Richard Boddie, a black libertarian friend of mine, sent me this article. It is written by Thomas Sowell, a black man I consider the most insightful commentator/philosopher in the country today (a title I've bestowed upon him for two decades).
The column is about the spate of recent unreported black race riots, as detailed in a book White Girl Bleed a Lot by former local SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE investigative reporter Colin Flaherty.
My post here proves one thing: I'm a racist. So says the Left.
Of course, the looney left so frequently plays the race card that this reflexive gambit has little impact any more -- outside of progressive groupthink circles.
The apologists for black-on-white mob violence think it's no big deal. It doesn't deserve reporting -- or at least reporting that details the race of the perps and the victims.
According to these left wing racists (yes, they ARE the racists, by any reasonable definition of the term), such reporting of black violence would only inflame racial animosity. Better to cover it up.
Of course, if there were a SINGLE incident where 30 WHITES set upon and severely beat a middle-aged black couple, the left wing (a.k.a. "mainstream") press would go into a tizzy -- drawing grand conclusions that white racism is rampant in America, yada, yada, yada.
Yet the fact that these brutal incidents DO occur over and over and over -- but are blacks groups beating mostly non-blacks -- somehow is no big deal. And anyone who says it is a big deal is -- you guessed it -- a racist.
That is because I had encountered that phrase before, while doing research for the four new chapters on intellectuals and race that I added to the revised edition of my own book, "Intellectuals and Society," published this year.
That phrase was spoken by a member of a mob of young blacks who attacked whites at random at a Fourth of July celebration in Milwaukee last year. What I was appalled to learn, in the course of my research, was that such race riots have occurred in other cities across the United States in recent years -- and that the national mainstream media usually ignore these riots.
Where the violence is too widespread and too widely known locally to be ignored, both the local media and public officials often describe what happened as unspecified "young people" attacking unspecified victims for unspecified reasons. But videos of the attacks often reveal both the racial nature of these attacks and the racial hostility expressed by the attackers.
Are race riots not news?
Ignoring racial violence only guarantees that it will get worse. The Chicago Tribune has publicly rationalized its filtering out of any racial identification of attackers and their victims, even though the media do not hesitate to mention race when decrying statistical disparities in arrest or imprisonment rates.
Such mob attacks have become so frequent in Chicago that officials promoting conventions there have recently complained to the mayor that the city is going to lose business if such widespread violence is not brought under control.
But neither these officials nor the mayor nor most of the media use that four-letter word, "race." It would not be politically correct or politically convenient in an election year.
Reading Colin Flaherty's book made painfully clear to me that the magnitude of this problem is even greater than I had discovered from my own research. He documents both the race riots and the media and political evasions in dozens of cities across America.
http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2012/07/17/are_race_riots_news
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