Race is not important, a Chicago newspaper editor assures us. That denies the obvious: America is the most race conscience society in the world. We learn that fact every day from black caucuses, black unions, black ministers, black teachers, black music, black art, black poets, black salon owners, black public employees, black names, black police officers, and black media. We learn it in stories written by members of the National Association of Black Journalists.
We talk about everything black except black mob violence and lawlessness. That is taboo.
-- Colin Flaherty, “White Girl Bleed a Lot”
Within hours of last Wednesday’s brutal mob attack on Steve Utash, Detroit’s scribes, Pharisee, and hypocrites were at work explaining away the attack’s reasonably inferrable racial motivation as anything but racial. As we described the other day at American Thinker, police, city officials, and the media all sang off the same hymn sheet that what happened was a “vigilante style attack.” (“Justice, Detroit Style”). It was not a vigilante attack, unless the crime being avenged was “driving while white.”
Detroit News columnist Laura Berman explains away race as a motive in favor of frustration at slow police response times. Sounds plausible: who hasn’t stopped for a minor traffic accident, waited around forever for the cops to show up, and finally just tried to beat the driver to death? At least race-baiting Darrell Dawsey sees racism all over this story --just not in any of the thugs who broke Utash's head. He says, “The real motivation may not have been that Utash is white, just that he was there.” True, Utash was there, unfortunately for him and his family – and so were at least 30 other people,*-- and none of them are in a coma. Now, I wonder what made Utash different . . . . ? As far as Dee-Dee’s concerned, blaming this on angry blacks can be tossed as a “fictional narrative.”
One media bright spot is that Rochelle Riley, a black columnist for the Detroit Free Press, and as reliably orthodox a liberal as ever knee-jerked her way through the issues of the day, surprised us all on Sunday by featuring in her column the comments of Jerry Carr, a 58-year-old black man who used to live in Detroit, and now lives in Grosse Pointe Woods, telling the truth about the Utash attack. Says Carr:
“Was this a hate crime? One of my friends said, ‘You’re doggone straight it’s a hate crime. That’s a no-brainer.’ If a black motorist was in Clinton Township and hit a little white boy and a crowd of white people beat him into a coma, they would have had to bring in the National Guard.”
Riley continues:
Carr said Detroit needs a dialogue, not between black people and white people, but between black people and black people. He said his oldest son earned a perfect math score on the SAT, attended University Liggett in Grosse Pointe Woods, Cranbrook in Bloomfield Hills and MIT in Cambridge, Mass., but the only place he was called the n-word was at a school in Detroit.
Is an admission like this in the Free Press a revolutionary event? No more so than the invention of the wheel. Now maybe things can get moving again.
Author Colin Flaherty says that we talk about everything black except “black mob violence and lawlessness,” which is taboo. I’m going one step farther and saying the mob violence and lawlessness are emblems of black racism, the mention of which is the real taboo.
Jerry Carr is right that the dialogue that’s really needed is the ones blacks need to have among themselves, not that I expect it’s close to being started. For one thing, it’s going to require black leaders with the moral authority to attempt it, and owning a bullhorn isn’t enough to qualify. If the the black community’s liberal majority have anyone suitable, none of the rest of us know who they are.
For a half century black leaders have been telling their constituents, and lecturing the rest of us, that no attention need be paid to concerns about black racism, because in comparison to white racism it barely exists, or because the concept of black racism is a categorical impossibility. To enforce the taboo, whites who call attention to black racism are condemned as -- racists. When an instance of black racism becomes unmistakably apparent, as it did last week in Detroit, it’s denied. According to Colin Flaherty, who wrote an entire book on the unreported instances of racist black violence against white victims, ‘Deniers always say the same thing: One, it does not exist. Two, here is why it does exist.”
When they’re finally caught and identified, I expect most of the men and boys who mobbed Steve Utash will turn out to be semi-literate, astoundingly ignorant of the universe beyond the ghetto, and utterly disconnected from community concerns that deniers like Laura Berman want to think are the sources of their frustration.
But even if they’re ignorant, they’re not stupid, or at least not completely stupid. What little they know, they know. And what they know is what they’ve heard hollered by the loudest and most insistent voices in their world. This mob’s “senseless” behavior isn’t senseless at all unless we agree to discount all that’s been repeated to them their whole lives by, if I can borrow from Colin Flaherty’s list, a social collective of indignant black ministers, teachers, rappers, public officials, matriarchs, grandmatriarchs, and neighborhood elders who never stop talking about the community’s unquenchable grievances against the majority race.
