In a free society, composed of individuals who are unequal by nature, the highest government good is neutrality in the treatment of its citizens before the law. One standard and one justice for all. This is the only equality that not at odds with individual freedom. It is the only equality that can make a diverse community one. A nation that respects individual rights and protects individual freedom cannot be sustained if there is one standard for black and another for white; one for rich and another for poor. It can only be sustained by a single standard — one law and one justice for all. – David Horowitz & John Perazzo
(FrontPage) When a Neighborhood Watch guard shot Trayvon Martin in February 2012, a chorus of civil rights activists concluded that he had been killed because of his race. Michael Skolnick, the political director for hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, spoke for the consensus in an article he titled, “White People You Will Never Look Suspicious.”
I will never look suspicious to you. Even if I have a black hoodie, a pair of jeans and white sneakers on … I will never watch a taxicab pass me by to pick someone else up. I will never witness someone clutch their purse tightly against their body as they walk by me. I won’t have to worry about a police car following me for two miles, so they can ‘“run my plates.”’ I will never have to pay before I eat. And I certainly will never get “‘stopped and frisked.”’ I will never look suspicious to you, because of one thing and one thing only. The color of my skin. I am white….
Skolnick spoke for those who rushed to condemn the Watch Guard, George Zimmerman, calling him a racist and killer in advance of the evidence, and demanding his arrest. It was the pervasive theme of the outrage even though Zimmerman was of Peruvian descent and not “white.” To make the racial case, Zimmerman’s accusers labeled him a “white Hispanic,” and disregarded the fact that he was Latino with a great-grandfather who was black. Speaking for the many, Congressional Black Caucus member Hank Johnson claimed that Martin was “executed for WWB in a GC—Walking While Black in a Gated Community.” It was the unmistakable implication of President Obama’s own statement on the case: “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” For the already convinced, Trayvon Martin was killed not because of anything he had done, but because he was a black man in a racist culture, and therefore racial prey.
As it happens, the term “white skin privilege” was first popularized in the 1970s by the SDS radicals of “Weatherman,” who were carrying on a terrorist war against “Amerikkka,” a spelling designed to stigmatize the United States as a nation of Klansmen. Led by presidential friends, Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, the Weather terrorists called on other whites to renounce their privilege and join a global race war already in progress.
Although their methods and style kept the Weather radicals on the political fringe, their views on race reflected those held by the broad ranks of the political left. In the following years, the concept of “white skin privilege” continued to spread until it became an article of faith among all progressives, a concept that accounted for everything that was racially wrong in America beginning with its constitutional founding. As Pax Christi USA, a Catholic organization, explained: “Law in the U.S. protects white skin privilege because white male landowners created the laws to protect their rights, their culture and their wealth.” This was the theme of A People’s History of the United States, the most popular book ever written on the subject, of university curricula across the nation.
Eventually, the concept of white skin privilege was embraced even by liberals who had initially resisted it as slander against a nation that had just concluded a historically unprecedented civil rights revolution. This was because the concept of white skin privilege provided an explanation for the fact that the recent Civil Rights Acts had not led to an equality of results, and that racial disparities persisted even as overt racists and institutional barriers were vanishing from public life.
The inconvenient triumph of American tolerance presented an existential problem for civil rights activists, whom it threatened to put out of work. “White skin privilege” offered a solution. As the Southern Poverty Law Center explained: “white skin privilege is not something that white people necessarily do, create or enjoy on purpose,” but is rather an unavoidable consequence of the “transparent preference for whiteness that saturates our society.” In other words, even if white Americans were no longer racists, they were.
A parallel concept favored by progressives was ‘institutional racism.” This was the idea that even in the absence of actual racists, the values and standards of American institutions by their very nature discriminated against non-whites. These two sophistries made possible new battles and continued the life of campaigns that annually lured millions of dollars into the deep pockets of “anti-racist” organizations and movements, even as racists were no longer detectable in the institutions themselves.
Lynching Whites
What reality is there to the claim that white skin is privileged and black is not? Is it really the case that non-whites are the exclusive targets of racial vendettas, while whites enjoy protection from racial prejudice and collective suspicion? No sober individual could possibly think so.
In fact, for decades, at the hands of progressives white males have been the prime villains in the nation’s classrooms, and the principal targets of disapprobation and presumptive guilt in the general political culture as well. Not that long ago the nation witnessed a public scandal as racially charged as the Trayvon Martin case in the public lynching of three white male students at Duke University. Like other institutions of higher learning, Duke prides itself on its racial tolerance. There are no more sacred principles on campuses generally than racial tolerance, diversity and inclusion. As everyone knows, however, but few will take the risk to observe, these principles extend to every race but whites.
