Posted on 05/23/2015 12:14:57 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Earlier this week, outlaw motorcycle clubs engaged in a daylight gun battle in Waco, Texas. This combat involved hundreds of people. The mall where the riot occurred was left resembling a war zone, with hundreds of spent bullet cartridges strewn about, broken bodies everywhere, and police and other local municipal services overwhelmed. By the end of melee, nine outlaws were dead, 18 wounded, and at least 165 people were arrested; 120 guns were recovered at the crime scene.
In late April and early May, African-American young people protested the killing of Freddie Gray by the Baltimore police. Those peaceful protests escalated into a local uprising against the police. This was neither random nor unprovoked: The Baltimore uprising was a response to the long-simmering upset and righteous anger about poverty, racism, civil rights violations, and abuse by the police. No one was killed during the Baltimore protests or subsequent uprising.
The gun battle chaos in Waco was a result of rivalries between outlaw motorcycle clubs, in competition with one another for the profits from drug and gun traffic, various protection rackets, and other criminal enterprises. The Baltimore uprising was a reaction to social, economic, racial, and political injustice; a desperate plea for justice in an era of police brutality and white-on-black murder by the state.
The participants in the Waco, Texas gun battle were almost exclusively white. The participants in the Baltimore Uprising were almost all black. Quite predictably, the corporate news media’s narrative frame for those events was heavily influenced by race. News coverage of these two events has stretched the bounds of credulity by engaging in all manner of mental gymnastics in order to describe the killings, mayhem, and gun battle in Waco as anything other than a “riot.”
As writers such as Salon’s own Jenny Kutner keenly observed:
I use the terms “shootout” and “gunfire erupted” after reading numerous eyewitness reports, local news coverage and national stories about the “incident,” which has been described with a whole host of phrases already. None, however, are quite as familiar as another term that’s been used to describe similarly chaotic events in the news of late: “Riot.”
Of course, the deadly shootout in Texas was exactly that: A shootout. The rival gangs were not engaged in a demonstration or protest and they were predominantly white, which means that — despite the fact that dozens of people engaged in acts of obscene violence — they did not “riot,” as far as much of the media is concerned. “Riots” are reserved for communities of color in protest, whether they organize violently or not, and the “thuggishness” of those involved is debatable. That doesn’t seem to be the case in Texas.
The dominant corporate news media have used the Baltimore uprising and other similar events to attack Black America’s character, values, and culture. The argument is clear: The events in Waco were committed by white men who happen to be criminals; the Baltimore uprising was committed by black people who, because of their “race” and “culture,” are inherently criminal.
Racial bias in news reporting has been repeatedly documented by scholars in media studies, critical race theory, political science, and sociology. As anti-racism activist Jane Elliot incisively observed, “People of color can’t even turn on the televisions in their own homes without being exposed to white racism.” The centuries of racism, and resulting stereotypes about the inherent criminality of Black Americans, are central to why the events in Waco and Baltimore have received such divergent news coverage.
In an interview about the Waco shootout, Harrold Pollock, co-director of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, makes this point very clear:
I have never encountered a gang incident in Chicago remotely like this. The number of perpetrators involved — not to mention the nine deaths — far exceed the typical urban gang-related shooting. Maybe there was some gang incident in Chicago like this decades ago. But this sort of pitched battle? I’ve never heard of anything like it. If these biker gang members were non-white, I think this would cause a national freak out…
But I do think that our views about urban crime are so framed by race and inequality in a variety of ways. When criminal activity seems unrelated to these factors, it doesn’t hit our national dopamine receptors in quite the same way. People tend to view these motorcycle gangs as a kind of curiosity.
Yet, there is a deep resistance by many in White America to accepting the basic fact that the mainstream American news media is habitually racist in its depiction of non-whites.
The mass media helps to create what Walter Lippman famously referred to as “the pictures inside our heads.’” The news media (and popular culture as a whole) helps individuals to create a cognitive map of the world around them by teaching lessons about life, politics, society, desire, relationships, and other values. This cognitive map also helps individuals to locate themselves relative to other groups of people in a given community. This cognitive map provides a set of rules, guidelines, and heuristics for navigating social reality.
