Posted on 03/16/2015 7:36:09 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
A conservative radio show host used the story of Black teenage girls viciously assaulting another girl at a Brooklyn McDonald’s as an opportunity to direct a stunningly inaccurate and racist diatribe against the entire Black race.
During a recent segment on his show, Texas-based host Michael Berry attempted to draw a comparison between the behavior of Black people and white people while attacking the girls involved in the McDonald’s beating.
“We have people living in our country who are savages. Absolutely, positively savages, to engage in this kind of behavior,” Berry said, making it clear he’s talking about Black people. “The whole McDonald’s is full, they’re loving it.”
Berry’s comments came as the girls who were allegedly involved in the beating and apparent robbery surrendered to authorities one-by-one over the weekend. New York police said yesterday only one of the six teenage girls who took part in the attack is still at large. The beating has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times after being posted to YouTube.
One of the girls, who is just 14, was removed from an airplane at an international terminal at Atlanta’s airport, reportedly on a plane bound for her native Jamaica. Bail for the purported leader of the attack, Aniah Ferguson, 16, who was arrested on Thursday on charges of robbery and assault in the second degree, was set at $500,000, according to local media.
With the regularity of a clock, you can predict that some white conservative will use the occasion of a Black person committing a crime against another Black person to loudly cry about Black-on-Black crime. They reach for it with obvious glee, claiming that it’s a more serious matter in America than crimes committed against Black people by white racists or white police officers targeting young Black males. This is a favorite tactic of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani,
When he engaged in a debate on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in November with scholar Michael Eric Dyson, Guiliani said Black people should be more concerned with the way Blacks are “killed by other Blacks.”
“I would like to see the attention paid to that, that you are paying to this,” the former mayor quipped.
But Dyson quickly explained that the comparison was null and void.
“First of all, most Black people who commit crimes against other Black people go to jail,” Dyson said. “Number two, they are not sworn by the police department as an agent of the state to uphold the law. So in both cases, that’s a false equivalency that the mayor has drawn, which has exacerbated tensions that are deeply embedded in American culture.”
Berry said during his radio show last week that white people “don’t need to say white lives matter because white people don’t walk up to white people, put a gun to their head and blow them away,” he said. “White people don’t drive past the home of other white people and shoot into the window, knowing there are children inside. White people don’t walk into McDonald’s and 4, 5, 6, 10 of them and beat the snot out of them for minutes on end while everyone cheers and films it, World Star. You know why white lives matter? Because that’s what white people believe. The dirty little secret is Black people don’t believe that Black lives matter.”
It was an astoundingly ignorant statement that was not only profoundly offensive but that also conveniently ignored recent events in America, as well as the nation’s violent history. Just in the past decade, there has been an exhaustingly long list of instances of white people stepping into elementary schools and movie theaters and blasting away at other white people, including small children, with guns.
Any attempt by a white person to assign violent tendencies to Black people while they are living in the most violent country in the world, one where white people have established centuries of mind-numbing violence committed against non-white peoples—in addition to each other—is ridiculously off-base and ignorant.
Moreover, it gets at the particularly pernicious tendency of white racists to ascribe the bad acts of a few to an entire race. If he was interested in using a similar logic applied to another big news story of the week, he might have concluded that every white male college student was a raving racist because of the actions of the Oklahoma fraternity.
But Berry knows the narrative of the savage Black criminal is so embedded into white American minds that when such ugliness spills out of his mouth, he will get knowing nods, rather than outrage, from his listeners.
“We can’t deny the influence that this subculture is having on our society. You can go and hide behind your gates. Y’all can hire a guard at night,” he continued. “But eventually, a Trayvon Martin’s going to come walking through your yard, at night, on suspension from school. Because his dad has a good job, and he lives there. And he lives in a world of thuggery, and his dad doesn’t. That’s actually — that was the case there. But he was a thug, who went to school with other thugs.”
Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network announced that its youth group, Youth Huddle, run by Sharpton’s daughter Dominique Sharpton, will hold a vigil on Monday night to offer prayers for the 15-year-old teen, Ariana Taylor, who was beaten in the McDonald’s and hospitalized for nonlife-threatening injuries. NAN’s leadership said some of the students involved in the fight are from a Brooklyn high school, Erasmus High.
While many critics will point angry fingers at the teenage girls, just a five-minute trip through reality TV shows like “Basketball Wives” and “Love & Hip Hop” will show grown women engaged in brawls nearly as bad as the one in McDonald’s. The only thing stopping the TV fights from going on longer is that the producers have security jump in and stop them—after enough blows are delivered to provide entertainment to viewers.
And before reality TV, let’s not forget the national craze that was the “Jerry Springer Show,” which for years displayed daily violence that mostly featured girls fighting each other.
It’s not hard to see where these girls get their cues about how they are supposed to behave—from the adults all around them.
Any criticism of black criminal thug behavior = saying nasty things about black people
you know, when people do this, just tell them you never mentioned the thugs’ color. Tell them they are racist for assuming they’re black. Tell them they’re an ass for assuming that criticism of black criminals means someone thinks all blacks are criminals. They’re just trying to gin up phony racism charges to hijack the conversation away from the real problem.
Even my note saying I was being sarcastic?
Blacks in America commit homicide at a rate of more than 7 times the rate of whites, according by statistics published by the US Department of Justice.
And across the Atlantic, blacks in the UK stand out in a similar manner, for their disproportionately high rates of violent crimes.
A strong argument could therefore be made that blacks are simply more violent due to genetics, culture, or what ever reasons one likes.
We report, you decide.
Yeah. And?
This race baiter is doing exactly what he’s complaining about. LOL A raaaaacist, he is.
Because black people never engage in violence or crime... unless there’s an opportunity.
Thoughtful and exceptionally well said.
He’s pretty stupid.
Actually he and his wife adopted two sons from Ethiopia and she was the 109th Secretary of State for the state of Texas.
Oh, and Nandita was born in India.
Right. SOS for Texas. Thanks for the correction! But obviously, he’s a big fat racist!
:)
Former Democrat, talk radio convert, makes a braying jackass out of himself.
If they find out how much Michael supports the lavender lifestyle, all could be forgiven.
If I recall these incidents correctly, they were loony liberals who went on gun rampages against other liberals in situations where they knew the would not face a hostile fire fight from armed self-defensers.
The people who'd walk in mass kill and maim totally innocent people in school, theater or whatever, are simply very dangerous mentally ill lunatics.
Religious fanatical terrorist, who do the same, also fall into this category.
But do not get me wrong, to be honest, I also happen to think that many leftist liberals are mentally ill, but not to the extreme of murdering innocents.
With Muslims I believe genetics plays a bigger part than most want to admit as 1st cousin marriages are allowed in Islam. That is fertile ground for the appearance of all sorts of problems.
With Blacks genetics may play a big part in violent tendencies but a defunct family structure coupled with dependency on govt. handouts and drug/alcohol use during pregnancy deserve a large part of the blame.
the dc navy yard shooter a few years back was black. he only shot whites.
Well. The Atlanta Black Star calling someone racist (again) through a painful and deluded process....whodda thunk it?
ABS can be summed up by one of the comments to Nick’s article asking him “why to you always capitalize ‘Blacks’ but never ‘whites’?”
They (ABS) are wearing chocolate filtered sunglasses.
“to say” stuff?
Did he shoot anyone in the face?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.