Anti-White Racists Find a Way to Turn a National Tragedy into a Race Issue
by Alexander Zubatov
Thus far, we know very little about the Las Vegas shooter, his motivations and his affiliations. But we do know this: he was a white man shooting into a crowd of largely white people. It’s safe to say this: whatever else this was about, it wasn’t about race. Or so we thought ….
Numerous race-baiting media outlets, knowing that nothing drives clicks and copies as much as a good ole charge of racism, are trying to find a race angle where none exists:
Here is one from the black nationalist publication, The Root, which feels the need to say that there have been larger mass shootings of blacks in our history: http://www.theroot.com/this-is-only-the-deadliest-shooting-in-u-s-history-bec-1819112938
Here is one from the increasingly anti-American extremist network known as CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/opinions/mass-shootings-white-male-rage-modan-opinion/
And here is one from your ever-at-the-ready-to-race-bait friends at the Huffington Post: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/double-standard-white-privilege-media-las-vegas-shooting_us_59d3da15e4b04b9f92058316
And here is the coup de grâce from the ostenisbly authoritative Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/10/06/when-the-shooter-is-white/
There are many more where these came from. Their argument, such as it is, is essentially that these kinds of mass shootings are almost always committed by white people, and yet when a white man does such a thing, he’s almost inevitably labeled a crazed “lone wolf,” whereas if a black person does it, the race angle is stressed (and if a Muslim does it, it’s labeled terrorism … which label, these articles seem to forget, is used because ISIS or some other Islamist extremist organization has credibly taken direct responsibility for these acts).
Of course, anyone who has been alive and more or less conscious over the course of the past decade would know that nothing could be further from the truth. When race or racism is an actual motivation in a mass shooting, the media floods that race angle with wall-to-wall 24/7 coverage. The coverage of Dylann Roof’s black church shooting in Charleston is a testament to that. Race was all the media wanted to talk about. Roof, the media’s narrative went, wasn’t just some “lone wolf” or loony tune, but rather, the direct outgrowth of a culture of white supremacy.
But what about something that should have been the mirror-image of the Dylann Roof church shooting, the recent September 24, 2017 mass shooting in a white church in Antioch, Tennessee by black Sudanese migrant Emanuel Kidega Samson, in which a note found in the suspect’s car spoke of revenge for the Dylann Roof shooting (with other social media posts by Samson also strongly indicating an obsessive focus on race issues)? You might be forgiven for not knowing what I’m even talking about here. The mainstream media barely even reported on the incident, and the reports that came out said hardly anything about the story’s obvious race angle. In fact, when more right-leaning publications chimed in to tell the truth about the media’s silence regarding the race issue in play, their viewpoints were largely derided in mainstream sources as reflecting conspiracy theories of the “alt-right” and “far right.” While some of those same mainstream sources were forced to recant a few days later, they nevertheless continued to refer to the “alt-right”-origins of the racial angle and otherwise downplayed the story sufficiently that hardly anyone noticed or cared.
Zooming out from the narrow topic of mass killings, while the topic of white cops killing blacks has been the media’s main focus for the past few years despite the lack of any empirical support for the existence of an epidemic of such killings, talking about the real epidemic of blacks killing blacks and blacks killing cops at a rate far higher than cops kill blacks are big taboos.
So where exactly is the racism here? The mass shooting by Stephen Paddock gives us a lot to talk about as it is. We can talk about mental health. We can talk about hotel security. We can talk about America’s gun laws and gun culture. Whatever you may think about these topics, they are all fair game. But race??? Race has absolutely, positively nothing to do with this.
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Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics. In the words of one of his intellectual heroes, José Ortega y Gasset, biography is “a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”
Some of his articles have appeared in The Federalist, Times Higher Education, The Imaginative Conservative, The Independent Journal Review, Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, Mercatornet, The Montreal Review, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Culture Wars and nthposition.
He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).