Factor that in, and there’s an evil straight-line logic to an attack like this. That’s why recognizing the attack as a hate crime, as Jerry Carr’s friend did, is a “no-brainer”; it’s why thousands of metro Detroiters also understood what happened last Wednesday the first moment they heard about it, while two days later the cops, the press, and the mayor were still frantically playing Hide the Race-Card.
And what Detroit’s young black males have been told, and who’s been telling them, is what makes it repulsive when certain of Detroit’s black clergy amble up, sheep-suits zipped tight, pretending to speak for the harmony of the races, and expecting us to believe that all their past hollering about justice has ever been anything but color-blind.
Take the Rev. Horace Sheffield III (please) who “issued a statement Saturday, urging Detroiters to take to the streets of the neighborhood to search for those who beat Utash.”
Sheffield’s far from Detroit’s worst when it comes to keeping racial resentment stoked, but he does his part. If Sheffield thinks there’s an advantage in it, he’ll enthusiastically kiss up to the hate-mongering racist Louis Farrakhan. When asked once how he could be so supportive at a public event where Farrakhan was laying down his usual anti-Semitic hate, Sheffield, (who, bear in mind, is a Baptist pastor), explained himself this way: “We need someone to give us direction. I believe we have a leader here that can organize us.” Farrakhan? The day Baptists need to get direction from a Jew-hating Black Muslim is the day you know Jesus has left the building.
But it’s not just Sheffield who does this. Detroit’s black clergy are nearly universal in deferring to “Minister Farrakhan” as the black community’s counterpart to the Apostle Paul.
Like Sheffield, the Rev. David Bullock of Greater St. Matthew Baptist Church also imagines he can combine the Christian gospel with black nationalist race-war theory. He can’t; no one can. Trying only leads to him babbling things like, “for many, it wasn’t until the killing of Trayvon Martin that the racial war actually hit home,” or dropping the usual dark hints about “the truth of the experience of the masses of Black Americans in America” (guess what? If you’re black, the “truth of the experience” is really going to piss you off!). Naturally, Bullock condemns criticism of Obama’s incompetence in office as racist, because
[t]he collective memory of slavery, segregation and degradation at the hands of a perverse and pervasive racist culture provides a tool for translating these innocent words into deep racially charged generalizations the majority culture has long attributed to African Americans.
Embrace Bullock’s racist gospel if you want, but then please don’t tell us it’s meant to lead to racial peace and understanding. One Bullock media project takes a look at the “STATE OF NIGGADOM” in America. A sample:
In this Mini - DocU Series, we confront regular Black American's confronting the reality of failed Black Bourgeoisie solutions to the race problem and demanding - We Gotta Do Something!
Invariably, exactly what blacks “gotta do” is left to the resentful imaginations of the hearers, a brotherhood that enfolds members of Utash’s would-be executioners; sure, maybe they’ve gone astray, but they’re still fellow victims of the depredations of the “majority race.” And didn’t they take to the streets? Didn’t they do something?
Bullock, in the wake of the attack, in order “to mend any bruised racial feelings” – (and to camouflage his race-obsessed opportunism) – announced that he was starting “a benevolent fund for Utash’s family and would ask other local pastors to join him.”
Struggling to keep up with Bullock’s showing off, Rev. Sheffield said the community needs to do more to track down those responsible -- as if there weren’t already too many people on the streets around Morang and Balfour looking to settle scores. But it’s what Sheffield said next that simply must be preserved forever in the International Hall of Irony:
Consequently, I am calling on all activists, march organizers, protest promoters, representatives of the people, speech makers, candidates for public office, ancestral worshippers, talk show hosts, and protectors and defenders of Detroit to prove that we equally deplore injustice and unbridled brutality no matter what color the victim is or of the one committing it.
Is it just me, or does that same list keep popping up? The only category in Sheffield’s list that I don’t recognize as significant contributors to black racism are the “ancestral worshippers.” And that’s only because I can’t figure out who the hell Sheffield’s talking about.
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*According to the earliest, less filtered reports in the Detroit News last Friday, from 20-30 people were in the crowd surrounding Utash as he was beaten – a number that has since vanished and been replaced by numbers of a dozen or fewer. Colin Flaherty describes a similar occasion in his book where a mob of twenty black people stole a white person’s bike, but only four persons actually put their hands on him. Consequently, “the local newspaper said only four people were involved. This kind of math happens a lot.”
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