In a society such as the United States, organized around maintaining certain hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality, how one sees themselves is often a reflection of precisely how they are not members of a given group. Those lessons are internalized on both a conscious and subconscious level; on a basic level, the in-group is defined relative to the out-group.
This is the essence of making a person or group into the Other.
Simone de Beauvoir, feminist philosopher, made this essential observation:
The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the expression of a duality — that of the Self and the Other. This duality was not originally attached to the division of the sexes; it was not dependent upon any empirical facts. It is revealed in such works as that of Granet on Chinese thought and those of Dumézil on the East Indies and Rome. The feminine element was at first no more involved in such pairs as Varuna-Mitra, Uranus-Zeus, Sun-Moon, and Day-Night than it was in the contrasts between Good and Evil, lucky and unlucky auspices, right and left, God and Lucifer. Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought.
Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself. If three travellers chance to occupy the same compartment, that is enough to make vaguely hostile ‘others’ out of all the rest of the passengers on the train. In small-town eyes all persons not belonging to the village are ‘strangers’ and suspect; to the native of a country all who inhabit other countries are ‘foreigners’; Jews are ‘different’ for the anti-Semite, Negroes are ‘inferior’ for American racists, aborigines are ‘natives’ for colonists, proletarians are the ‘lower class’ for the privileged.
In a society like the United States, one that is structured around maintaining white (and male) privilege, a type of logic is created where some groups and individuals are deemed to be more valuable and privileged than others.
Language, as a way to describe the world around us, is pivotal in this process; it locates a given person relative to others, describes relationships, and both acknowledges and reinforces differences in power. Language also evolves. It is not fixed. And it reveals a great deal about changing norms about identity. As such, language is inherently political.
In America’s public discourse, the knee-jerk and instinctive move to refer to black people as “thugs”, and the parallel impulse to resist any such marking of white individuals with the same language, is a function of how the “I” and the “ego” are structured in a race-stratified society. Thus, the divergence in language used by the corporate new media to frame and discuss the events in Waco may actually reveal much more about how white Americans see themselves than it does about people of color, and black youth in particular.
White racial logic demands that whites and blacks engaged in the same behavior are often described using different language. (White people have a “fracas,” while black people “riot”; during Hurricane Katrina white people were “finding food,” while black people were “looting.”)
In the post civil rights era, White racial logic also tries to immunize and protect individual white folks from critical self-reflection about their egos and personal relationships to systems of unjust and unearned advantage by deploying a few familiar rhetorical strategies, such as “Not all white people,” “We need to talk about class not race,” or similarly hollow and intellectual vapid and banal claims about “reverse racism.” Ego, language, and cognition intersect in the belief that Whiteness is inherently benign and innocent.
Whiteness is many things. It is a type of property, privilege, “invisibility,” and “normality.” Whiteness also pays a type of psychological wage to its owners and beneficiaries. While its relative material value may be declining in an age of neoliberalism and globalization, the psychological wage wherein Whiteness is imagined as good and innocent, and those who identify themselves as “white” believe themselves to be inherently just and decent, still remains in force. One of the most important psychological wages of Whiteness remains how white folks can imagine themselves as the preeminent individual, the universal “I” and “We,” while benefitting from the unearned advantages that come with white privilege as a type of group advantage.
Non-whites in the United States, and the West more broadly, do not have the luxury of being individuals. If a “Black” person commits a crime, it is somehow a reflection of the criminality of Black people en masse. Similarly, when a person who happens to be marked as “Arab” or “Muslim” commits an act of political violence, an obligatory conversation on the relationship between “terrorism” and the “Muslim community” ensues.
However, white folks can commit all manner of murder and mayhem, and there is no national conversation about the meanings of “Whiteness” or of “White America’s” particular problems. In many ways, being white is the ultimate marker of radical autonomy and freedom: Its members rarely feel the obligation — nor are they made to by the media or the state — to be held accountable for each other’s behavior.
So it is that white people who do “bad” things are “bad” individuals; while black and brown people who do “bad” things are representative of a type of collective or group problem and pathology.
During those rare public moments of intervention, when the particular problems and pathologies of White America are discussed white denial is immediately deployed as a type of defense shield (the response to any rigorous or critical discussion(s) of Whiteness and white privilege is especially toxic and hostile from white conservatives). Ultimately, white denial is the immune system of a white body politic that is averse to critical self-reflection about its own poor behavior and shortcomings.
