By Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
While the mainstream media lavished endless attention and
emotion on the George Zimmerman trial for the killing of Trayvon Martin last
weekend, the body of a 17-year-old black boy was discovered on basement stairs,
face down, behind a boarded-up house in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago.
His body was so badly decomposed that local news reports originally suggested that
he had died of blunt force trauma. An autopsy demonstrated that he had in fact
been shot to death. His family blamed his death on his refusal to join a gang
at school.
The boy's name was Darryl Green. Thus far, no non-local
media outlet has told the story of Darryl Green. That's because Darryl Green
was likely killed by another black person.
This is the world in which we now live: a Hispanic man
kills a black boy, likely in self-defense, and the media portray the killing as
evidence of a brutal white power structure looking to reinstitute Jim Crow.
Melissa Harris-Perry of MSNBC laments that the not guilty verdict in the
Zimmerman trial means it's OK to kill innocent black children. Commentator
Andrew Sullivan suggests that the verdict means a return to "the era of
lynching." The cover of the New York Daily News links civil rights martyr
Emmitt Till to Trayvon Martin. As John Nolte of Breitbart News tweeted, we now
live "in a country with a twice-elected black president and the media acting
like Mississippi is still burning."
The sad fact is that the media do not care about dead
black Americans, unless those blacks are murdered by whites. Never mind the
fact that blacks constitute 13.1 percent of the American population but 49
percent of murder victims. Never mind the fact that black life in the inner
cities is plagued not by white people stalking down black kids, but by black
kids hunting down other black kids.
Such facts don't forward the leftist narrative that
America is a terribly brutal and racist country requiring endless government
interventionism to fix. Such facts don't forward the leftist narrative that
white folks, particularly conservative white folks who believe in judging
people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin,
are the true threat to black success. Such facts undercut the liberal agenda of
ignoring problems in the black community in favor of cobbling together a
coalition of people dedicated to fundamentally changing the system.
The left is committed to changing America in basic ways.
But in order to create enough support for changing the greatest and most
tolerant nation ever to grace the planet, the left must portray America as an
evil, nasty place. Doing that requires promoting the lie that non-black
Americans hate black people, and would dig their old white sheets and burning
crosses out of storage if given half a chance. Both the media and the
Democratic Party are complicit in that propaganda effort. Building on the fact
that America used to be a racist place, and ignoring 50-plus years of American
transformation, the left has convinced many Americans, both black and white,
that America is a grotesque and monstrous place.
For many Americans, it feels so good to buy into that notion.
It provides an easy dose of unearned moral superiority -- "America is
racist, but I'm not, because I believe America is racist." It allows
Americans to ignore real and pressing problems in favor of moaning about vague
and undefined ones -- "forget about Darryl Green, let's talk about
institutional racism." Most of all, it carries with it an easy and
dismissive solution -- "let's turn power over to a chosen few who can fix
everything."
Meanwhile, more Darryl Greens will die. So will more
Trayvon Martins, given the fact that Martin was the product of a broken home,
had a criminal history and a history of fighting, and was caught up in drug
culture -- all factors in his death, and all problems the media refuse to talk
about. But the media don't care about those deaths. All they care about is the
larger goal: fixing America, one fake racial scandal at a time.
No comments:
Post a Comment