The Usual Sin of Omission

The New York Times published a story about a tourist who was stabbed in a Harlem subway car. The story goes on and on, but obscures what appears to be the case--the attacker was black and the victim was white. The danger of being white in a Harlem subway car is nothing new. When I was a freshman at Columbia in 1959, one of the first things we were told was to make sure, at the 96th street subway station, we did not get on the subway line that went through Harlem.

Contrast the media feeding frenzy (and the University administraton's hand-wringing and rush to judgment) about the collapsing case of the three Duke lacrosse players who were charged with raping a black stripper, a case that is now collapsing, or the coverage and self-congratulation at the recent conviction of a white young man who beat a black would-be car thief in Howard Beach with a baseball bat. The true "no go" areas, based on race, are black areas much more than white ones.

When a white person is charged with attacking a black person, that's news and the hand-wringing about racism begins. When the far more common case of blacks attacking whites arises, the papers won't even disclose the relevant racial facts. And then our media conglomerates glorify the culture of black thuggery on MTV and elsewhere.

Although there is a huge percentage of black young men in or just out of prison, the media can't bring themselves to discuss openly the prevalence of violent crime in that racial group.

Oh, and by the way: lately most terrorists are (shhh. . . .) Muslims.

UPDATE, June 15, 2006--The Times today published another article with multiple authors, and did not mention anyone's race, but published a picture of the alleged perpetrator (black) and the victim's parents, who appear to be partly Asian, although you can't be certain. The basic point is the same--white on black crime, real or imagined, gets a big play and generates breast-beating of all kinds. The MSM pretty much ignore much more common black on black and black on white crime, and bury racial information.

In the past, of course, there were plenty of lynchings, droit de seigneur sex (a la Strom Thurmond) by white men with black women, and even burned out black communities (e.g., in Tulsa). That stuff has gotten progressively rarer since Selma and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

So new white on black offenses, real or phonied up, become grist for black race hustlers and their white abettors.