There are many examples of this phenomenon:
White male college students: Most recently, a Boston University Professor named Saida Grundy dared to state that white male college students are a problem population. Based on studies of white male college students’ use of drugs and alcohol, propensity to violence, sexual assault, and other negative conduct, Dr. Grundy’s claim is rather obvious and matter of fact. Nevertheless, she was met by howls of rage and upset by aggrieved Whiteness. Saida Grundy has been forced to apologize. Her future employment at Boston University may be imperiled.
Mass shooters: America is sick with gun violence. Mass shootings are a particular problem and behavior of white men, as they constitute approximately 30 percent of the population and commit about 70 percent of mass shootings. However, concerns about public health and white men’s relationship to mass shootings have been met by rancor. The suggestion that “aggrieved white male entitlement syndrome” may be fueling white male gun violence is routinely shouted down as impolitic.
Domestic terrorists: The United States has a serious problem with right-wing domestic terrorism. Right-wing domestic terrorists, almost all of them white men, have killed police officers, planted bombs, engaged in sedition and treason, and have openly talked of starting a second American Civil War by attacking the federal government. America’s police and other civil authorities are so concerned about these developments that they have issued a number of reports and alerts on the matter. Republicans and the right-wing media were so aghast at these facts that they chose to censor and harass the officials who dared to suggest that America may have a serious problem with white domestic terrorists. Public safety is secondary to protecting white men—and the White Right—from being held accountable for domestic terrorism.
Financial gangsters: The American (and world) economy was almost destroyed by the recklessness of casino capitalism, financial gangsterism, fraud, and other criminal acts by Wall Street. The people who participated in those acts ruined lives, and through the loss of jobs, stress, and wrecked communities, have shortened the life spans of many millions of people. Those who created said chaos were mostly white and male. If these financial thugs were instead people of color or women, the Great Recession would have been met with rage and upset about “affirmative action,” “unqualified” professionals, or about the “poor cultural influences” of the people who broke the world. Instead, there was no conversation about the white male culture of greed and destruction among the financiers and plutocrats, they have not been imprisoned for their crimes, nor have those white male banksters and casino capitalists been marked as a criminal class.
Against all of these examples of malfeasance, black people must be deemed thugs who uniquely “riot” and constitute a natural “criminal class” for the many lies of Whiteness to solidly cohere. The cognitive mapping, language, and sense of ego that support a belief in the inherent goodness and nobility of Whiteness cannot withstand rigorous and critical self-examination.
The contradictions in how Black Americans and other people of color are discussed by the mainstream media, as compared to white folks, are glaring and obvious for those who choose to see them. Those who choose to speak truth to power about white supremacy, white privilege, and white racism are forcing White America to confront what the latter has by choice deemed as somehow illegible and unseen. To force White America to realize that, yes, it too has a criminal class of people, is pathological, and neither inherently noble nor benign, is a type of ideologically disruptive moment that has and will continue to be met with rage, anger, denial, and dismissal.
Why? Because such observations and facts are too challenging for many white individuals to process, because they have been socialized by a society that deems them better than the Other by virtue of belonging to a semi-exclusive club of people who are categorized as being members of the “white race.”
But white denial does not make the aforementioned facts any less true.
When white folks, whether among the pundit classes, or in day-to-day interactions, are confronted with the gross contradictions of their language — why black people in Baltimore are called “thugs,” while white outlaw bikers who kill people somehow did not engage in a “riot” — they may appear confused, frustrated, or perhaps even willfully stupid as they try to evade and explain the distinction between the two examples.
I have come to the conclusion that many white folks are legitimately confused when confronted by such examples, that their inability to process this data is sincere; those who have not disowned their Whiteness and white privilege are unable on a cognitive level to process many aspects of empirical reality. Units of speech such as “white crime,” “white pathology,” and “white thugs” have no meaning in the cognitive schema and conceptual grid of Whiteness.
Such concepts “do not compute.”
As great American thinkers such as Martin Luther King Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois, and others have suggested, Whiteness and white privilege have damaged the cognitive, intellectual, ethical and moral processes of White America (as distinct from any given white person). The challenge thus becomes: Is it possible to help those white individuals who are still loyal to Whiteness and White racial logic, to see the world as it actually is, and to transcend the White Gaze?
