Cold-blooded murder over a joke with “racial overtones”

In 1998, Stanford A. Douglas Jr., then 22, was employed as a maintenance man at The Baptist Home in Philadelphia. William Berkeyheiser, then 55, was an executive in plant operations. Douglas, who is black, overheard Berkeyheiser, who was white, tell a joke that Douglas thought had racial overtones. Douglas did a slow boil for seven years, until March 27, 2005, when he allegedly shot Berkeyheiser dead as he opened the front door of his home.

Such murders of whites by blacks, carried out for obscure motives of real or imagined racial hurt, are a constant in modern American history, ranging from the black Caribbean butler who in 1914 burned down Frank Lloyd Wright’s home Taliesen and murdered seven people including Wright’s mistress, to the mass murdering Colin Ferguson on the Long Island Railroad in 1993, to this latest racial murder. But society declines ever to notice the phenomenon, or delineate any pattern in it. Each murder remains a separate, senseless act, each (white) victim simply a victim of chance.

In fact, as I wrote in 1994 about the LIRR murders, blacks are constantly told by white and black society that whites are racists who are responsible for all the failures and frustrations that blacks may experience in their lives. Black on white murder, motivated by racial resentment, is the inevitable consequence. The Berkeyheiser killing is particularly disturbing and significant because it suggests that such resentment may stay alive for many years after the incident or supposed incident that gave rise to it, both individually, in the case of Douglas, and collectively, in the case of most of politically organized black life in America. Though slavery ended 140 years ago, and all legal discrimination ended 40 years ago, and though white society has turned itself inside out in order to make up for past wrongs to blacks, a significant element in the black community continues to view blacks as the oppressed and whites as the oppressors who deserve whatever comes to them. Under those circumstances, the “silent tax” of the racial murder of whites will continue.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 25, 2005 08:54 PM | Send