Sunday, April 23, 2006

Let's Call the Fouls Both Ways

A group of debauched young white Duke University students allegedly assaults a black stripper and the cable news shows go wall to wall playing up the racial aspects of the incident. All the usual suspects emerge to tell us what this says about white attitudes toward black women and how racism still thrives in the ivory towers of white privilege, etc, etc.

Meanwhile, a gang of Neanderthals attacks several people just minding their own business in Las Vegas. The attacks are savage and disgusting, serving no purpose except to inflict pain and suffering on a complete stranger. The news media dutifully mentions them, but it wasn't until I saw the surveillance tapes of the brutal beatings that what everyone pretty much knew, but nobody wanted to say, became clear. The gang of attackers were black and the victims, as far as I could tell, were white.

There wasn't a peep about the race of any of those involved in this savagery in any of the reports I read or heard (see here or here, for example) until Campbell Brown asked a guest on the Today show Saturday morning whether police thought there might be just a teensy racial dimension to the attacks. Her guest replied, that, no, there probably wasn't, the attackers just happened to be black and the victims just happened to be white, and Ms Brown was happy to let that answer suffice.

For the media, racism is only a factor in crimes in which whites attack blacks, a phenomenon which is much more uncommon than the reverse. In fact, blacks are 50 times more likely to commit violent crimes against whites than whites are against blacks. Bureau of Justice victimization reports show that 89 percent of interracial crimes involved black perpetrators and white victims. Yet the media seems to want us to believe that the real problem in America is white violence against blacks.

Let three white degenerates merely be charged with having forced themselves onto a black stripper, and the news media is made delirious by the catnip of racism in the air. Yet when fifteen to twenty black sub-humans punch, kick, and whip innocent bystanders who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, one is given to think the word racism must have suddenly disappeared from the media style manual.

A basketball referee who only called fouls against one team and not the other would quickly lose the respect of everyone in the game. Maybe this helps explain the low esteem in which the modern media is held.