Have you been following the story of Jena, LA? Jason Whitlock has, and he doesn't have much nice to say about anyone. The school board has to explain why it overruled the school principal, reducing the punishment of white kids who hung nooses from a tree in a clear act of racial intimidation. The principle wanted to expel them. The school board suspended them for three days.
In an apparently unrelated event, six black kids then beat up a white kid. One black kid was charged with attempted murder, which certainly was an excessive charge. But then the protesters descended, including race whores Sharpton and Jackson, acting like this was an injustice of historic proportions. Note to protesters: if you want to build sympathy for your cause, it is best to find a more noble act than defending a bunch of kids, some of whom already have extensive rap sheets, who just beat the crap out of someone for no reason.
Heather McDonald has a provocative thesis: professional racial hucksters such as Sharpton and Jackson gin up protest to distract the public the real crisis of the black community. The concern one has over arguments such as McDonald's is not that she has her facts wrong, read the article and you'll see she doesn't, but that it gives cause for the rest of us to be complacent. After all, it's all "those people's" fault. These are our brothers and sisters (not to mention fellow citizens) and while we ask for them to get their house in order, we should ask what we are doing to help.
Update: Joel Rosenthal, writing well on the same subject, writes, "Overcoming prejudice takes time. It is an understood fact that educated people do not hate." I must nitpick. First, as we conventionally understand education, meaning education and schooling are the same thing, this is factually false. I have spent my entire adult life around people with a great deal of schooling and I can say they hate as much and as irrationally as anyone. They might irrationally hate different things and different kinds of people, but they do indeed hate. Just look at the follies on campus, now including Stanford trying to deny Donald Rumsfeld a position at the Hoover Institute. These people aren't interested in true education. When they say they want to liberate their students from prejudice, what they really mean is they want to substitute their own prejudices for those currently held by students. But even a truly educated person hates. He hates ignorance. And that notion, I suspect and hope, gets Mr. Rosenthal's firm approval.
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