The Ten Year Hate

Tim W. writes:

The “hate” crimes bill expansion is an outrage, but so is naming the bill after Shepard and Byrd. Both were brutally murdered about ten years ago, and in both cases their killers were quickly apprehended, prosecuted, and sentenced to death or life imprisonment. Yet we have these two cases thrown in our faces constantly. Also the entire community and state in which the killings occurred are blamed. For years after the Byrd killing reporters haunted Jasper, Texas looking for signs of “racism” in the town. They found a 171 year old cemetery that was once racially segregated. Even though it was no longer segregated, the iron fence that formerly separated the two sections had never been dismantled. Oh, the horror! When blacks took a majority on the city council last year, NBC saw it as a sign of racial progress in the wicked town. Gore confronted Bush with the killing in one of the 2000 presidential debates, demanding to know why the killers (sentenced to death) weren’t also charged with a “hate” crime under his governorship.

As for Shepard, we have the Laramie Project, a 2002 film in which the entire town of Laramie, Wyoming is indicted for “homophobia.” This film has also been adapted as a play, and is performed regularly on college campuses all over America.

The reason we keep hearing of these two cases after a decade has passed is that crimes of this type are actually rare in America. So when one occurs, the media and the left (redundant, I know) have to milk it for all it’s worth because it may be a decade before another one drops in their lap. They thought they had one at Duke with the “white boys gang-raping a young African-American woman,” but, alas, it fell apart.

Meanwhile, we have the Knoxville horror, the Wichita horror, the two white college girls murdered last year in North Carolina and Alabama, and a regular stream of black-on-white violence which we never see transformed into political causes or media feeding frenzies.

We properly worry about these new laws restricting our speech and thought, but most Americans are already programmed to react in a Pavlovian manner to crime, at least in public, where in counts. They dismiss the frequent assaults on whites as just random acts, while singling out the rare politically incorrect crimes as the worst in the history of our racist, sexist, homophobic nation.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 15, 2009 12:52 PM | Send