Why do only handful of such tragedies trigger national outrage?
Violence following the recent fatal shooting of an unarmed robbery suspect in Ferguson, Mo, has tragically followed a predictable script.
On average, more than 6,000 African Americans are killed by gun violence each year. That startling figure is nearly equal to all of the U.S. combat fatalities incurred in both Afghanistan and Iraq over some 13 years. African Americans are the victims in about half of the homicides in America each year despite the fact that blacks represent only about 13 percent of the U.S. population.
One would think that these alarming statistics would provoke the sort of protests that we’ve seen in Ferguson, but that is not the case. Nor does racial unrest automatically follow cases in which white police officers fatally shoot black criminal suspects. Only a small handful of such instances trigger outrage in the black community.
Instead, the sort of civil unrest we’re seeing in Ferguson is most likely to be ignited by the infrequent and disparate cases in which someone white, whether a police officer or not, fatally shoots an unarmed African American.
Controversy, for example, arose over George Zimmerman’s fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida. Now, small-town Ferguson is in an uproar over a police officer’s fatal shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown.
There is a second theme in such cases. The media almost invariably distort the facts, sometimes deliberately seeking to incite tensions. In the Trayvon Martin case, journalists published photos of Martin as a diminutive adolescent, not more recent pictures of Martin as a 17-year-old who was much taller than Zimmerman.
Zimmerman was referred to by the New York Times as a “white Hispanic” (a term not usually accorded those of mixed ancestry). ABC News was accused of airing footage of Zimmerman shortly after his encounter with Martin that concealed the severity of Zimmerman’s head injuries. NBC edited a recording of Zimmerman’s 911 call to police in a way that suggested Zimmerman was a racist. CNN speculated that Zimmerman may have used the racial slur “coon” during his 911 call.
In the Brown case, the media has rushed to portray the victim as a “gentle giant” who was almost certainly gunned down by a racist, trigger-happy cop. Only days later it was reported that just minutes before his death, the 6-foot-4, 292-pound Brown had allegedly committed a strong-armed robbery, bullying and assaulting a store owner half his size — and had been almost immediately been stopped not far away for walking down the middle of the road.
A third theme is the entrance of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the New Black Panther Party. Almost immediately, they incite tensions by issuing wild, unfounded charges. Jackson said of the Martin shooting that “targeting, arresting, convicting blacks and ultimately killing us is big business.” Jackson just called the Brown shooting a “state execution.” Sharpton called the legal acquittal of Zimmerman an “atrocity.” In the Zimmerman case, the New Black Panther Party put a bounty on his head, and in Missouri it called for violence against the police.
Fourth, demagogic politicians use these tragedies for political advantage — usually in ways that only make things worse. Libertarian senator Rand Paul, who is eyeing a 2016 presidential run, blamed the police for their overt military appearance and their crowd-control tactics. Yet street violence still persisted days after police in military-style riot gear were pulled from the scene — until finally there were requests for National Guard intervention.
President Obama did not soothe tensions when he claimed that Trayvon Martin looked like the son he never had, an implication that any president of the United States might have greater sympathy with those who shared a similar appearance. Obama initially weighed in on the Brown case before all the details had emerged, faulting both sides equally for the violence. In 2009, when police arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates at his home, Obama blasted the police as racial stereotypers and thereby only spiked tensions.
Finally, these shootings for weeks on end spark racial finger-pointing. Liberals acknowledge high black violent-crime rates but cite poverty, racism, and unfair police enforcement as the catalysts. Conservatives counter that high rates of single-parent families, dependence on government entitlements, and glorification of misogyny and violence in popular culture account for inordinate black violent-crime rates.
Eventually, the unrest peaks, then abates, and the country goes back to business as usual — a little more racially divided as we await the next predictable controversy.
Meanwhile, we might remember that the American experiment to unite various racial and ethnic groups into one culture is as noble as it is rare in history. When it has previously been tried in the modern world — Yugoslavia, Cyprus, Iraq, Rwanda, Syria, Congo — it usually has failed spectacularly.
What will save us are not more elite and self-serving “conversations” about racial difference, but a new classically liberal effort to consider race irrelevant in our shared American culture. Perhaps if we started treating people as unique individuals and not as hyphenated and anonymous groups, we could deal with these tragic shootings as individual tragedies rather than collective conspiracies.
© 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Jackson, Sharpton, and Obama, all racist democrats, use race division to try and win elections. The New York Times is their bullhorn.
Yes, and it is extremely successful, right? The hate of Whites these racist hucksters create leads to Blacks voting DEM about 95% of the time.
The voices of racial division and hatred have a profitable business in the market. Anyone who gives them the mic to peddle their wares (for, no doubt, their own profit) is part of the problem.
This feigned outrage is easily defeated by simple math. Assuming 60 out of the 6,000 lives lost to gun violence are due to police shootings (A wildly exaggerated assumption) would only yield a 1% death rate from police. Statistically insignificant when trying to address the causes of death. Using a more realistic 6 of 6,000 only yield 1/10th of one percent. This shows that the outrage and demonstration that result from these incidents have nothing to do with the incident itself, it is simply an excuse or red herring for other motives of the charlatans and protesters which the media seems more than willing to shill for.
I’m really getting tired of all these idiots in the world, from the worthless barbaric Isis to the idiots rioting in Ferguson, who won’t even listen to reason or the facts of the case. This crap is getting old fast.
In Class War, there is no substitute for selecting Race-Batable shootings to play the public as patsy!
And hey, if you object, why then you must be branded “reactionary” and targeted for IRS audit or indictment!
There is also the publicity for the affair stemming from the fact that this was identified as “paramilitarized police” in action. The idea is probably just. Some of the photos show long guns actually getting in the way of arrests, handcuffings etc. Billy sticks would have been much more effective.
Frankly, the idea of giving po’ white trash advanced equipment is not a good one, and would not have occurred, I think, to earlier generations of Americans, who were careful about training and equipping the lower orders. After all, what you now have in Ferguson is heavily armed po’ white trash, along with black rabble rousers. It is doubtful that Ferguson can recover from this.
Perhaps in the future, Islamists can utilize the same phrases that whites use to justify the subjugation and sanctioned murder of of blacks. They can say that Greeks killed more Greeks than did Turks, Armenians should just get over the Genocide, a young Yazidi male once robbed a store, Coptics rang their church bells too loudly, a Hindi man had smoked cannabis before he was beheaded, Israelis wore the wrong color of sweat shirt, we must respect the Rule of Sharia Law. The way that we whites treat blacks sounds and looks an awful like Dhimmitude status. In many communities in America the understanding is that whites allow blacks to live relatively unmolested so long as they are disarmed, submit to the police and any white civilian, stay in their ghettos and never engage in politics or public protest.
It’s the media. While politicians will make what they can out of a situation the media create the news rather than report on it. The media gives the race hustlers something to grab hold of. When the media leaves the issue retreats to where it generally belongs.
Professor, you describe quite well the primary “business model” of the Democratic/Progressive political party in America. The Blacks vote about 95% for DEM candidates. Not bad and suggestive the DEMS won’t do anything soon to alleviate the Ghetto culture of failure, shame and violence or stop the racial divisiveness that serves the DEMS so well.
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