Racial Double Standards

From Frontpage Magazine:

In the past week, two television reporters in Roanoke, Va. — Alison Parker and Adam Ward — were murdered by a black man who hated whites, and a white police officer in Houston — Darren Goforth — was murdered by a black man. Neither crime has been labeled a hate crime. And no mainstream media reporting of the murders attributes either to race-based hate.

For the mainstream media, the Roanoke murders were committed by “a disgruntled former employee,” and regarding the Houston policeman, the media report that, in the words of The New York Times, “a motive for the shooting remained unclear.”

The disregard of anti-white hatred as the motive for blacks who murder whites even when the murder is obviously racially motivated comes from the same people who denied that the Islamist Nidal Hasan’s murder of 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood was religiously motivated. These people — all on the left — have an agenda: to deny black racism and Islamist-based violence whenever possible. Only white police and other white violence against non-whites is clearly racist — even when not.

Thus, President Barack Obama convened a “White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism” rather than a “White House Summit on Countering Islamist Violence.” Though the summit was convened the month following the Islamist massacre of the Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris, the words “Islam,” “Muslim” and “Islamist” did not once appear in the White House’s 1,668-word fact sheet on the summit. The Obama administration went so far as to label Hasan’s murders of his fellow soldiers “workplace violence.”

So, too, the mainstream media depicted the black murderer of eight white people at a Connecticut beer warehouse in 2010 as a man who had been angered by white racism, not as the white-hater he was. Under the headline “Troubles Preceded Connecticut Workplace Killing,” a New York Times article reported: “He might also have had cause to be angry: He had complained to his girlfriend of being racially harassed at work, the woman’s mother said, and lamented that his grievances had gone unaddressed.”

And a Washington Post headline read: “Beer warehouse shooter long complained of racism.”

The fact was that the man was fired for stealing beer from his workplace, and there was a video of him doing so.

Back in the heyday of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King proclaimed:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

He was calling for a single standard to apply to blacks and whites, in an era when a double standard often disadvantaged blacks. And decent people accepted the idea, consistent as it was with the individualism of the American political culture.

But soon enough came demands for a double standard, with affirmative action, racial quotas and incessant excuses for bad behavior from the black community.  That continues today, and it poisons the culture and generates fully justified resentment from whites.  That liberals label that resentment “racist” silences some voices, but does nothing to reduce the resentment.  In fact it amplifies it, since whites not only resent the double standard, but also resent being attacked for believing in racial equality rather than the black race privilege that the liberals want.

Blacks who marched with King were not demanding a double standard.  And they did not need a double standard, since their behavior did not need a bevy of excuses made for it.  They were far different from the rioters in Ferguson and Baltimore, and from the black racist killers.