XPost: alt.politics.republicans, talk.politics.guns, sac.politics   
   XPost: talk.politics.medicine   
   From: athletics@vanguard.edu   
      
   There’s no doubt Grafton Thomas committed a hate crime when he   
   allegedly stabbed five people at a Hanukkah party in New York.   
   He is an African American. There was a time when the two, a hate   
   crime, and African American, were not only mutually exclusive   
   but almost unthinkable. There was good reason. In the long vile,   
   hideous history of racially motivated hate violence in America,   
   African Americans have been the prime targets.   
      
   The legions of statutes, photos and various exhibits that depict   
   gruesome lynching scenes and mob violence against African   
   Americans at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in   
   Montgomery, Alabama is gory testimony to that. But even before   
   Thomas welded his machete at the Hanukkah party in New York that   
   had changed.   
      
   While Thomas’s attack is a grotesque and extreme example of hate   
   violence, it is hardly an aberration. Whites are the targets of   
   racially motivated attacks by blacks. True, some of the attacks   
   against whites by blacks are for their money and valuables.   
   Others are revenge assaults by blacks for real or imagined   
   racial insults. It is equally true that most violent crimes   
   against whites are committed by other whites, while most violent   
   crimes against blacks are committed by other blacks.   
      
   Yet even after discounting crimes that are hastily and   
   erroneously tagged as racially motivated, many blacks do attack   
   whites because they are white. Justice Department studies have   
   shown that a measurable number of the hate crimes examined were   
   committed against whites by black attackers. The Southern   
   Poverty Law Center which for decades has tracked hate violence   
   in America notes that cases of black-on-white violence has been   
   more than an aberration in the last two decades.   
      
   More than a few ultra-conservative websites, bloggers, and the   
   usual motley collection of white supremacists and rightist   
   extremist groups have jumped all over this and screamed long and   
   loud that racial hate now comes with a black face. This does   
   several things. It puts the finger-point on blacks as America’s   
   major hate mongers. It feeds into America’s gun mania by   
   igniting loud calls for fearful whites to arm and protect   
   themselves from lawless blacks. But most of all, it presents the   
   false narrative that racially motivated hate violence is a grim   
   product of a long bygone past, and that whatever hate violence   
   remains is perpetuated by blacks.   
      
   This lie has worked. Who better than Trump to prove it? He took   
   much heat in November 2015, for his false, gross factually   
   challenged and deliberately inflammatory retweet of a favorite   
   white nationalist talking point about black on white crime. Said   
   Trump, whites were in grave peril from being murdered by blacks,   
   and the stats supposedly proved that. The figures were quickly   
   debunked. It didn’t matter. The lie was out there and countless   
   numbers believed it.   
      
   Trump’s racist bombast could get zero media and public traction   
   if there weren’t just enough white victims and, now as the   
   attack on the Hanukkah party showed, Jewish victims of black   
   hate violence to make these fallacious claims seem plausible.   
   That’s stirred a kind of reverse prickliness on the part of many   
   blacks. The reaction has been either disbelief that blacks can   
   commit a hate crime. Or, there’s the complaint that when blacks   
   do commit a hate crime and whites are the victims, the media   
   blows it to the sky and federal hate crime charges are quickly   
   slapped on the black offender. The charge is that there’s a   
   double standard in how the media and public perceives and reacts   
   to black violence against whites as opposed to white violence   
   against blacks. Thus, there is little outcry or condemnation of   
   it by blacks. Civil rights leaders and organizations, yes, but   
   blacks in general, no.   
      
   Worse, some blacks quietly shrug off the violence with the   
   bitter remark that whites have been killing blacks for years and   
   getting away with it, and that there has been no massive   
   explosion of white outrage at the lax treatment of white killers.   
      
   The deafening silence by blacks on this apparent racial outrage   
   against whites will draw shouts from some that blacks are   
   hypocrites and have a double standard when victims are whites.   
   They’re not totally wrong. The victims of Thomas’s rampage were   
   innocents who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong   
   time and were stabbed because they were white.   
      
   Blacks must mourn these murders as passionately as they do those   
   of black victims of white attacks and just as passionately call   
   for the harshest punishment of the killer. The great strength of   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
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