New York City’s Staten Island borough is being plagued by a recent succession of hate crimes. National Public Radio reported on Aug. 20 of “at least 10 alleged hate crimes in the borough’s Port Richmond area since April — all violent, and all perpetrated against Mexicans.”
It wasn’t until a few days ago when I proactively searched for “recent hate crimes” in Google News that I came across this story. It certainly wasn’t the lead feature on CNN. I never saw it headlined on the Drudge Report. Perhaps many of you hadn’t heard about these unfortunate incidences of violence until now.
Why? Could it be because, as the Los Angeles Times revealed last week, 10 of the 11 assaults “involved blacks attacking Mexicans”?
Remember the Duke lacrosse case? The case that unnecessarily ruined the reputations of three innocent white Duke University students when they were falsely accused of rape by a black student and a pandering district attorney embroiled in a tough reelection bid? That “scandal” was front-page material for months. But charges of minority-instigated hate crimes apparently can’t even crack the Fox News ticker.
It seems to me that the media only care about reporting on hate crimes when whites are doing the hating.
Is that claim too edgy? Too callous? Too speculative? Maybe so, but it’s getting difficult for me to care anymore.
This is what a white kid is left to conjecture in a country where the Left appears hell-bent on denigrating his ethnicity because they feel bad about slavery. Well guess what hippie, I feel bad as well. But when will we reach a place in the United States where, without ever forgetting our tainted history or ignoring our shortcomings, we can begin to recognize that we largely have moved past the days of segregated drinking fountains?
I suspect many white people feel the same way – at least secretly. If they tell you otherwise, they are lying. Or racked by white guilt. Probably both.
In recent years, non-whites have borne some of the most prestigious titles in our federal government. Minorities are routinely recognized by a majority of Americans as having made some of the greatest music, produced some of the best films, and having had some of the most positive impact on our culture.
But political correctness has made it so that one cannot ask tough questions about racially selective news “reporting” or trends in criminal violence without being cast off as a bigot. And whether we want to acknowledge it or not, minority groups are as equally guilty as whites of this ultra-sensitive garbage. I think a lot of this can be blamed on the hate crime culture.
Hate crimes are really just violent crimes that have the added value of being purportedly motivated by bigotry. But hate crime laws seek only to divide people into different groups and classes. They advance the notion that some people are different than others, and are deserving of special treatment. Racism and prejudice have always afflicted this planet and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. But if we want to achieve any semblance of a “colorblind” or “post-racial” society, people need to recognize that all violent crimes are driven by hate. It is divisive and irrelevant to the administration of justice to try and interpret the private racial motivations behind every violent act.
With the election of Barack Obama, America’s leaders have been presented with a unique opportunity to readdress hate crime legislation in a transformative way. I’d like to think that they would recognize their attempts at healing the wounds of racism for some groups through laws of preferential treatment have actually created new wounds for others. I’d like to think that they would come to the realization that violent behavior alone should be reason enough to put bad people behind bars.
I’d also like to think that politicians employ logic and common sense on a daily basis. I’d like to think a lot of things are true.
