Posted on 10/25/2002 9:21:26 AM PDT by Fintan
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BLACK PEOPLE have done it for decades. When we hear on the news about some low-life doing a despicable deed, we whisper to ourselves, "I sure hope he wasn't black." It's an understandable reaction, especially for a people who have seen how the dominant culture (re: white folks) takes the actions of a person different from it and makes it represent an entire race. And it works the other way, too. When black folks get in a position to achieve, we root for them on general principle. One recent example: blacks who once couldn't care less about Notre Dame football now pay attention to it because Tyrone Willingham is the college's first black head coach. When it came to the Beltway sniper, the mind-set was the culprit couldn't be black. Black people just didn't do those kinds of things, we thought. Even the so-called experts said white males were more prone to such hideous acts. So when discussion came up about the sniper's identity, the consensus seemed to be, "Well, you know it's got to be a white boy." Then came John Allen Muhammad. And suddenly all attempts to distance ourselves came to a head-scratching halt. It was done with diabolical efficiency, this picking off of human lives. In most cases, one shot led to instant death. Over the past three weeks, the sniper is believed responsible for 13 shootings, 10 of them deadly. The targets appeared random, their race, profession, gender or ethnicity unimportant. One of the lives claimed was that of Kenneth Bridges, an African-American East Germantown man much beloved and respected in the community. So the killer couldn't be black, could he? Yes he can. And it's time to understand that categorizing crimes based on race doesn't fly anymore, despite how convenient it is to our peace of mind. Good and bad, as trite as it sounds, comes in all colors. "If you go randomly killing people, you are a bad person," Tufuku Zuberi, 43, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Africana Studies, said yesterday. "Race is not important." Truth is, when it comes to high-profile crime stories, some blacks tend to think "Oh, we don't do that." In an essay titled "Straighten Up and Fly Right," Stanley Crouch writes about an old "Saturday Night Live" routine called "Black Crime/White Crime." A white crime: A man shoots 18 people at work, then kills himself. A black crime: A man runs out of a liquor store with two six packs and a whiskey bottle in his back pocket. The bottle falls out. When he goes back to retrieve it, he gets busted. And remember Colin Ferguson? When Crouch first heard about the Long Island Railroad shooting in 1993 that left six people dead and 19 people injured, "I knew that the perpetrator was a white guy," Crouch wrote. "When I saw Colin Ferguson in handcuffs, I said, 'Well, I guess we have gotten there.' " Adds Zuberi, "Sometimes I think it's a consequence of selective amnesia to create a picture of our community that doesn't exist," he said. "We need to become more self-critical." "Along those lines, it would be very important to recognize we are human, too." In fact, authorities may have lost ground in the Beltway sniper case largely because they were focused on looking for white people. The Washington Post reported that police approached a blue Chevy Caprice in a Baltimore parking lot near an interstate exit on Oct. 8. It was the day after a boy, 13, was shot before he entered his middle school in Bowie, Md. Muhammad was allowed to go. "Everyone was looking for a white car with white people," said a high-ranking police source. Racial profiles "don't work for anybody," Zuberi said. "Racial profiling is a mistake. Everybody should be aware of that now." But race will probably play a greater role in the sniper story. "You know it was a brother, and it's going to impact how we're viewed," Zuberi said. And onto Muhammad falls the burden of being "a representative of us."
But he's not. And we shouldn't accept it. Nor should we continue to use out-of-whack emotional scales to weigh whether something is a white crime or a black crime.
"The time of smug dismissal has passed," Crouch wrote. Indeed, it has. |
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Unless the blakc is a republican house slave. sorry, but this makes the rest of the column incongruous.
Yeah, tell that to Powell and Rice. Do blacks really believe this stuff?
I think everyone who reads this article is going to pick this line out. When I read it, this was the first and only thing that stood out. As I completed the article, all I could think about was this line. The first two responses, concentrate on that line. And we all know it to be a crock and a lie. So, what the author is saying, that despite all the attacks to the contrary, Jackson, Sharpton, Belafonte, et al; all of these race hustling poverty pimps are secretly saying - "Wow! Good job Powell/Rice/Thomas!" When you read a line like that - so blatently absurd - the rest of the article falls flat.
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