RUTHFULLY YOURS

George Zimmerman was tried, convicted and sentenced in the media on the charge of Racism in the First Degree without a single piece of supporting evidence other than the bare fact of his altercation with a black man.

Had there been a time when Zimmerman had uttered a racial slur then NBC or the New York Times would have dug it up and presented it to readers and viewers first thing next morning. Instead the volume of opposing evidence, including Zimmerman’s advocacy on behalf of a homeless black man assaulted by police was ignored as a fact inconvenient to the racial narrative.

Paula Deen was tried, convicted and sentenced as the Nation’s Worst Racist (after the passing of George Wallace) for using a racial slur about a man who put a gun to her head back in 1986. Walmart stopped selling a cookbook because its author said something bad back when Sam Walton was still CEO and America and Russia were going head to head over whether Communism or Capitalism would dominate. (Communism won, but Capitalism gets to sell cheap copies of the rope it’s being hung with.)

The black murderers of Chris Lane, a white Australian baseball player, one of whom tweeted that he hated white people and boasted of assaulting five of them since the Zimmerman verdict and the other who used Black Nationalist signage, are not being accused of racism. That means that if they ever write a prison cookbook, Walmart will probably sell it.

There is roughly 100% more evidence that James Edwards, one of the teenagers charged with Lane’s murder, was racist, than that George Zimmerman was racist. But the odds that Edwards will ever be charged with a hate crime, let alone be treated as a national poster boy for bigoted violence the way that Zimmerman was are laughably infinitesimal.

None of the revenge assaults carried out by black perpetrators against white victims in “retaliation” for Trayvon Martin ever led to one of those obligatory national conversations on race that we have been having ever since Martin was shot during a scuffle with a Latino homeowner because that would require admitting that black racism exists.

A white man shooting a black man is presumed racist. A black man shooting a white man is described an indictment of society as a whole. A white man shooting a black man is put down to individual racism, but a black man shooting a white man is written off as a response to white racism. James Edwards’ sister has already begun advancing that defense.

These assumptions fall into place long before the trial is over or any of the facts are in. They are part of the unwritten stylebook of modern media coverage.

Black racism is the Bigfoot of the mainstream media. Reports of it happening in flash mobs in Chicago or Philadelphia are dismissed in the same way that Sasquatch sightings are in the Pine Barrens. It’s not that its existence can’t be documented, but that the evidence will never even receive a hearing.

Unlike the Zimmerman case, that is racist. A racism double standard is the very embodiment of racism.

There are few more damning indictments of the media’s racism than the fact that the man behind one of the worst race riots in the last generation has his own show on MSNBC.

If we lived in the racist America that MSNBC liberals claim we do, David Duke would have appeared with members of the Bush administration and had his own show on FOX. Instead Al Sharpton hosts Attorney General Eric Holder and has his own show on MSNBC. That simple contrast tells the whole dirty truth about the unequal treatment of black racism.

It’s not that liberals don’t know that black racism exists. They know it exists and they embrace it as a rallying call for social justice by warning white Americans that their “oppression” has consequences.

Obama’s initial response to the release of the Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright video was to deliver a cynical speech on race invoking the ghosts of slavery and segregation, talking up Wright’s “memories of humiliation” and suggesting that the hateful preacher wasn’t wrong in his sentiments, only in failing to notice the progress that had been made since then.

Instead of truly disavowing Wright’s hate, Obama’s famous speech on race treated black racism as a response to white racism. That speech set the pattern for every Obama racial speech since, including his most recent remarks on Trayvon Martin.

Obama’s insistence on framing black racism as black anger, as a response to white bigotry rather than bigotry itself, is why the national conversation on race that he insists on having every time he takes a tumble in the polls never goes anywhere.

Racism, like any form of xenophobia, is unfortunately indigenous to the human character. To privilege one form of racism over another is to justify it and to dehumanize its victims as deserving of abuse.

If black racism is described as anger and white racism as bigotry, then white people are held responsible both for their own bigotry and for the bigotry directed at them. To liberals, this is simple social justice, but to anyone who has made a study of bigotry this is characteristic of the way that bigots fault their victims for the hate and violence that they direct at them.

The liberal position on black racism is racist. It is a “moderate” racism in that it deplores violent expressions of “anger,” but argues furiously and insistently for the rightness of the anger itself.

If bigotry is wrong, then it is wrong not only as an action, but as an idea. Every liberal, from Obama to the media apparatus surrounding him, makes an attempt at distinguishing between the legitimacy of black anger and the illegitimacy of its expression. And that dishonest distinction makes them complicit in the racist violence directed at white people and the murder of people like Chris Lane.

Black racism is no different than white racism. Its façade of legitimacy rooted in memories of oppression is only an excuse for a hatred that arises not from historical memories of the past, but from a common human xenophobia toward anyone different in the present.

If black racism really were only a historical memory or a cry against modern oppression, it would be limited in its scope to white people. It isn’t. Black racism targets Asians and Latinos as well. The black anger that Obama defends is really common bigotry dressed up in grainy civil rights photographs.

We don’t need to have a national conversation that justifies black racism and saddles its victims with more affirmative penalties. What we must do is send a message that it is intolerable and unacceptable.

The racial double standard does black men no favors. The murder of Chris Lane is not the fault of history, but of two black men and their white getaway driver, their families, and above all else, the education and entertainment figures that taught them that hating white people was their birthright.

To treat people of any race that way is to diminish them as human beings and to call on their worst selves.

When people are not held responsible for their actions, not just criminally, but socially, then the actions are perpetuated. If white murderers were not held responsible for killing black men, as liberals have insisted is the case, then the numbers for white-on-black crimes would start catching up with those for black-on-white crimes.

A system that can see white racism in a Rorschach inkblot, but can’t see black racism when it’s pulling the trigger is the very definition of a racist system.

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