Leonard Pitts, Jr. and Hate Crimes

On June 5, 2007 columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. published a column entitled Racist cries of media bias don't fit this crime. Here is the beginning of Pitt's column

It seems that in January, a young white couple, Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, were victims of a brutal crime. They were carjacked, kidnapped and raped. Cleaning fluid was sprayed into Christian's mouth. She was stuffed in a trash can and apparently suffocated. Newsom was shot and set afire. His body was dumped. Five blacks, one a woman, have been arrested.

The story made headlines around Knoxville. It was unnoticed nationally.

That has changed. A constellation of white supremacists and conservative bloggers has pushed the story into the national limelight as illustration of their argument that news media, constrained by political correctness, refuse to report black on white crime while pulling out all the stops when crime is white on black, as in the Duke lacrosse debacle. Me, I would see their Duke case and raise them a Central Park jogger, but what do I know?

Anyway, bloggers like Michael Oliver have chastised the "liberal, biased, Mainstream Media" for missing the Knoxville story. He asked: "Had the roles been reversed, would the media ignore such a horrific crime?"

Truth is, media ignore horrific crimes all the time. Space is limited and growing more so. Which means the story that catches fire usually has some element beyond gruesomeness to sell it. In the Duke case, it was class, privilege, sex and race that did it. [Snip]

And last weekend, white supremacists held -- I kid you not -- a "rally against genocide" in Knoxville.

So the poor victimized White Crackers are angry that the above described horrific crime is not being tried as a "Hate Crime."

So what happened next? From Leonard Pitts yesterday:

As you may know, yours truly has lately been the target of death threats and harassment from the ranks of the not-so-tightly-wrapped.

Digby very kindly points at the column by Kathleen Parker where Parker points out that the real problem is that Hate Crime laws create social divisions.

Groups such as the Anti-Defamation League have insisted that hate crime laws are necessary because crimes that make minority communities fearful "damage the fabric of our society and fragment communities." The Duke and Knoxville cases cast doubts on that premise. It is human nature to resent groups and individuals deemed more special than others.

Signaling through laws (or media treatment) that one group's suffering is more grievous than another's - or that one person's murder is worse than another's - is also likely to fragment communities, as well as to engender the very animosities such laws are meant to deter.

Let me just say that I think this shows that Ms. Parker is a sick, stupid, and historically ignorant bitch who may well be in the pay of the KKK. And those are my kinder thoughts.

She probably agrees with George Will that the Racist Southerners who felt kicked out by the Democratic Party and went with George Wallace in 1968 felt that the were an oppressed minority. Well, so do pedophiles and rapists. They are oppressed for damned good reasons. What they want destroys society. They SHOULD be oppressed. Racists, rapists and pedophiles have no positive value to American society.

Here is a short American History Lesson for those who have forgotten

America is still trying to figure out how to effectively oppress the scary slave Niggers-Negroes-Blacks-African-Americans. America's dirty secret (hidden only from the current White over class) is that America was built to a great extent on the oppression of Black Slaves. That's why they are in the Constitution. They were really important. But the rot of slavery is worse for the oppressors than for the oppressed, because the fear of the slave rebellion never goes away until it is faced, and the White over class will do almost anything to refuse to face their own fear of Blacks.

The White over class fear leads to the oppression of the under class, and that oppression causes anger in those who are oppressed. That is the key to the devastation slavery has had - and still has - on America. But there is no oppression today. The slaves have been freed and segregation is ended, Right?

That is only what the blind wish to see. The history of the oppression of the slaves is more than just legal oppression. A lot more.

The original system of oppression was total warfare on the "Niggers" when they were legally called slaves rather than humans or citizens. Before the Civil War every young White Southern male was trained to defend his Race when the inevitable Great Slave Rebellion occurred. It was even built into the college curriculum. Nothing was every placed in the way of those young White soldiers. No law, no morality, no recognition that the targets of their whips, guns and oppression were even human. Ask the Churches. Even God and the Bible justified the oppression of the slaves. The Southern Baptists only publicly recanted this about two decades ago. And privately?

When the U.S. Constitution was written, this was the social basis of the most powerful states other than Massachusetts.

After the Civil War the scary slaves were given citizenship and access to the courts (lot of good THAT did) and the solution was a new form of oppression. It was a two-pronged attack on Niggers/Negroes. The legal prong was to segregate them. Separate them from their betters, the Whites. The other prong - not legal, but de facto - was to terrorize them if they even poked their heads up and asked to vote or to question why they were not treated like other citizens. The many branches of the KKK were institutions to carry out this illegal oppression. [This was not a conspiracy, planned by a central group of conspirators. It was a reflection of the social fears of the White oppressors, just as the fear of a slave rebellion had been. Given the fears, this reaction was logical.]

It is the second, illegal, prong of repression which is still widely practiced. Intimidation is preferred today because it doesn't get as much bad Press. That wasn't a problem before the Civil Rights Movement. In those days the Press just didn’t bother to report the problems. Today random White-on-Black violence like the Whites who dragged the James Byrd Jr. to death behind a pickup in Jasper, Texas a few years ago is still part of the social system of White oppression of African-Americans. Any dark-skinned American who reads or hears of James Byrd Jr. and doesn't think "That could have been me or one of my children." simply is disconnected from reality. Because it could have been.

The recent story from Jena, Louisiana about "the White Tree" shows exactly how the modern oppression is done. [ h/t to Rick Perlstein ] It starts with young White (usually males) expressing their superiority (That's OUR tree) and then enforcing it with intimidation. (Nooses hung from the tree.)

