-Caveat Lector-
License to Kill
http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/dh/2000/david07-13-00.htm
David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 13, 2000
IT
WHEN A YOUNG MAN named Matthew Shepard was tortured and
left to die on the high plains of Wyoming simply because he was
gay, the nation was outraged. Earlier that year, an even more brutal
attack was made on the person of James Byrd Jr., a black man in
Texas. Like Shepard's murder, Byrd's was followed by outpourings
of anger and grief from editorial pages and political pulpits across
the country.
Well and good enough. These responses are signs of health in the
body politic, the presence of a will to summon the better angels of
our nature, and to keep the savagery that lurks beneath the surface
of any civilized society safely at bay.
But by contrast, most of the nation never knew about another crime
that took place more than a year before the attack on James Byrd.
Three white Michigan youngsters hitched a train-ride as a teenage
lark. When they got off the train, they found themselves in the
wrong urban neighborhood, surrounded by a gang of armed black
youths. One of the white teenagers, Michael Carter, aged fourteen,
was killed. Dustin Kaiser, aged fifteen, who was brutally beaten
and shot in the head, eventually recovered. The fourteen-year-old
girl (whose name has been withheld) was pistol-whipped and shot
in the face after being forced to perform oral sex on her attackers.
Though the six African-Americans responsible for the deed were
arrested and convicted, their attack was not prosecuted as a hate
crime. More to the point, most of the nation never knew that the
crime had taken place. It was not reported on page one of the
national press, and there was no public outrage expressed in the
nation's editorials or in the halls of Congress. Indeed, the few
papers that reported the incident nationally did so on their inside
pages. Beyond the Great Lakes region, the stories often failed to
mention the races of the participants at all.
The crime took place on July 21, 1997, but among readers of this
book, there will not be one in a hundred who has even heard of it,
because, as a hate crime, it was in a perverse sense politically
incorrect. To notice that black people, as well as whites, can be
responsible for vicious crimes of hate, is improper. Hate crimes can
only be committed by an oppressor caste; therefore, what
happened in Michigan was not a hate crime at all.
The fact is that it is not tolerable in America to hate blacks, but
it is okay in our politically correct culture to hate white
people. Hollywood understands this rule of progressive etiquette. A
recent film, American History X, features (for the umpteenth
time) white neo-Nazis as the villains of a homily about racial
bigotry. The idea is that race hatred is synonymous with
"skin-heads" who are white. But a few years ago a
sensational mass murder trial in Miami spotlighted a black cult
leader named Yahweh Ben Yahweh, who required his cult
members to kill whites and bring back their ears as proof of the
deed. One of his recruits was a star football player. Seven people
were murdered. But there was no Hollywood scramble for the rights
to the Yahweh cult story, as there would have been if the colors
were reversed or everyone had been white. As a result, few
Americans are even aware that these murders ever took place.
According to Department of Justice figures, 85 percent of the
crimes of interracial violence nationwide are committed by blacks
against whites. How many of these crimes are actually the result of
black racism, and therefore hate crimes? There is no real way to
tell. There is, however, plenty of anecdotal evidence that suggests
the problem is not negligible. A recent spate of brutal and random
murders in a single Los Angeles district, for example, was
explained by one black inhabitant to a Los Angeles Times reporter
as retaliation for the "fact" that "whites had taken all the black
jobs."
Of course, the leftist academy has a ready answer for every
question about black racism: Only whites can be racist. The
alleged reasoning behind this assertion is that in our society only
whites have power. This is the kind of absurdity only an intellectual
could think up. Forget the thousands of public officials great and
small, police chiefs, judges, administrators, and members of
congress, petty bureaucrats, corporate executives, and military
officers now drawn from the ranks of minorities, who wield social
power in various forms. At the most elemental level, a black with a
gun – and there are many – has the power of life and death over an
unarmed law-abiding citizen of any race or color.
The doctrine that only whites can be racist is, in fact, itself an
instigation to hate crimes. It is a doctrine that has already spread
to the secondary schools. The week after the Shepard killing, a
Seattle father called a national talk radio show on which I was a
guest and told the audience that his son's class in junior high
school had been discussing the hate crime concept because of the
killing. During the discussion, the teacher informed the class that
only heterosexual whites could be racists. The caller's son was
unconvinced and brought up the savage beating of Reginald Denny
by a group of black gang members during the Los Angeles riots.
Surely, he suggested, this was a hate crime. But his teacher
corrected him. Even though Denny was pulled from his truck solely
because he was white, and then beaten within an inch of his life,
he could not be the victim of racial attitudes. The attempted murder
of Reginald Denny was actually an act of rebellion by people who
were themselves the victims of a white racist system, and the act
they committed, therefore, could not be considered a hate crime.
This is the perspective of academics who teach Whiteness
Studies, of law professors who teach "critical race studies," and no
doubt of education professors busily transmitting the progressive
worldview to the next generation of junior high school instructors.
This is one reason why conservatives and libertarians have not
joined the left in promoting politically correct hate crime
legislation that would create a few more specially protected
categories among us, as a kind of human Endangered Species
Act. Sorting Americans into distinctive racial, ethnic, and gender
groups, while designating whites and heterosexuals to be their
"oppressors," makes the latter into legitimate targets of
hate themselves. It thus becomes a way of exacerbating, rather
than correcting, social disorder.
It is time to go back to the wisdom of the Founders, who wrote a
constitution without reference to ethnic or gender groups. They did
so in order to render us equal before the nation's system of law. It
was an imperfectly realized ideal then, but that should be no
excuse for abandoning the ideal now. We need to end the vicious
libels of political correctness that have percolated their message of
anti-white racism into our mainstream culture. The vast majority of
white people do not hate or oppress black people. We need to
single out those individuals who do for condemnation and social
ostracism. And we need to do the same to individuals who belong
to minorities and are haters themselves. Most of all, we need to go
back to the task of treating all Americans as individuals first, and
as members of groups only secondarily, if at all.
David Horowitz is editor-in-chief of FrontPage Magazine and
president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.
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