, and in light of the fact that Martin had just arrived in town that day after being kicked out of his mother’s house 200 miles away for being suspended from school that third time, meant that Zimmerman was fully within his rights to be suspicious of someone he had never seen before apparently taking an interest in darkened homes late at night; after all, we know in retrospect that Martin did have “experience” in this type of thing. And of course, the media showed its insensibility when it completely missed the boat on Rachel Jeantel’s “advice” to Martin on how to respond to Zimmerman’s presence (remember too that “crazy-ass cracker” that they decided Zimmerman was is “new school” for a “cop” or “cop wannabe”) that rather than alleviate justified suspicion, enhanced it. And Martin further “explained” his presence by pounding Zimmerman’s head into the sidewalk pavement.

The evidence in the case only supported one conclusion: That Zimmerman had acted in self-defense, which was his right to do. There was no rationalization for Martin to act the way he did; he had only his contempt for civil society. Thus what we saw here was media complicity in fashioning a narrative that was not only false, but provided a “justification” for those who have no respect for civil mores to act aggressively opposed to it, giving them their own sense of power within a universe in which the “enforcers” of law are intruders who upset the “delicate” balance of “order” maintained by the threat of, and sometimes in the actual commission of, killing—and usually by these same people. Police upsetting this “balance” by enforcing society’s mores in urban neighborhoods where crime is a “rite of passage” for some “disaffected” youths apparently do so at their own risk. 

Today, “movements” like “Black Lives Matter” have been sprung from the well of the media’s false narrative that select societal dysfunctions is caused by forces opposed it, not by those who perpetuate it. It ignores the truth that the vast majority of us will likely never come face-to-face with the decision to either do nothing, or something when confronted with the likelihood of physical harm, or possibly death. Police officers are generally “prepared” for it, and often pay a price for it; so too did Zimmerman. But Haruka Weiser was not prepared for it, and she paid a different price. 

To put a “political” spin on this, while Bernie Sanders offers a way out, Clinton merely exploits the self-righteous anger for votes. Perhaps she knows that there is an “understanding” between her and certain voters about the “ethics” of crime.