Muddy Water
June 21st, 2007Some people look at this and respond by mocking Texas, but to me, its racial undertone is more worthy of comment.
An angry crowd beat a man to death after a vehicle he was riding in struck and injured a young girl, police said Wednesday. Police believe 2,000 to 3,000 people were in the area for a Juneteenth celebration when the attack occurred Tuesday night. The driver had stopped to check on the little girl at the entrance to an apartment complex when a group of men attacked him, authorities said. The passenger, David Rivas Morales, 40, got out to try to help the driver, but the crowd turned on him, said police Commander Harold Piatt.
The thing about this is, it was a crowd of black people, and the reason that’s worth a note is best phrased as a question: can you imagine what the oucry would be if, say, a black man had been killed by a mob of white men (or Hispanic men)? Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would be all over the news and white men would be apologizing on cable and we wouldn’t hear the end of it.
If it were up to me, everyone in the mob would go to prison for twenty years, but there are some serious racial issues in this country that go both ways. Take this article as another example.
In a new twist in American race relations, a federal court has ruled that a white teacher in a predominantly African-American school was subjected to a racially hostile workplace. The case concerned Elizabeth Kandrac, who was routinely verbally abused by black students at Brentwood Middle School in North Charleston. Their slurs make shock jock Don Imus look like a church deacon. Nevertheless, despite frequent complaints, school officials did nothing to intervene on Kandrac’s behalf, arguing that the racially charged profanity was simply part of the students’ culture. If Kandrac couldn’t handle cursing, school officials told her, she was in the wrong school.
[…]Let’s be clear: What these children called this teacher is beyond reprehensible and only could be construed as hostile and threatening. Here’s a sample: white b–, white m– f–, white c-, white a–, white ho. Other white teachers and students corroborated Kandrac’s account, including a male war veteran who testified he would rather return to Vietnam than to Brentwood. Kandrac’s attorney, Larry Kobrovsky, argued that the repeated use of “white” made these slurs racist in nature. But school officials insisted that because black students were equally abusive to other blacks, the language wasn’t inherently racist.
Here’s what we know without question: If majority white students had used similar language toward black students and teachers, the case would have been plastered on the front page of The New York Times until heads rolled.
The truth is that American Civil Rights — like Civil Rights anywhere — are a joke. Civil Right leaders don’t care about Civil Rights — they care about their Civil Rights and the rest can be damned. That’s why nobody ever apologized to the Duke Lacrosse Team (I’m looking at the Reverends) and that’s why nobody ever apologized to this teacher or the Hispanic man (I’m assuming) who was lynched by a crowd of black people. That’s why white people hate the thought of apologizing for slavery, or the Internment, or the 1960s, unless they’re apologizing for George McGovern.
Everyone’s too selfish to see beyond their own.