Why Does It Matter If The Shooter Is White Or Black?

The fact that the person who shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, was white matters plenty to many.

But why?

It’s not simply that it was a white cop.  Don’t forget that similar rage echoed through black communities (fortunately without the violence) when Treyvon Martin – a young black man – was killed by an Hispanic volunteer neighborhood watchman.

And it’s not due to hypocritical, selective concern by African-Americans, upset only by the death of young black men killed by non-blacks.

Of course, it’s true that the horrendous murder rate (think Chicago, for instance) of young blacks by others of the same race results in far more deaths than killings by non-blacks.

No, there’s something else.  The reason seems to be the perception that when a non-black person kills a black person he did so because of the different skin color.  How else can one explain the reaction to this disparity?  One can lament the death of anyone but regard the killing of a black person by a white person as special because of the racial factor.  The attack is perceived to be an attack on one’s race.  Murders within one racial group aren’t taken personally.

What a shame.  This is 2014 in Missouri, not 1963 in Alabama.  This is not Memphis in 1968 when Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot down.

What is the basis for thinking that a twenty-eight year old white police officer would shoot a large eighteen year old black man because of his color?

That is not to say it couldn’t happen.  Cops aren’t perfect and bad ones certainly exist.  But a possibility hardly supports the bias that he was one.

Yet the protesters and their media abettors apparently believe so.  And don’t underestimate the influence of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in fomenting that view.

Maybe the word “shame” isn’t strong enough.  To think that so many people – fellow Americans – view whites that way is disheartening. It’s as if a large segment of our population refuses to recognize how much American has changed in the past fifty years.  That is not a good omen for a cohesive society and nation.  What can be done?

 

Start with understanding why such black racism exists.  The Sharptons and Jacksons of our land certainly have their reasons for fueling and sustaining it.  I suspect, however, that the far more important factor is the welfare state and a sense of entitlement which plagues so many black Americans by robbing them of pride in themselves and hope in the future. 

The Great Society has generated a class of people, both black and white, who do not understand the reasons why they seem confined to lives of poverty.  They’ve been conditioned by liberal policies to believe that society owes them something.  They expect a “hand-out” not a “hand-up”.  And so, without initiative, they wallow on the fringes of society.

Blacks, in particular, have been instructed by liberals and the Sharpton types that they are victims.  They, therefore, have no responsibility for their undesirable situations.

 

And who are the victimizers?  Whites, of course.  The white cop who killed Michael Brown was simply one of them.