Report: Man Assaulted 'for Being White,' Nat. Media Buries Story
Unless you’re in New York City or read a few select websites, you probably haven’t heard of an alleged racial attack on a bus in Brooklyn. There’s a reason for that, of course — it doesn’t fit the narrative of hate crimes against minority communities.
According to WNYW-TV, police are searching for a black suspect who allegedly attacked a white man because of his race.
“It happened on a bus Monday morning about 10 a.m. in Downtown Brooklyn,” WNYW reports.
“The NYPD says a 29-year-old man was onboard a B25 MTA Bus on Fulton Street. Another man walked up to him and punched him in the face while making an anti-white comment. The victim was not seriously injured but suffered swelling and pain.”
According to an NYPD statement, “(t)he unidentified individual proceeded to get off the bus at the intersection of Fulton Street and Bond Street and fled on foot southbound on Bond Street.”
Video of the suspect walking south along Bond St. was subsequently released by the NYPD:
Gothamist reports that the attacker said, “I hate all you white motherf*****s,” “You’re a f*****” and “I hate everyone like you, white b*** homo.”
While most of the major local outlets picked the story up, the story remained curiously (but not that curiously) unreported by major national news outlets.
The Daily Wire ran a short piece on it, as did Breitbart. Newsweek was a surprise outlet in terms of picking up the story, although they emphasized the homophobic element of the attack and spent significant space mentioning a race-related incident earlier in July where the suspect was a white woman.
In other words, no mention of a “vicious hate crime.” And that other incident Newsweek mentioned was instructive. In spite of being a relatively minor incident in comparison to this, The Hill, The Root, The Daily Beast Bustle, Daily Kos, Alternet and other news outlets picked up that story. It was mentioned in searching blog posts with titles like “Racism is Alive and Well…” Just a theory, but I’m guessing this one won’t be.
Unlike with normal, garden-variety anti-white racism, you can’t just shrug this off by saying that whites aren’t oppressed the same way marginalized communities are.
If you believe in hate crime legislation as a whole, the primary argument you would have is that someone who commits a crime because of the identity of their victim(s) is inherently more dangerous than someone who commits a crime for other reasons. This clearly fits the bill. It’s someone being randomly attacked for their race. How can you get more frightening than that? Why can’t the mainstream media condemn all hate crimes, not just those that fit an agenda?
Furthermore, in terms of media attention, our fourth estate loves any sort of story that makes the case we’re becoming more divided and coarse as a people — unless, of course, that story proves that division and coarseness isn’t just coming from angry white people (who of course probably voted for Trump because they’re angry and white).
Yet, if we’re talking about division, this is exactly the kind of thing we should be talking about. We can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist.
Police are searching for the suspect, who’s said to be approximately 5 feet, 10 inches, weighing roughly 180 to 200 pounds. If he’s caught, no matter what he says, I doubt reporting this will be high on anyone’s list.
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