One of the existential questions that have repeatedly confronted Black America is: “what does it feel like to be a problem?”
White America needs to begin to ask itself the same question.
Universities and think tanks really need to stop smelling the fumes coming from social science/gender/women/justice/sexual/racial studies. Time to push the basics, reading (the classics), writing (not tweets), arithmetic (the real kind), science (the real kind) and history (the truthful stuff).
Note: Many of those Waco bikers scum were Hispanic (which I only mention because this author is so bent on making this a black-white issue, when in fact it is nothing of the sort).
People who can't move beyond thinking of themselves only as members of isolated groups, and not as individuals who can achieve, will never escape blame, anger and self imposed isolation.
Wiki List of riots - I do not see Waco Biker Brawl listed.
Our great "sin" (those of us who do not define ourselves by our skin color - or gender or....) is that we don't join progressives (whatever stripe they tightly wrap themselves in - color, sexual orientation, gender, disability, nationality, etc) and wallow in "guilt."
If you haven't read the article linked below, it's a good time to check it out.
The perils of designer tribalism - On the bane of “Third Worldism” and Roger Sandall's book The Culture Cult.
"..........[French writer Pascal] Bruckner’s book is a vigorous indictment of “Third Worldism”—the odious species of romance that glorifies everything foreign, exotic, and primitive while simultaneously railing against civilization, science, and modernity. (That other social philosopher, W. S. Gilbert, was right to save a place on his famous list for “the idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone/ All centuries but this and every country but his own.”)
The very power of Bruckner’s indictment helps to explain its neglect. The message he brought was distinctly unwelcome music to the ears of politically correct intellectuals, whose smugness and sense of moral superiority, then as now, was inextricably bound up with the mendacities of Third Worldism and kindred specimens of emotional blackmail. (Just listen to Susan Sontag on Kosovo or Michael Ignatieff on Rwanda.) “Solidarity with oppressed peoples,” Bruckner wrote,
is above all a gigantic weapon aimed at the West. The logic of aggression is at work in Third World solidarity, and this has made it a continuation of the Cold War by other means. Being non-European is enough to put one on the side of right. Being European or being supported by a European power is enough to make one suspect. The bloody messes in banana republics, and butchery of political opposition and the dictatorial lunacy by their petty chieftains are all brushed aside. Such trifles will not restrain the progress of these peoples toward socialism. What seems criminal in Cuba, Angola, and Guinea has the real purpose of washing away the far greater crime of colonialism........
Part of what makes The Tears of the White Man such an important book is Bruckner’s sensitivity to the aerodynamics of liberal guilt. He understands what launches it, what keeps it aloft, and how we might lure it safely back to earth. He understands that the entire phenomenon of Third Worldism is fueled by the moral ecstasy of overbred guilt. Bruckner is an articulate anatomist of such guilt and its attendant deceptions and mystifications. “An overblown conscience,” he points out, “is an empty conscience.”
Compassion ceases if there is nothing but compassion, and revulsion turns to insensitivity. Our “soft pity,” as Stefan Zweig calls it, is stimulated, because guilt is a convenient substitute for action where action is impossible. Without the power to do anything, sensitivity becomes our main aim, the aim is not so much to do anything, as to be judged. Salvation lies in the verdict that declares us to be wrong.
.... Sandall's real target is the assumption—common coin among anthropologists—that “culture” is a value-neutral term and that, as Claude Lévi-Strauss put it in 1951, one had to “fight against ranking cultural differences hierarchically.” In his book The Savage Mind—which argues that there is no such thing as the savage, as distinct from the civilized, mind—Lévi-Strauss spoke blithely of the “so-called primitive.” (It is significant that Lévi-Strauss should have idolized Rousseau: “our master and our brother,” “of all the philosophes, [the one who] came nearest to being an anthropologist.”) One of Sandall’s main tasks in The Culture Cult is to convince us that what Lévi-Strauss dismissed as “so-called” is really “well-called.” Sandall does not mention William Henry’s In Defense of Elitism (1994)—another unfairly neglected book—but his argument in The Culture Cult reinforces Henry’s accurate, if politically incorrect, observation that
the simple fact [is] that some people are better than others—smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace. Some ideas are better than others, some values more enduring, some works of art more universal. Some cultures, though we dare not say it, are more accomplished than others and therefore more worthy of study. Every corner of the human race may have something to contribute. That does not mean that all contributions are equal. . . . It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.