When an anonymous individual drew a noose on the office door of an African American faculty member at Columbia University the entire university community concluded that it was an act of racism, and the institution was virtually shut down to express collective horror that such an event might occur. This all took place before there was any indication that its message was racial or that its perpetrator was not the faculty member herself – which has been a not infrequent occurrence on campuses before.
When three white members of the Duke lacrosse team were accused of rape by a black prostitute, on no evidence whatsoever, the campus not only did not defend the presumption of their innocence, but rushed with intemperate haste to punish them as though they already been tried and convicted. The university expelled them, the Lacrosse coach was fired, the Lacrosse season terminated, their names were published and 88 members of the Duke faculty signed an open letter condemning their racist deed.
The cloud of suspicion and presumption of guilt that engulfed the students, ruined their reputations and put their lives and careers on halt. It lasted for more than a year with no challenge university officials or public authorities or the mainstream media. Yet it was entirely based on the false and malicious and false accusations of a local prostitute and drug addict, whose record of criminal behavior and absence of credibility were eagerly overlooked because she was black. While the faces of the innocent accused were plastered across the national media where they were portrayed as racists and rapists, the accuser herself was protected, and her name withheld throughout the case—even after her criminal libels were exposed.
The nameless accuser was a professional stripper who had been hired to entertain a fraternity party. A fellow stripper, who was also black and present at the event denied the rape had ever taken place. One of the accused rapists proved that he was not even present when the attack was alleged to have taken place. Yet he was judged guilty all the same by the civil rights crusaders. Guilty because he was white. White skin was enough evidence to get all three students indicted by the local district attorney who was seeking votes in an election year among a constituency that was largely black and now racially inflamed (although the national press averted its eyes from this aspect of the case as well).
Leading the calls for punishment before trial were racial agitators Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Jackson was first out, attempting to secure a conviction by decrying the long “history of white men and black women and rape and assault,” as though the criminal actions of a minority implicated every person of the same gender and color. Jackson also proposed to have his organization pay all tuition costs for the faceless criminal accuser should she want to attend college. The clear implication was that unlike her rapists whose parents (being white) could afford a Duke education, the benighted woman was denied such an opportunity by a racist society.
Not to be out mau-maued, Sharpton claimed, “this case parallels Abner Louima, who was raped and sodomized in a bathroom [by a New York City police officer] like this girl has alleged she was.” The fantasizer of this ludicrous connection was a man practiced in the art of racial libels, including the infamous (and almost identical) accusations made by his infamous client Tawana Brawley who ruined the lives of six innocent white males by making false accusations of rape against them. After six years of inflicting hell on his victims, Sharpton eventually lost a libel suit brought by one of his victims. But even being a convicted liar failed to disqualify Sharpton as a civil rights “leader” since his victim were only white.
A professor of English named Houston Baker emerged as Duke’s homegrown racial arsonist, leading a posse of Duke faculty members in a public condemnation of the accused students in an ad that appeared in the Duke Chronicle. Baker charged that “white male privilege” had permitted the alleged perpetrators of “this horrific, racist incident” to remain “safe under the cover of silent whiteness.” Whiteness had given them “license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech and feel proud of themselves in the bargain.”
A year later, the three lacrosse players were exonerated, and the district attorney was sacked as conclusive evidence showed that there had been no rape and they were innocent of any crime. But the mob leaders Jackson, Sharpton and Baker, never had to face consequences for their maliciously racially motivated deeds, never were made to apologize for their racism, or concede that that’s what it was. Call that immunity black skin privilege.
The Duke travesty has left the front pages and faded in memory, along with the many other episodes of racial injustice to whites, that were never openly acknowledged as such. Not only have we have reached a national moment when innocent whites are presumed guilty on the basis of their skin color, but blacks are often presumed innocent when the evidence points to their guilt.
This is true whether the crime they commit is false witness, as at Duke, or a double homicide, as in O.J. Simpson’s murder of his wife and a stranger. Simpson was defended by a “dream team” of the nation’s best lawyers and the televised trial was closely watched by the entire nation. When a mostly black jury acquitted the murderer, the overwhelming majority of Americans who had watched the trial viewed the verdict with horror. But not black America, which cheered and celebrated this miscarriage of justice as a racial “payback.” No one called that racism. That’s another black skin privilege.
