A Censored Race War?
by Thomas Sowell
Recently
by Thomas Sowell: A
Cynical Process
When two white
newspaper reporters for the Virginian-Pilot were driving through
Norfolk, and were set upon and beaten by a mob of young blacks –
beaten so badly that they had to take a week off from work – that
might seem to have been news that should have been reported, at
least by their own newspaper. But it wasn't.
"The O'Reilly
Factor" on Fox News Channel was the first major television program
to report this incident. Yet this story is not just a Norfolk story,
either in what happened or in how the media and the authorities
have tried to sweep it under the rug.
Similar episodes
of unprovoked violence by young black gangs against white people
chosen at random on beaches, in shopping malls or in other public
places have occurred in Philadelphia, New York, Denver, Chicago,
Cleveland, Washington, Los Angeles and other places across the country.
Both the authorities and the media tend to try to sweep these episodes
under the rug as well.
In Milwaukee,
for example, an attack on whites at a public park a few years ago
left many of the victims battered to the ground and bloody. But,
when the police arrived on the scene, it became clear that the authorities
wanted to keep this quiet.
One 22-year-old
woman, who had been robbed of her cell phone and debit card, and
had blood streaming down her face said: "About 20 of us stayed to
give statements and make sure everyone was accounted for. The police
wouldn't listen to us, they wouldn't take our names or statements.
They told us to leave. It was completely infuriating."
The police
chief seemed determined to head off any suggestion that this was
a racially motivated attack by saying that crime is colorblind.
Other officials elsewhere have said similar things.
A wave of such
attacks in Chicago were reported, but not the race of the attackers
or victims. Media outlets that do not report the race of people
committing crimes nevertheless report racial disparities in imprisonment
and write heated editorials blaming the criminal justice system.
What the authorities
and the media seem determined to suppress is that the hoodlum elements
in many ghettoes launch coordinated attacks on whites in public
places. If there is anything worse than a one-sided race war, it
is a two-sided race war, especially when one of the races outnumbers
the other several times over.
It may be understandable
that some people want to head off such a catastrophe, either by
not reporting the attacks in this race war, or not identifying the
race of those attacking, or by insisting that the attacks were not
racially motivated – even when the attackers themselves voice anti-white
invective as they laugh at their bleeding victims.
Trying to keep
the lid on is understandable. But a lot of pressure can build up
under that lid. If and when that pressure leads to an explosion
of white backlash, things could be a lot worse than if the truth
had come out earlier, and steps taken by both black and white leaders
to deal with the hoodlums and with those who inflame the hoodlums.
These
latter would include not only race hustlers like Al Sharpton and
Jesse Jackson but also lesser known people in the media, in educational
institutions and elsewhere who hype grievances and make all the
problems of blacks the fault of whites. Some of these people may
think that they are doing a favor to blacks. But it is no favor
to anyone who lags behind to turn their energies from the task of
improving and advancing themselves to the task of lashing out at
others.
These others
extend beyond whites. Asian American school children in New York
and Philadelphia have for years been beaten up by their black classmates.
But people in the mainstream media who go ballistic if some kid
says something unkind on the Internet about a homosexual classmate
nevertheless hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil when Asian
American youngsters are beaten up by their black classmates.
Those who automatically
say that the social pathology of the ghetto is due to poverty, discrimination
and the like cannot explain why such pathology was far less prevalent
in the 1950s, when poverty and discrimination were worse. But there
were not nearly as many grievance mongers and race hustlers then.
May 15,
2012
Thomas
Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other
Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators
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