I’m going on vacation for a week. Honestly, I really need it. But before I do I couldn’t help leaving with you not with anything particularly insightful but something actually pretty obvious to anyone who has a brain and/or doesn’t harbor a lot of racial animosity toward black people that needs to find some comeuppance or ‘I told you so’ about Trayvon Martin.
So here goes.
For the last week or so, the right-wing racial resentment-o-sphere has been aghast about the horrific murder of Chris Lane, 22, a young Australian in the United States on a baseball scholarship. Lane was jogging when three young kids (two black, one either mixed race or white) decided to follow and kill him. The really sociopathic nature of the crime was brought home by the fact that one of the accused assailants allegedly told the police, “We were bored and didn’t have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody.”
In other words, it’s the Trayvon Martin case in reverse but now the liberal media is mum and President Obama isn’t rallying his gangbanger peeps to get all up in arms about it. Except of course when you consider that unlike the Martin case — where the press buzz and scandal was basically exclusively tied to the fact that George Zimmerman wasn’t arrested let alone charged with anything — two of the three boys allegedly behind Lane’s killing were arrested and immediately charged with capital murder. So young thugs kill an innocent man in cold blood and then get to walk free to death row or life imprisonment in the Oklahoma Department of Corrections.
Yeah, except that.
If you have any profile on the web and thought there was any problem with the Martin killing you’ve probably been inundated with a lot of emails or tweets or whatever jagging about the ‘double standard’ when the same thing happens and the races are reversed. And it’s always a bit of a challenge to distinguish the people who simply are lazy or dimwitted and haven’t considered the pretty obvious difference in the case that led to the media uproar in the Martin case and the majority of people searching for the ‘anti-Trayvon’ and hankering for evidence of the increasing struggle of white people to get a fair shake in America.
Stepping back from the projectile vomit of ignorant nonsense about this tragic murder, the response to it is part and parcel of the mass of writing on the right about the growing tide of black ‘mobs’ killing white people. Read World Net Daily and you’ll find virtually every other issue has a Birth of a Nation-like story along these lines (actually a topic I’ve wanted to commission a piece on for some time and one well-mocked by Cord Jefferson here.)
Young black men commit murders in this country at a vastly disproportionate rate to young white men. But murder victims of both races are overwhelming killed by members of their own race. 86% of white murder victims were killed by other whites and 94% of blacks were killed by blacks. Those numbers are from 1976 to 2005, a period that includes the highest murder rate era of the late 20th century. The differential today is likely lower today since as murder rates have declined to historic levels over the last 20 years, the fall has been particularly sharp among black men – a small data point that among other things lends some additional credence to the theory that lead poisoning was a significant driver of crime rates in the late 20th century.
This is the part where this kind of article falls back to say, well, race is complicated. It’s not as simple as it was in the old days. But actually, it’s still not that complicated. This whole episode amounts to little more than another plea from the subsection of aggrieved white Americans who still crave both social dominance and and the seat at the front of the racial victimization bus.
