Op-Ed: Media Blames Black Problems on 'Racism' to Deflect from Actual Culprit - The Legacy of Liberalism
Tyre Nichols was a 29-year-old black man who died three days after five black police officers brutally beat him for suspected reckless driving in Memphis.
Ben Crump, a high-profile attorney who has represented the families of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd and others, also represented the family of Tyre Nichols. Crump implied that race was a factor in Nichols’ death. But how could that be? Blacks attacked a black.
It is worth comparing this case to how cops treated George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Here, there were four officers, two white, one Asian, one black. Floyd resisted arrest. The officers struggled to get him in the back of the police car. He did not cooperate. He then left the vehicle on the other side. Because he had difficulty breathing, he asked the cops if he could get on the ground. They did not throw him to the ground. None of them used racial slurs or abused him in any way.
He died because he had overdosed on fentanyl. His blood fentanyl level was 11ng/ml, nearly four times the lethal dose. It was not the knee on the back of the neck. The cops used standard protocols in subduing Floyd. They called an ambulance and helped Floyd after the medical team arrived.
The five black officers approached Nichols very differently. They screamed at him and shoved him. When he ran away, it infuriated them. But it was not so much that he was resisting arrest, but that he feared the cops, which turned out to be justified.
The Tyre Nichols case did not create anywhere near the national outrage that we had with George Floyd, even though in this case police behaved far worse than the officers in the Floyd case. The reason is that the police were the wrong race. They were not white, and so they did not fit the desired narrative. And that’s where the racism comes in.
It is not in the police departments; it is in the media and in our dominant institutions. Not only is the media biased against whites, but it is also biased against the police.
Another case of bigoted media coverage of police involved an incident that occurred in California. Police shot and killed Anthony Lowe, a 36-year-old black man and a double amputee. The news stories all said police shot him while he was running away. The implication was that the cops had no reason to shoot him and that he wasn’t a threat. But when you look at the circumstances, it’s not that straightforward.
First, police were arresting him because he had stabbed somebody in the chest with a 12-inch butcher knife. The person he stabbed has identified himself as Ramiro, a warehouse worker and father of four who didn’t know Lowe.
Ramiro reported that Lowe pushed himself out of his wheelchair, came running up to him on his knees and shoved a knife into his side, puncturing his lungs. A police officer saved Ramiro’s life by applying pressure to the wound and reassuring him while they waited for an ambulance. He was in surgery for four hours and almost died.
So a police officer saved a man’s life, and no one in the media mentioned that. They were more concerned about the officers who took Lowe’s life. Again, the life they took was an individual who attempted to murder Ramiro. His motivation for killing a complete stranger was unknown. That doesn’t justify police shooting him, but other things may have.
Police received a call that a man in a wheelchair had stabbed someone. When they arrived on the scene, the man ran away while brandishing the knife he’d already stabbed one person with. The police ordered him to stop and drop the knife. He continued to run. He threatened to throw the knife at the police. So they shot him.
All the coverage is of the mistakes the police made. But Lowe stabbed someone he had never met, resisted arrest and did not drop a deadly weapon when ordered to do so.
Another story that illustrates the hypocrisy of the media and the racialist crowd involved a cyclist in California who was hit by a car and died. He didn’t die as a result of being hit by the car. He died because the man driving the car got out after he ran into him and stabbed him to death.
The victim was a 58-year-old doctor named Michael Mammone, a married father of two. Mammone was white; the one who violently murdered him, 39-year-old Vanroy Evan Smith, was black. There had been no prior contact between them. The final twist in this matter is that while Smith was stabbing Mammone to death, a bystander reported that he was shouting about “white privilege.”
This story was not covered at all in the national news. But what if the doctor riding the bicycle happened to be black and the man driving the car was white? What if witnesses reported that as the white man was violently murdering the black cyclist, he was screaming racial slurs? It would have been a national story. But because the race of the murderer and the victim did not fit the narrative, there was silence. It was not a story the media wanted to tell.
There are many news stories about racist police (and non-police) killing blacks because those are the stories the media wants to tell. There are many examples of blacks killing whites or Hispanics or blacks, but they do not make the news.
When the only murders appearing on the news are whites or police killing blacks, it creates the perception that it is open season on blacks. This is what the media wants people to think. They want to create the impression that we have a problem in America with systemic racism and racist police.
They blame “racism” for the problems afflicting the black community to deflect from the actual reason. It’s not racism; it’s government. It’s the welfare state. It’s the Democratic Party and its failed liberal policies. Sixty years of the “Great Society” have inflicted enormous damage on blacks. The left fears that if they discover the reason for their problems, they might become independent and vote Republican.
It is not systemic racism, racist police or the legacy of slavery, as is so often stated, but the legacy of liberalism.
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