The underreported heinous crime

Wish I'd said that!

[Reprinted from Issues & Views November 4, 2002]

In a stinging, thoughtful article, "Hate Crime Reversed," columnist and talk show host Armstrong Williams denounces the biased approach shown by almost all media outlets to an almost unbelievably heinous crime. To this day, many Americans have never heard of Reginald and Jonathan Carr, two brothers who, on December 19, 2001, in Wichita, Kansas, burst into a home where five young people in their 20s were visiting, three men and two women, and proceeded to put them through a night of torment and horror. The Carr brothers, who are black, physically and mentally brutalized the five white friends, before shooting each in the head. Four of them died. Williams compares the media treatment of this crime, that took place almost a year ago, to the endless, almost minute-by-minute coverage of the dragging death of James Byrd, the black man who, in 1998, was murdered by two white men in Texas. Williams writes:

Unlike the Byrd murder, however, the Wichita massacre received little national exposure, largely because the victims were white. That means no Jesse Jackson screaming into his megaphone about how the government needs to wipe out racial violence. And no Rev. Al Sharpton fulminating into his power horn about the need for a special category of law dealing with racially-motivated crimes. Hardly anyone even raised an eyebrow when Wichita officials declined to try the case as a hate crime.

Had the victims been four black people killed by two white assailants, the hate crime prophets would have come streaming into Kansas carrying the national media in tow. Yet, when an equally savage and racially-motivated crime is perpetrated against white people, the response is muted.

Apparently, the supporters of hate crime legislation are concerned with only stemming racially-motivated violence against blacks. This inconsistency suggests that hate crime legislation is not about justice. After all, the law covers the crime of murder. Hate crime legislation is not about redressing inequality, or it would be equally concerned with all racially-motivated crimes. Hate crime is about twisting the law to accommodate the all-encompassing view that blacks are forever victims of whites. It's about how whites can never truly empathize with the first-hand effects of racial injustice. It's about the politically correct view that racial injustice is "a black thing."

See on this site, "What's so special about hate crimes?"

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