Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes Read Online Free PDF Page A

perpetrator, and especially one involved in crimes against victims who are already the targets of community prejudice, poses troubling problems. One such issue was the temptation offered to aggressive prosecutors to impute such intentions where none might exist. In a sobering column, George Will recalled a recent example of perverse legal reasoning in applying the hate crime standard. In 1989, a white female jogger was raped and beaten into a coma by a gang of black and Hispanic youths on a "wilding" rampage in Central Park. The act was not deemed a "hate crime" by prosecutors, and the perpetrators did not suffer enhanced penalties under the law "because they also assaulted Hispanics that evening. They got more lenient treatment because of the catholicity of their barbarism." Of course, the act they committed — rape — could be characterized as a hate crime itself.
    In the emotional melodrama of the Matthew Shepard killing, the left once again found political oxygen. Temporarily thrown by the feminist hypocrisies surrounding the impeachment of President Clinton, the left viewed the Shepard case as a way to recover its balance and to once again rally behind society's victims against its victimizers. The absence of conservatives and libertarians among the Capitol protesters only served to confirm the enduring sense of righteousness that fuels the progressive agenda. This politics of the left is what George Will calls "a sentiment competition," which is "less about changing society than striking poses." The proposed multiplication of hate crime categories which stipulate that some crime victims are more important than others would be what Will calls "an imprudent extension of identity politics." It would work against , not for, the principle of social tolerance.
    A little more than a year before the attack on James Byrd in Texas, three white Michigan youngsters hitched a train-ride as a teenage lark. When they got off the train, they found themselves in the wrong urban neighborhood, surrounded by a gang of armed black youths. One of the white teenagers, Michael Carter, aged fourteen, was killed. Dustin Kaiser, aged fifteen, who was brutally beaten and shot in the head, eventually recovered. The fourteenyear-old girl (whose name has been withheld) was pistol-whipped and shot in the face after being forced to perform oral sex on her attackers.
    Though the six African-Americans responsible for the deed were arrested and convicted, their attack was not prosecuted as a hate crime. More to the point, most of the nation never knew that the crime had taken place. It was not reported on page one of the national press, and there was no public outrage expressed in the nation's editorials or in the halls of Congress. Indeed, the few papers that reported the incident nationally did so on their inside pages. Beyond the Great Lakes region, the stories often failed to mention the races of the participants at all. The crime took place on July 21, 1997, but among the readers of this book, there will not be one in a hundred who has even heard of it, because, as a hate crime, it was in a perverse sense politically incorrect. To notice that black people, as well as whites, can be responsible for vicious crimes of hate, is improper. Hate crimes can only be committed by an oppressor caste; therefore, what happened in Michigan was not a hate crime at all.
    Two years ago, the most celebrated trial of the century focused on a black man accused of murdering two whites in what was apparently an act of blind rage. The idea that O. J. Simpson might have murdered his wife and a stranger because they were white was never even hinted by the prosecution, although the defense managed to turn the proceedings into a circus of racial accusations against whites.
    The fact is that it is not tolerable in America to hate blacks, but it is okay in our politically correct culture to hate white people. Hollywood understands this rule of progressive etiquette. A recent