I get angry when some ignorant cracker tries to intimidate me, and I'm White. Further attempts to intimidate the African-American kids are sure to follow, and when they do, will result in some fights.

So then White Law steps in. The cracker (elected) DA adds to the intimidation of the "Uppity Blacks" by bringing attempted Murder charges against six of them.

I don't know if "Hate" crime is the best name for the laws. But if the law does not somehow recognize the illegal repression and intimidation that goes on in every American ghetto every day even now, then all we have is "Cracker Law."

Without some form of ENFORCED "Hate Crime" legislation, then we are still back at the day after the Emancipation Proclamation and the Southern Crackers (not just in the South, either) are still practicing their control of the scary Black Race through intimidation. That is why it is important to look at the race of the criminal and of the victim and look at the criminal's motive. When the motive is includes Race and the victim is the descendant of slaves (or looks like it) then America as a whole must take special actions to stop those crimes and the criminals need to know that their buddies can't get them off (KKK? Birmingham church bombing? Anyone?)

Ah, but the Civil Rights Movement is over, Segregation is no longer legal, and we are a race-blind society, right?

Nope. That was the first prong of the oppression. The second prong involving intimidation and violence is still alive and very, very well. It is especially appreciated by the Republican Party where it gives them thousands of White Cracker votes in every election.

And while I am ranting about this Racist Cracker society in American (intentionally adopted by Nixon into the Republican Party in 1972 and carefully coddled there), let's not forget the five Opus Dei Catholics on the Supreme Court who are supporting the Southern Crackers by making it generally not legal to measure America's biggest inherent Crime by the only measure that matters, Race. Look away and it's not there, right? Can't see it and there's no Racism. Can't legally measure it, and judges aren't allowed to see it.

Voila! Racism is gone. Just get the DA's to charge a few pesky Black teenage kids who don't like being oppressed and the problem is solved. They aren't oppressed Blacks. They're just criminals who should be imprisoned. Oh, and building more privately owned prisons makes money for the Crackers while holding the "criminals" out of sight.

Anyone who doesn't see the need for effective Hate Crime legislation in this nation - this Nation which was built as much on Race Hatred as any other element - is either blind or a fool. America's Race hatred of Blacks makes this a special case, one that requires special legislation and serious enforcement. It requires what is called "Hate Crimes Legislation" and it requires that those laws be enforced. Otherwise, we act like Bush in Iraq. We just keep kicking the can down the road until someone else has to handle it, and take the blame.

Until then we will all suffer from the fear of the oppressors and the anger of the oppressed. Even those who do not participate in either the fear or the anger are diminished and damaged by the actions of both.

Right-wing DixieCrat terrorism -- recent history

Meteor Blades reminds those of us who love the ideals of America that on Jun 21, 1964, three young men were murdered by members of the KKK in Mississippi because they dared to try to register African Americans as voters.

The Black slaves had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War and their freedom was enshrined into the Constitution in the 13th Amendment in 1865. Then the 15th amendment, passed in 1870, guaranteed that "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

Nearly a century later the White over-class, represented by the KKK, was murdering individuals who tried to exercise that Constitutional Right or help others to do so. This was only eight months after the Church bombing in Birmingham in which four teenage girls died for the "crime" of being Black. The killers hid behind the twin veils of secrecy and intimidation of witnesses for decades, as right-wingers usually do.

It was these killers, the southern KKK in its many versions, together with the angry frightened white supporters who were being forced to share power with people their families had owned as property (like dogs and horses) a century earlier who were taken wholesale into the Republican Party in Nixon's and Lee Atwater's Southern Strategy of 1972.

Dick Cheney and the Southerners in the American Republican Party are the direct familial and ideological descendants of these frightened, vicious people. They deny it, saying that they do not approve of such terroristic tactics and of the KKK. But the fact is, the two incidents mentioned here proved counter productive. They brought down more heat than could be dealt with, and in fact encouraged a lot more people to work to share the Civil Rights all Americans were supposed to have with African-Americans. The change in the attitudes of the Southern racists was not because terrorism was immoral (illegal had never bothered them) but was because it had quit being a successful strategy -- nearly a century after the Civil War.

I was in college in 1964, so I guess that Meteor Blades and I are about the same age. I suspect he grew up in the North and saw from a distance how bad this terrorism and intimidation was. I grew up in east Texas, and it was so normal that I only realized that I was attending an all-white segregated High School because my parents made sure I was aware of Brown vs. Board of Education and because I watched TV clips of the National Guard trying to keep the peace and get the Black students safely into the Arkansas schools in the late 50's under Eisenhower. The very few incidents that made it into the news (the local editor did not want to lose subscriptions - or have his building burned down) don't touch on the violence and anger of that period.

It is somewhat better now. That is largely because the worst of the racists and terrorists have died off or gotten too old to be very active. I had thought that our kids were getting better, and that the right-wing American terrorists were becoming extinct, but the American conservative movement has either resurrected them or created a new set of terrorists with which we have to deal. Race is less the issue than it was, but now Class has come to the fore in ways not seen since the late 19th and early twentieth century, and war is still an acceptable tool to them to use for little more than just getting wealthier. And the only reason personal terrorism has declined in America is that the upper classes and wealthy have decided that it is no longer an effective tool to use to keep and augment their positions. In many ways, centralized ownership and control of the mass media has replaced much of the retail level terrorism of earlier years.

I guess that is a little better but it, too, has to be dealt with.

In the meantime, let's remember that the three murdered members of the Congress of Racial Equality died to give us many of the things that are better about America now. Those of us here now need to try to clean our nation up even more, so that we can hand it off even more improved to our children.

God! I must either be getting old or I'm in a preachy mood this morning! Or both.