Targeting Whites But Harming Blacks

I’m afraid that Robert L. Woodson Sr.’s words in his Wall Street Journal op-ed will fall on deaf ears:

Are only white people capable of hate crimes? If you get all your news from mainstream media sources, that’s what you’d think. A 51-year-old black man allegedly stabbing a 12-year-old white boy in Pittsburgh while shouting racial epithets barely made national news. The same was true when a black man was arrested for savagely beating a 65-year-old Asian woman in Midtown Manhattan. We saw endless coverage of the despicable assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, but when a 25-year-old black male allegedly killed a Capitol police officer last week, MSNBC erroneously reported the suspect was white.

Throughout 2020 there was a rise in violence against Asian-Americans, but the race of the perpetrators was typically mentioned only when they were white. Media and other elites obsessively push the narrative that the greatest threat in this country is coming from “white supremacists.” This gross oversimplification has dire consequences for the most vulnerable in our society—those living in the poorest neighborhoods—and for the nation as a whole.

A media environment in which the only acceptable villains are white creates a more dangerous world for all of us. The rush to judgment based on skin color is familiar to those of us who lived through segregation. In those days, some in law enforcement couldn’t care less about crimes committed by blacks against other blacks, but there were severe penalties for offenses against whites. We marched and demanded fair and equal treatment under the law. As far as the application of criminal law, much of what is happening today is a retreat to the pre-Civil Rights South.

Every tragic police killing of a black person is amplified by radical progressives to accuse police of white supremacy and to push for defunding and anarchy. The more law-enforcement officers we lose to defunding, early retirements and drastic drops in recruitment, the fewer we have to patrol lower-income neighborhoods. Homicides among lower-income minorities soar. Meanwhile, the cries of the 81% of blacks who oppose defunding the police are chronically ignored.

concluding

Race remains a salient issue in America, but not only because of whites victimizing minorities. Yet the U.S. is the world’s most prosperous and harmonious multiracial society. We have some serious problems we must address, but we can’t solve them unless we’re willing to speak about them honestly.

There are two things that sadden me about what’s going on now. The first and most important is that most of those injured by the race-baiting that’s going on in the media right now will be black. The second is that those who are telling the rest of us that Mr. Woodson is a liar and that we’re not the “most prosperous and harmonious multiracial society” are under 50 and don’t realize how much progress we’ve made.