Obliging Eric Holder: Toward An Honest Discussion of Race

Posted By Jack Kerwick On July 19, 2013 @ 12:30 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 3 Comments

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It isn’t just orgies of violence and destruction that the acquittal of George Zimmerman has provoked. This verdict also renewed Attorney General Eric Holder’s call for an “honest” discussion of race, a discussion that, he maintains, Americans continue to defer.

I am second to none in my contempt for Holder, but, in this case, he couldn’t be more correct: Americans have not discussed race honestly. Nor will they do so as long as, ironically, the Eric Holders of the world continue to have their way.

For all his cries for a truthful dialogue on race, Holder, like the man to whom he answers and their fellow ideologues in the Racism-Industrial-Complex, is deeply invested in fortifying the pack of bald-faced lies that are American racial politics. So, with an eye toward dismantling these lies and heeding Holder’s request for straight talk, I submit the following questions to get the conversation going.

Traditionally, Americans have endorsed what has been called “the one drop” rule. According to this rule, if a person has any (black) African ancestry whatsoever, he or she is black. Well, since George Zimmerman’s great-grandfather was black, doesn’t this mean that he is black? After all, had Zimmerman lived in the antebellum South, the knowledge that he had “black blood” in his veins alone would have sufficed to make him as eligible a candidate for slavery as Trayvon Martin would have been.

In turn, doesn’t this mean that the Zimmerman/Martin case is but another black-on-black shooting?

If so, why, of the astronomical number of instances of black-on-black violence that occur in America on a regular basis and that Holder and his ilk ignore, are they determined to make, quite literally, a federal case out of this one instance of such violence? If not, if — unlike Barack Obama and Holder himself — Zimmerman somehow defies the one-drop rule, how or why does this justify treating the shooting death of Trayvon Martin far differently than the shooting deaths of the thousands of blacks who are shot dead annually by other blacks?

It is a twisted subculture of the black underclass that underwrites the epidemic of black violence. Far from being condemned, it has been romanticized and/or excused (by people like Holder and Obama). However, countless numbers of young black males like Martin imbibe a warped sense of masculinity from this ghetto ethos of which gangsta’ rap and hip hop are the most popular vehicles. May not this have had at least some role to play in Martin’s fate—as well as that of the legions of young blacks that kill and are killed on a daily basis in this country?

In an honest discussion of race, isn’t it imperative that we finally express at least a fraction of the outrage over the shocking rates of black-on-white violence that was expressed by Holder and the like over the killing of Trayvon Martin? It goes without saying that if whites were targeting blacks to the extent to which blacks target whites, no one—least of all Holder—would stand for it. So why do such “anti-racists” as Holder and Obama endorse this grotesque double standard, standards that sanction the debasement of white life while confirming the suspicions of an ever growing number of whites that “anti-racism” is really just code for anti-white?

Why is black criminality and violence invariably explained away by “anti-racists” in terms of “root causes,” but when racial animus is directed, or is even, as in the case of George Zimmerman, alleged to have been directed against blacks, there is no search for any “root causes”? In the case of Zimmerman, say, his property and that of those in his lower-middle class community had been besieged by people who fit a certain profile—a profile that Trayvon Martin matched. Is it not fair to think that had Zimmerman and his neighbors not suffered these injustices, that maybe he wouldn’t have been quite as suspicious of Martin that fateful night?

We use the words “racial unrest” and “race riots” in characterizing exhibitions of mayhem of the kind that are unfolding in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict. Why? Such terms suggest a clash between the races. In reality, from at least the beginning of the second half of the last century to the present, so-called “race” riots have actually been black riots. When Klansmen used to spread terror throughout black communities, no one referred to these episodes as “race riots.” Neither do we do so today when recalling those times. So, again, why do we use this term to describe mobs of blacks who target whites?

There are plenty more topics that would be addressed in a genuinely honest discussion of race. These are just some questions that come immediately to mind in the aftermath of the Zimmerman verdict.

I won’t hold my breath waiting for those who claim to want an honest discussion of race to respond honestly to them—or respond to them at all.

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