In America today, blacks generally can conduct racist assaults on whites and count on “civil rights” activists and the media not to notice. In the two months following Trayvon Martin’s death, black assailants carried out at least 14 fourteen known attacks against white victims with the idea of “avenging” the fallen youth. In East Toledo, six juveniles beat a 78-year-old white man, shouting: “This is for Trayvon … Trayvon lives, white [man]. Kill that white [man]!” In Gainesville, five blacks shouting “Trayvon!” beat a 27-year-old white man, leaving his face permanently disfigured. In another Gainesville incident, a black crowd shouting “Trayvon!” assaulted and stomped on a white man who was trying to recover his female companion’s purse from the hands of a black thief.
In Chicago, two black teenagers beat and robbed a 19-year-old white man because, as one of the attackers explained, they were angry about Trayvon Martin. In Baltimore, a group of blacks beat and robbed a white man, stripping him naked, then posted a video of the assault online with the caption: “me an my boys helped get justice fore trayvon.” In Mobile, a white man named Matthew Owens was brutalized by twenty African Americans armed with brass knuckles, bricks, chairs, bats and steel pipes after he asked them to stop playing basketball in the street directly in front of his home. As the assailants left the scene, one of them looked back at the victim, who was bleeding profusely, and shouted,: “Now that’s justice for Trayvon!” It is unlikely that many Americans have heard of these racial attacks, because the perpetrators are protected by a media that does not want to notice that the racists are black, and their victims are white.
Within weeks of the Trayvon Martin shooting, a parallel killing occurred with the skin colors reversed at a Taco Bell restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona. A 22-year-old black motorist got into an altercation with Daniel Adkins, a 29-year-old, mentally disabled “white Hispanic” who was walking by. When the argument grew heated, the motorist drew a gun and killed Adkins. When police arrived at the scene, the black shooter claimed that Adkins had swung a bat or metal pipe at him, although no such items were found at the scene. Arizona, like Florida, has a “Stand Your Ground” law that allows a person to use deadly force to protect himself when faced with a life-or-death confrontation. A protective media withheld the shooter’s name, and there was no racial mob calling for his head. Unlike George Zimmerman, the gunman was not arrested nor charged with a crime. Call that black skin privilege.
If you’re black and possibly guilty but a white person is involved, the media will actively volunteer to be your advocate. This was true in the Duke case, where the New York Times and other papers convicted the accused in advance of any legal proceeding.
In the Trayvon Martin case, the media withheld details of the crime that were damaging to Trayvon in order to protect him and indict Zimmerman — that the mainly white community he had entered at night had been the target of a rash of recent break-ins and burglaries by young African -American men; that the hoodie Trayvon was wore was a uniform for burglars; and that Trayvon had been suspended from school after burglary tools were discovered on his person along with unaccounted-for jewelry.
At the same time, the press flooded the airwaves and front pages with sentimental photos of Trayvon as an innocent adolescent, while withholding others of the six-foot-two, 17-year-old who beat the smaller Zimmerman to the ground, smashing his head on the concrete and causing him to scream repeatedly for his life before he fired his gun in self-defense.
Looking at the Martin case, black skin privilege means you can form a lynch mob if the target is a “white” man and the press will overlook it; you can demand a judgment in advance of the facts, and can conclude his guilt in advance of a trial. You can even take “justice” into your own hands by threatening his life as the Black Panthers did, or twittering his home address like vigilante filmmaker Spike Lee and comedienne Roseanne Barr did in the hope that someone might go after him. If this isn’t a rebirth of the cracker mentality of the segregated South, it is hard to know what would be.
But it is events under the national radar that take the biggest toll. Black skin privilege means the national media will fail to report an epidemic of black race riots that have targeted whites for beatings, shootings, stabbings and rapes in major American cities recently.
A determined reporter, Colin Flaherty, broke ranks to document these rampages in a book titled, White Girl Bleed A Lot, after a statement made by one of the rioters. As reported in Flaherty’s book, there have been hundreds of black race riots in more than fifty American cities in the last few years, including more than a dozen each in Chicago, Miami, Philadelphia, New York, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Kansas City and Denver. In July 2011, to cite an illustrative example, a mob of African Americans created what the local NBC affiliate called an “astonishing” amount of violence at downtown Philadelphia restaurants, hotels and bars. Afterwards, the politically correct police chief said he feared for the safety of the rioters. But after surveying the mayhem, the city’s black mayor made an unprecedented public statement. “You have damaged your own race,” he said to the culprits, and in a pointed reference to the Martin case, he added, “Take those God darn hoodies down.”
