Fueling Racial Resentments

In a column at The American Conservative Rod Dreher cites four recent cases where a member of a racial or ethnic minority murdered one or more whites or Asians and the media all but ignored the possibility that racial hatred played a role in the crime.

The cases he cites are that of two young black girls who killed an elderly Asian in the course of trying to hijack his car; the Black Muslim, Noah Green, who killed a white Capitol police officer; the former black NFL player who shot and killed five whites, including two children; and the Syrian born Muslim Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa who shot and killed ten ten white people in a Boulder, Colorado supermarket.

He might also have mentioned the recent murder of Julie Eberly, a white mother of six, in a road rage incident that occurred while she and her husband were on a trip to celebrate their anniversary. Her murderer was a black man.

At any rate, after describing each case Dreher concludes that the media's reluctance to emphasize the racial dynamic is appropriate. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, Dreher rightly observes,

...there is no reason to think that racial animus played a role in the murders. Why racialize a murder without solid evidence that it had a racial angle?....That is the standard the media have for killings in which the suspected perpetrator is a racial minority, and (especially) when the victims are white.

But, he points out,

This is definitely not the standard the media have for killings in which the (suspected) murderers are white people killing minorities. They are still yammering about how Robert Long, arrested in Atlanta for mass killing at Asian spas, is guilty of an anti-Asian hate crime — this, though there is no reason at all to believe that Long was motivated by anti-Asian hate. We know that he was tormented by his sexual obsession.

Perhaps we will learn that there was an anti-Asian component of this, but we don’t know it now. That has not stopped the media from racializing this terrible crime.

After highlighting recent examples of media attempts to portray the Atlanta killings as a crime motivated by racial animus he concludes with this:

This keeps happening with the media. Why? I mean, I know why: because newsrooms are filled with progressives who are drunk on left-wing race grievance ideology.

To hell with professional standards or moral responsibility — they have a Narrative to propagate. I spoke this week to a foreign journalist working in the US, and he told me that he’s having to work harder than before to find out what’s happening in the US, because he can no longer trust what he reads in the American newspapers.

I can’t stop asking myself the question: Why are they teaching non-white people to fear and loathe whites? What are they preparing America for?

Good questions.

Media progressives fear, I think, that if they make too much of what is a disproportionate victimization of whites by other racial groups it will fuel hostility among whites toward those groups, so they downplay the possibility of the motive of race hatred when the perpetrators are non-white.

But then by promoting the racism narrative when the perpetrators are white they surely fuel hostility among minority groups toward whites. What's more, these people aren't stupid, they must know what they're doing.

Would there be constant coverage last week and this week of the Derek Chauvin homocide trial in Minneapolis had Chauvin been a black police officer or if George Floyd had been white? Everyone, including the most obtuse media news people, knows the answer to that question.

Had the racial component not been what it is there would've been no riots last summer in the wake of Floyd's death and little interest in Chauvin's trial last week and this.

So we return to Dreher's questions: Why are progressives in the media (and in academia) teaching non-white people to fear and loathe whites? What, excactly, are they trying to accomplish?