There was no consequent violence in the streets, no calls to defund the police, no outpouring of grief for the shoplifter.
Several days ago a man named Darrell Brooks drove his vehicle into a crowd at a Wisconsin Christmas parade, killing six, including an 8 year-old child:
Investigators allege Darrell Brooks Jr., 39, turned into the parade route in Waukesha on Nov. 21 and swerved the vehicle side-to-side without slowing down as he struck dozens of people.That was a two day story. There was no talk about race or racism in the progressive media, despite the fact that Brooks' social media was filled with racial hate and vitriol.
So why the reticence? In the first case a white cop shot and killed a white wheelchair-bound victim. The media evidently saw no opportunity to use this incident to incite racial animosities so they quickly lost interest.
In the second case, the driver was black and the victims were all white, but this, too, did not fit the media narrative of a virulent white supremacy stalking the land looking for black victims. So after a day or two they let pretty much let the story fade out.
So here's your homework assignment: Imagine in case number one that the wheelchair bound victim had been black, and imagine in case number two that the races of the driver and his victims had been reversed. What do you suppose the media reaction would've been then, and what would the state of our cities be as you read this?
It probably doesn't take much imagination to picture the difference in the media's reaction to these horrors were the circumstances as we imagined them, and, if the response to the killing of George Floyd and the shooting of Jacob Blake are any indication, it's quite likely our cities would be ablaze right now.
Which might lead one to wonder why our major media yawn at crimes that would have them churning out condemnations and deprecations of white society had things been the other way around.
Is it not itself racist to be relatively indifferent to murders that would elicit moral apoplexy were the races reversed, and isn't this unequal treatment at best irresponsible? Is it not a contributing source to the deep racial resentments and polarization in our society when the crimes of whites are maximized and similar crimes perpetrated by blacks are minimized?
And why is so much of our society so eager to racialize everything that they were calling Kyle Rittenhouse a white supremacist despite the fact that there was nothing at all racial about the shooting in which he was involved?
Jason Riley (I shouldn't have to mention that Riley is black, but in today's climate I guess I better) writing at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) says this:
The same press outlets that portrayed Mr. Rittenhouse as a white supremacist have had remarkably little to say about the racial identity of Darrell Brooks, the black suspect in Wisconsin who is accused of plowing his car through an annual Christmas parade last month and killing six people, including an 8-year-old boy, all of whom were white.Riley's right, and no amount of rationalization by those on the left can excuse the irresponsibility of their tendentious behavior.
Given the suspect’s history of posting messages on social media that called for violence against white people and praised Hitler for killing Jews, you’d think that his race and the race of his victims would be relevant to reporters.
Race is all anyone would be talking about if a white man had slammed his vehicle into a parade full of black people. Yet suddenly the left has gone colorblind.
Liberals want us to believe that racial disparities in police shootings and incarceration rates stem from a biased system and have little to do with racial disparities in criminality. They want to talk about so-called hate crimes that involve white assailants and black victims, but not those involving black assailants and white or Asian victims.
They want headlines to read “White Cop Shoots Black Suspect,” even when there’s no evidence that the encounter was racially motivated. This is playing with fire.