Crime Statistics
In the liberal culture, black skin privilege has created an optical illusion, persuading progressives that white-on-black attacks are commonplace events, rather than the other way around. In fact, there are five times as many black attacks on whites as the reverse. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which relies on crime victims to identify their assailants, 320,082 whites were victims of black violence in 2010, the latest year for which statistics are available, while 62,593 blacks were victims of white violence. But these raw statistics understate the pattern. In 2010, the white and black populations in the United States were 197 million and 38 million, respectively. In other words, blacks committed acts of interracial violence at a rate 25 times higher than whites (849 per 100,000 versus 32 per 100,000).
This pattern has been among the most consistent findings of criminal-justice research for many years and for a wide variety of crimes. Nationwide there were an estimated 67,755 black-on-white aggravated assaults in 2010, as compared to with just 1,748 white-on-black crimes of the same description. In other words, blacks committed acts of interracial aggravated assault at a rate 200 times higher than whites (181 per 100,000 population versus 0.9 per 100,000).
The physical threat to African Americans from whites is actually minimal compared to the epidemic of black violence against whites. The National Crime Victimization Survey reported approximately 13,000 black-on-white rapes in the United States in 2010, and 39,000 black-on-white robberies, both violent crimes against persons. By contrast, the numbers of white-on-black rapes and robberies reported in the same surveys were so infinitesimal that whites were estimated to have accounted for 0% of all rapes and robberies committed against black victims in the United States.
To stoke the fires of racial grievance in the face of these contrary facts, civil rights advocates pretend that the statistics lie or that merely mentioning them is an act of racism. They tell us that black criminals aren’t actually criminals; the true culprit is the white “unjust justice system” that “profiles” blacks, that and creates this racist illusion. “Unjust justice system” is the term favored by Los Angeles congresswoman Maxine Waters, who explains, “the color of your skin dictates whether you will be arrested or not, prosecuted harshly or less harshly, receive a stiff sentence or gain probation or entry into treatment.” Bill Quigley, legal director of the left-wing Center for Constitutional Rights, agrees with her conclusion: “The U.S. criminal-justice system is … a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people.”
President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also agree. At a debate during the Democratic Party primaries in 2008, Obama ignored the facts and charged that blacks and whites “are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates, [and] receive very different sentences” for “the same crime.” Not to be outdone, Clinton denounced the “disgrace of a criminal-justice system that incarcerates so many more African Americans proportionately than whites.”
No member of the press disturbed their duet by pointing out that African Americans commit many more crimes proportionally than whites. This is black skin privilege at work, and illustrates how prevalent anti-white racist attitudes have become in the political culture.
Through sheer repetition and lack of corrective information, the myths of white skin privilege have made a deep imprint on the culture generally and the culture of black Americans in particular. According to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, 84% of black Americans feel that the justice system treats them unfairly. But while it is true that blacks are arrested in numbers greater than their representation in the population, it is it is also true that they commit crimes in far greater numbers than their representation would warrant.
African Americans are 12.6% of the U.S. population, but they account for 38.9% of all violent crime arrests—including 32.5% of all rapes, 55.5% of all robberies, and 33.9% of all aggravated assaults. Is this because they are arrested for crimes they didn’t commit? Are they only “guilty of being black”?In fact, the statistics are compiled by interviewing the victims of these violent crimes, which in the case of crimes committed by blacks are mostly black themselves.
In 2010, black perpetrators were responsible for 80% of all violence against blacks (including 94% of homicides), while white perpetrators accounted for just 9% of all violence against blacks.
Another inconvenient fact for the promoters of the racial “injustice system” myth is that numerous high-crime cities with majority-black populations and high black arrest rates are run by African American mayors and African American police chiefs. Among them are Detroit, Jackson, Birmingham, Memphis, Flint, Savannah, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. Cognizant of the methods that police use to fight crime and the disproportionate contribution of blacks to crime rates, the former black police chief of Los Angeles, Bernard Parks said: “It’s not the fault of the police when they stop minority males or put them in jail. It’s the fault of the minority males for committing the crime. In my mind, it is not a great revelation that if officers are looking for criminal activity, they’re going to look at the kind of people who are listed on crime reports.” But this sensible attitude has not penetrated the leadership of the Democratic Party nor the nation’s morally degraded civil rights movement. (continue reading)