Henry’s quip about the bone in the nose elicited the expected quota of outrage from culture-cultists. But the outrage missed the serious and, ultimately, the deeply humane point of the observation. What Sandall calls romantic primitivism puts a premium on quaintness, which it then embroiders with the rhetoric of authenticity. There are two casualties of this process. One is an intellectual casualty: it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the truth about the achievements and liabilities of other cultures. The other casualty is a moral, social, and political one. Who suffers from the expression of romantic primitivism? Not the Lauren Huttons and Claude Lévi-Strausses of the world. On the contrary, the people who suffer are the objects of the romantic primitive’s compassion, “respect,” and pretended emulation. Sandall asks:
Should American Indians and New Zealand Maoris and Australian Aborigines be urged to preserve their traditional cultures at all costs? Should they be told that assimilation is wrong? And is it wise to leave them entirely to their own devices?
Sandall is right that the answers, respectively, are No, No, and No: “The best chance of a good life for indigenes is the same as for you and me: full fluency and literacy in English, as much math as we can handle, and a job.” ......
How does the ten year total compare to a year in Baltimore and Chicago?
I do not even know why we still consider these brain-dead humans to be actual humans. I think they must be some off-shoot of humans, maybe a re-emergence of neanderthals
couldn’t get too far into the article before I started getting nauseated. Is it lost on the writer that nine people died in Texas while none died in baltimore, Including one who set fire to a pharmacy and cut the hose so firemen couldn’t put it out. and again with a nonsensical story that deals with just you acting out. They took off from their day jobs is doctors lawyers engineers and scientists to riot and loot throw bricks at cops and start fires
.@MichelleObama Worst ever black mob violence? Commentary from First Lady https://t.co/q0iTdGoCwj via @YouTube #tcot— 1st Native Americans (@Solutrean) May 23, 2015
The reason these incidents are described differently is because they ARE different, both qualitatively and quantitively.
This writer is grasping at straws, and his pathetic and feeble attempt to graft some kid of profound racial context onto two totally different situations is altogether transparent, laughable and ignorant.
9 non-black bikers were shot and killed by the police and no riots, no looting and no property burned down and this guy wants to whine about whiteness!
The Fed Govt burned down and killed many Branch Davidians and no one rioted, looted or burned down property...
What’s this guy’s issue with white people again? Is it they need to riot, loot and burn down property too???
As of the best reporting at the moment the score is:
Dead by Police: 9
Dead by Bikers: 0
There does appear to have been a shoot-out, but it wasn’t between motorcycle “gangs’.
“slate” seems to have been getting their news from the usual unreliable sources.
[June 20, 2015] “......Autopsy Reports Released
Preliminary autopsy reports released Tuesday identify the nine bikers who died Sunday afternoon in a shootout with rival gang members and police at Waco’s Twin Peaks restaurant, and at least two of them have local ties.
The nine bikers, all of whom were members of either the Bandidos or the Cossacks, all died of gunshot wounds.
Jesus Delgado Rodriguez, 65, died of gunshot wounds of the head and trunk.
Jacob Lee Rhyne, 39, died of gunshot wounds to the neck.
Richard Vincent Kirshner, Jr., 47, died of gunshot wounds but the report did not specify where he was shot.
Richard Matthew Jordan, III, 31, died of gunshot wounds to the head.
Wayne Lee Campbell, 43, died of gunshot wounds to the head and trunk.
Daniel Raymond Boyett, 44, died of gunshot wounds to the head.
Matthew Mark Smith, 27, died of gunshot wounds to the trunk
Manuel Issac Rodriguez, 40, died of gunshot wounds but the report did not specify where he was shot.
And Charles Wayne Russell, 46, died of gunshot wounds to the chest.
...........Eight of the dead bikers were members of the Cossacks and one was a Bandido, authorities confirmed.
About 50 weapons were recovered at the shooting scene including guns, knives and a chain with a padlock that could be used to beat someone, police said Monday.
Other weapons have been discovered in some off the vehicles towed from the shooting scene, police said.
.....The shooting investigation will take weeks if not months, Waco police Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton said during a news conference Tuesday morning.
