By Victor Davis Hanson in PJ
Media
The recent unfortunate shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Missouri, and its violent aftermath seem to have had everything and nothing to
do with race. Brown was black and unarmed and the officer white; but it
is equally true that the 292-pound Brown likely committed a number of crimes in
the minutes before his death. He was high on
drugs; he robbed a
store and strong-armed the clerk; he was walking down the
middle of a road; and he started a physical altercation with policeman Darren
Wilson (who tried to question him), inflicting injuries on the officer before
being fatally shot. If that were a typical day in the life of an American
citizen, then civilization, as we now know it, could no longer exist.
So far, evidence both released and leaked suggests that Brown most
likely tried to grab the officer through the police car window, prompting a
struggle over his gun — which was fired into the patrol car twice — began to
run away, and then was shot as he turned and charged.
There is no evidence so far that Brown was either shot in the back
or shot while his
hands were up, surrendering to the officer. Legitimate questions, of course,
remain about many of these details of the shooting of an unarmed suspect, and
eyewitness accounts are conflicted; but so far no forensic evidence suggests an
execution-type police shooting.
No matter. Ferguson is supposedly now iconic of white
institutionalized racism and police brutality, a teachable civil rights moment,
as it were, that is currently being used by Democratic candidates to galvanize
the African-American vote against Republican candidates. So much so that
everyone from Eric Holder and Barack Obama to Elizabeth Warren and Ruth Bader
Ginsburg has described the shooting or its violent aftermath as iconic of some
sort of American pathology. It may be a half-century since the civil rights
movement in an America that is no longer white/black but a racial melting pot,
yet we seem
ossified in 1965 amber.
Several days of rioting followed the shooting. Black activists
such as Al
Sharpton, the New Black Panther Party and Jesse Jackson, as is their wont,
have leveraged the Brown shooting to indict America for endemic brutality
against people of color, and by extension enhance their own deplorable careers
of inciting racial tensions. More post-Ferguson demonstrations followed a
subsequent fatal shooting in St. Louis of 18-year old African-American Vonderrit
Myers, by a white off-duty policeman employed as a security guard. Yet
so far no one has disputed that Myers first fired three rounds at the off-duty
policemen and was killed by returning fire. If firing three rounds at an
off-duty police officer cannot be considered to warrant a legitimate violent
response, but rather must be illustrative of racism, then we are going to have
some tough days again. I say that mindful as well that African-Americans
statistically commit a vastly greater percentage of relatively rare interracial
crimes than do whites against blacks.
The resulting logic is that the rare white-on-black crime must be
transcendent and iconic of something, while the far more common
black-against-white violence is either irrelevant or in some way the
understandable baggage of our racial past. That, too, is not a sustainable 21st
century proposition.
Ostensibly, neither of these cases should have had anything to do
with the race of the perpetrator or of the officer in question. After all, one
of the most foolish things to do in the United States is to physically assault
an armed officer; the only thing more suicidal is to fire a handgun at an armed
officer.
Much has been written about both these cases, but one critical
point has not been made. Had Brown successfully wrestled away Officer Wilson’s
gun and killed him, or had Myers fatally shot with his first three rounds the
off-duty officer, there would have been no suggestion that the fatal shootings
involved race, and there would have been no post-shooting violence — and Eric
Holder would not have seen anything emblematic in just another police killing.
Indeed, had both officers been killed by Brown and Myers, they would now be
little remembered. In some sick sense, when Wilson was not hit by his own gun
that was fired twice in the car, and when the St. Louis officer was not hit by
Myers’ first three shots, then the crimes became racialized and violence
followed. In the twisted logic of politicized interracial crime, the two
officers committed the gaffe of not getting killed.
Racializing crime is a serious business, because it breaks society
apart along tribal lines. It is all the more dangerous when elected officials
like the president and attorney general are sometimes the worst offenders, given
their racialist slurs like “nation of cowards,” “punish our enemies,” and
“typical white person” and cheap editorializing in the Trayvon Martin and
Michael Brown cases. So on their cue, are we to look at lurid fatal crimes in
the news and see them not as matters of individual evil acts, but rather as
collective tokens of larger racial hatred? And are we to detect some sort of
state culpability that suggests shared guilt for the violence?
If that were true, the last three months were replete with especially
abhorrent interracial violence and some disturbing laxity on the part of
government.
African-American and Muslim convert Zale Thompson just attacked
two New York policemen with an ax. Thompson had posted virulent
anti-white invectives on the Internet and had had brushes with
authorities. Did he commit a hate crime? Is his venomous assault iconic of
anything that transcends his sick terrorist violence? Did recent politicized
change in New York police policy allow Thompson such criminal latitude?
Did Ali Muhammad Brown murder 19-year-old Brendan Tevlin out of
religious, racial, or anti-American hatred? Why was the convicted child rapist
Brown, with a long rap sheet, out at all? Are the police, the penal system, or
the judiciary at fault for such laxity? Should Eric Holder have held a press
conference to exemplify Brown — who is a suspect in multiple murders — as
illustrative of hate crimes, or the failure of the racialist American state to
keep such psychopaths behind bars?
The body of coed Hannah Graham has just
been found. Suspect Jesse Matthew is for now charged with intent to defile
the late Graham. He likewise has a prior record and has been a person of
interest in past serial sexual assaults and prior female disappearances. In the
age of Eric Holder’s racializing violence, does the fact that Matthew is
African-American and Graham is white play some part in her savage murder? Why
do such violent criminals seem repeatedly to be lost track of by the criminal
justice system? Is this, too, a Michael Brown teachable moment?
One of the most horrific of this autumn’s crimes was the
grotesque beheading of Colleen Hufford in Oklahoma late last
month by Alton Alexander Nolen (aka Jah’Keem Yisrael). Again, in the age when
Obama references Ferguson to the UN, are we supposed to note that Nolen was
black and Hufford white — especially given that Nolen’s freedom is emblematic
of a flawed criminal justice system that released him early from prison after
he was convicted of assault and battery on a police officer? Is this an
occasion for a Trayvon Martin moment of presidential racial editorializing?
We could go on and on. Last week one Marcelo Marquez (aka Luis
Enrique Monroy-Bracamonte) for all practical purposes executed two Northern
California sheriffs. An apparent illegal alien, he had purportedly been
deported twice to Mexico for felonies. Is he now a green-card holder, a
recipient of amnesty, or a felonious illegal resident of more than a decade?
And if so, how exactly did he operate for so long without worry about a third
deportation? Can President Obama address the UN about these unnecessary deaths?
So are those tragic deaths to be a teachable moment? About what
exactly? The culpability of the federal government in encouraging illegal
immigration? Racial hatred? The politicization of immigration law by the
Chamber of Commerce and La Raza elites? Had the two white deputies survived,
and shot and killed an armed Marquez and his armed wife, would we now be
subject to lectures about racist treatment of immigrants? Do we really wish to
go down that Ferguson road of squeezing political advantage out of the deaths?
If we were to embrace the abjectly racist worldview of Eric Holder
or Al Sharpton, where would the racialization of crime end? Who would decide
which interracial crimes illustrated premeditated racial hatred — or criminal
laxity on the part of the state — and deserved national attention? Which
adjudicator could or would declare that one interracial incident was
idiosyncratic without transcendent significance, but the other typical and thus
representative of collective pathology?
What exactly has this country stooped to, when our officials and
public figures traffic in politicizing the end of human lives? We are becoming
not just a sick country, but an amoral one as well. What Ferguson wrought will
not end well.
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