Kant For President

Suppose Immanuel Kant were alive today and ran for president. He'd probably be subjected to political advertising something like this from his opponent:

Pretty funny.

HT: No Left Turns

RLC

Sarah Kreager/Rosa Parks

How many of these attacks is going to take before we realize that we have a real problem in this country? In case you missed it last week here are the details:

As Sarah Kreager, 26, tried to sit down on a Baltimore City bus [last Tuesday], police say, a middle-schooler told her she couldn't. When she attempted to take another seat, a middle-schooler wouldn't let her. Finally, according to police, Kreager just sat down.

She was "immediately attacked" by nine students - three females and six males - from Robert Poole Middle School. They punched and kicked her at 2:59 p.m. at the intersection of 33rd Street and Chestnut Avenue, according to Maryland Transit Administration police.

Kreager was dragged off the bus and .... sustained "serious injuries" and had to be transported to the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center, according to a police report.

Kreager suffered two broken bones in her left eye socket, police said.

"She had eye muscles that were damaged," a police report states. "She had deep lacerations on the top of her head and another above her neck."

Two seats and the bus' rear glass were destroyed during the attack, police said.

The bus driver on the No. 27 line quickly called police, who responded and arrested the nine juveniles, said Jawauna Greene, an MTA police spokeswoman.

All nine suspects, ages 14 and 15, were arrested and charged with aggravated assault.

Their bus tickets - provided by the school - have been revoked. Greene said the investigation into the incident was ongoing and she didn't know whether the attack had anything to do with the victim's race.

The suspects in the incident are black. The victim is white.

Let's ask a couple of questions. Do you think that anyone would have expressed any reservations at all about making this a racially motivated incident if the woman had been black and her assailants white? For that matter, when was the last time you recall a black woman being severely beaten by a gang of white teenagers? When Rosa Parks made her historic stand for equality and just treatment by sitting in the "whites only" section of the bus outraged white racists didn't physically attack her. Accounts of whites being beaten or assaulted by blacks are, however, a regular feature of the daily police reports in our cities.

The fact is there is a deep pathology of violence and racism in the black community that for some reason is deemed impolite to mention. Yet it's there. That six boys would beat a young woman like this just for sitting down on the bus reveals something hideous about the world in which they are growing up, and that girls would join in is sickening beyond words.

How soon will it be until Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and the rest of the race hustlers demand justice for Ms Kreager? How long will it take before the Al Sharptons of the world express their outrage that this woman was savagely attacked (see her picture at the link) for no reason? How many editorials will the newspapers run condemning the dysfunctionality and bigotry in the black community underlying this attack and so many others like it? Here's our prediction: In a day or two this horrific episode will be totally forgotten by the media. Black racism and black on white crime simply are not regarded as newsworthy by the liberal media.

There are three reasons for this, I suspect. Some in the media, though they would never admit it, subliminally believe that you can't really expect much better of black people so there's no use campaigning against such behavior. The second reason is that liberals embrace a social/racial paradigm that sees all blacks as victims of the white oppressor. Crimes such as this one are jarring to that paradigm and the cognitive dissonance they unleash is best handled by forgetting about it or treating it as an aberration. The third reason is that liberals fear that by publicizing such atrocities they will only fuel white stereotypes of blacks and encourage a backlash of white racism that could undo much of the progress we've made in the last fifty years.

The first of these reasons is the bigotry of low expectations and is itself insidiously racist. It assumes that blacks simply can't be held to the same standard of behavior as others because they're inherently incapable of it. The second is an example of the absurd ideological blindness of liberals. When nine people are beating one young woman, who are the oppressors and who is the victim? The third reason is a legitimate fear and would be understandable if the media were equally concerned about the consequences of publicizing cases of white bigotry. The fact is they're not, indeed, they seem almost gleeful when they have the opportunity to do it, which itself points to an implicit assumption that whites somehow deserve black hostility, but blacks must never be made to look evil in the eyes of whites.

Maybe the day will come when the media will simply call savagery, thuggery, and moral depravity by its name, wherever it exists, and leave their ideological biases and motivations out of it, but we won't hold our breath waiting.

UPDATE: As predicted, this story has all but faded from view in the week since the beating happened. No Al Sharpton, no Jesse Jackson, no marches for justice, no introspectives on the virulence of racism in our society. I did read, though, that the perpetrators might be charged with a "hate crime." That's something, at least.

UPDATE: There's video of Sarah Kreager here. The news story contains statements like these:

"What took place was unacceptable and that has to be dealt with," said Mayor Sheila Dixon.

"Clearly, this is one incident in a population of 80,000 students. Things happen. It is a tragedy, as I said. It casts a light that I would rather not be cast on the school system," said Baltimore City Schools CEO Dr. Andres Alonso.

School leaders say they plan to talk to students and remind them to be courteous when they are on city buses.

This belies an astonishingly cavalier attitude toward an act of sheer savagery. This was not merely an "unacceptable" failure to be "courteous" or a "thing that just happened." Those who make such statements are downplaying the fact that there's a deep problem in their community that goes far beyond a mere lack of civility. The problem is a culture of violence perpetrated by kids who have only a rudimentary sense of human sympathy compounded by racism, and until people start naming the problem and calling the community to account, as has been done with white racism for the last fifty years, it will never go away.

RLC