He later said investigators hope to clear the crime scene by mid-morning Wednesday.
Crews continued to remove an estimated 135 motorcycles and at least 80 cars and pickup trucks from the restaurant’s parking lot Tuesday, a process that started Monday evening.
Police are escorting the flatbed trucks carrying the cycles and vehicles from the scene to an impound site, Swanton said.
Seven of the 18 bikers injured in the shootout remained in hospitals Tuesday, Swanton said.
All of them are in stable condition and most are improving he said.
He declined to release the names of the nine bikers who were killed, however, because investigators are having trouble locating family members to notify, he said.
Swanton discounted media reports that four of the nine bikers were killed by police, saying that will be impossible to determine until autopsies and ballistic tests have been completed.
“Is it possible? Yes. Is it a fact? No,” he said.......”
http://www.kwtx.com/home/headlines/Waco-Shooting-Near-Twin-Peaks-In-Waco-304043711.html
120 Guns?
Really?
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/05/its_not_race_that_divides_us_but_culture.html
“The racialists in power have again called us to an “honest discussion” about race. As they foresee it, this honest discussion will involve those of us who do not practice racism, but are not black, to come forward, confess our inherent racism, and be duly chastised or punished. Dialogue is not going to be part of the process, since non-blacks have already been found guilty, and the president’s jury is not remotely interested in evidence.
The trap in the president’s faux invitation is that it focuses our attention on the wrong component. The emphasis on race assumes too much, but does so because it advances the agenda of dividing us on grand scales, which is more conducive to the illusion of victimhood and the cure of entitlement. To divide by race in the way practiced by the president and the left enables them to hide one set of social realities from scrutiny, while predetermining the fault of another social set, based entirely on the colors of their skin, as long as it is understood that the guilty are not black. How is it possible that two or more groups, coincidentally divided by skin color, live in the same country but do not live in the same reality?
To hear our black, democratically elected president tell it, our dystopian nation is a hellhole of virulent racism. Thus, every thought, word or action that is critical of the president, and those who peddle racial victimhood and entitlement, is inherently racist. This is the rationale of a leftist, of a simpleton, because there is far too much history and evidence to the contrary to entertain it as serious. No nation on Earth more consciously ensures equality of treatment than ours.
So, if it’s not race that divides us, what is it? In a word, culture. For decades, a segment of the population that is black has drawn much attention, and critical scrutiny, for the culture that has become synonymous for many with what it is to be black. Not just what whites or non-blacks think constitutes blackness, but what many blacks think it is to be black. However, this is not true of all blacks, which is a critical distinction. There are many blacks who do not subscribe to black culture as it has been manifested in innumerable ways over the prior few decades. Even so, the ones who do, and whose practice of black culture is so visible and overt, make it easy for the lazy to think it is a representation of blackness in general, when it is not.
The president, for example, has no interest in representing the black citizens who live in stable family units, who work hard, provide for their children, encourage success, obey the laws, go to church, and try to do what’s right. He never speaks to their reality. His people, and Eric Holder’s people, are the ones who both celebrate and are imprisoned by a dysfunctional form of black culture. Within that culture there is self-segregation, hostility to other races, paranoia, anger, resentment, bitterness, victimhood, entitlement, crime, poverty, disinformation, deception, exploitation, broken families, destruction of religious faith, and failure..................................................”
Yeah, this is the biggest pile of media horsecrap I’ve ever seen.
#StopBlackViolence
#StopBlackCrime
While the Waco mess meets the legal definition of a riot, it does not fit the standard use of the term.
If a similar conflict had happened between black gangs and police, the charges by liberals of it being a police ambush would have been universal.
Odd how the writer doesn’t seem to understand what “riot” means. Obviously the biker incident wasn’t a riot. Is this even debatable? The writer’s craving for moral equivalence doesn’t mean that we just toss the meaning of words out the window.
I actually do find the biker incident fairly disturbing — the fact that you could have that kind of violence at a Hooters by the mall. But guess what? It’s not part of a pattern. Which is why there’s no “national freakout” over it.
And of course the writer ignores the most obvious bit of reality, which is that perceptions of black lawlessness are supported by the crime statistics and therefore neither racist nor irrational. Again, it’s the pattern thing.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
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