“What’s going on in
Florida?” (RE: Trayvon Martin …) Part III …
A young man was shot and killed. That’s bad enough. And his family and others
have every right to be upset and horrified by his death.
But here’s the truly bizarre part of this sideshow: almost nobody else bloviating about Trayvon
Martin – Sharpton, Jackson, and the media talking heads – seems to be as outraged
that hundreds of other black kids are shot to death, mostly by other black
kids, every year in this country.
No one appears as dismayed that homicide remains the leading cause of
death among non-Hispanic African-American teenage males. For comparison, traffic accidents are the
leading cause of death overall for teenagers of all races.
As tragic as the Trayvon Martin case is, that’s nothing
compared to what’s killing the most young black males every year.
You would think someone would get on that bandwagon. But no, nobody wants to address that
issue. That might make someone “feel bad
about themselves” for revealing the blindingly obvious to them: the gangsta culture enamored and imitated
among many young blacks is yielding deadly returns.
Instead, let’s divert attention to something else, because if
a black person shoots another black person – which happens all the time in
Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and DC, hey, that’s not news. It’s just a statistic.
And here’s that statistic:
94% of all murders of blacks are at the hands of another black person. Flip that statistic and it means the
probability of being black and murdered by someone of another race –
white/Hispanic, Asian or Native American – anywhere in this country is 6%.
So if a black person gets shot by someone who isn’t
black, that’s a big story. If that
happens in that inbred, cultural wasteland the media considers the South, it’s
even bigger news because you can then add racism into the storyline; it’s a
natural.
And that’s primarily because the Northeastern-based media –
and, honestly, a lot of their regular viewers – want to believe their own
stereotypes about what they think the South must be: farms, churches, revivals, trailer parks, Mayberry
RFD, Green Acres, Bible-thumping rednecks and bigots … and of course
segregation and the ongoing oppression of the black population.
You almost expect for them to use banjos and someone playing
the spoons as background music when they cover the South. Maybe see the Dukes of Hazzard drive by, as
they toss longneck PBRs out the window on their way to a date with their first
cousin.
After all, what do you expect the media to think when the
majority of the South voted for George W. Bush over more “enlightened”
candidates like John Kerry and Al Gore … how smart could the South really
be?
Another sign to the media that Jim Crow is alive and well in
the South is that many southern states are trying to crack down on voter fraud
by mandating photo IDs to vote. In the
media’s mind this is clearly a naked attempt to disenfranchise black and other
minority voters. (Most of these
potentially “disenfranchised” voters apparently have photo IDs to purchase cold
medicine at Walgreens, or tobacco or liquor, or get a library card, but would
be really put out if they had to show one to vote.)
We might as well face it:
Whites in the South must spend the majority of their time – when they’re
not out hunting squirrels, dodging tornadoes, knocking up their sister, or attending
Klan meetings – trying to keep blacks down.
And if some black kid gets in their way, they feel they have the right
to shoot them.
At least that’s how it seems if you take national news
accounts at face value.
Nobody is saying there isn’t racism in the South; but it’s probably
no more or no less pervasive than anywhere else in this country. There will always be redneck cracker bastards
not just in the South, but also in virtually every part of the country;
ignorance and intolerance know no geographic boundaries.
Nobody is saying there aren’t murders of blacks in the South,
and it’s true that a very small percentage of those will be committed by whites. But that will be an exceedingly small
percentage; not a sign that whites in the South are on a culturally sanctioned
jihad against blacks, as some race baiters would have you believe.
The overwhelming majority of murders of black people in the
South – like the country as a whole – will be committed by other black people,
not gun-happy white racists.
Let’s keep things in their proper perspective.
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