The Injustice Collector: Racist Assassin Claimed Anodyne Sentences Like "The reporter's out in the field" to be "Racist"

Because "field," you see, while meaning to everyone else "outside the office, out in the actual field of reporting," he took it to mean "cotton fields," and ergo a racist assault on his dignity.

He also objected to the phrase "swinging' by a place," because, I guess, lynching.

Allahpundit notes that Charles Cooke is asking, in a different way, the same question I asked a few days ago.

I asked, "If 'backlash' is a real thing, presumably all races and creeds, and not just white (Republican!) Christians, are susceptible to having tribal/racial fires lit in their hearts by hot, sensationalistic coverage of another tribes' sins (or alleged sins); why does the media not seem to care about "backlash" when it reports sensationalistically on Dylan Roof's terrorist murders? Why in fact does it actively seek to make Roof's crime a crime of the entire White Race, who are collectively responsible for it, and who are, ergo, especially in the mind of a maniac, to be collectively punished for it?

If there is a danger that white (Republican!) Christians will go after innocent Muslims upon being sensationalized into anti-Muslim hatred owing to an Islamist's terrorism, does not the same danger apply to other races and creeds?

In fact, we know for a fact the same danger does so apply: "Bryce Williams" proves it, if Christopher Dorn didn't already.

The various assassinations of cops proves it.

But the media continues to pretend that "backlash" is something only white people can engage in.

Cooke wonders about all the hot "microaggression" rhetoric that fed directly into the Vine Assassin's "injustice collecting" -- the same nonsense in which perfectly innocent words are transformed into racial assaults:

Half-joking on Twitter, the Free Beacon’s Sonny Bunch reacted to this news [that "Bryce Williams" believed, among other lunacies, that 7-11's watermelon flavored Slurpees were a racist insult] by observing that, "instead of going on a killing spree, this guy should’ve gotten a columnist gig at the Guardian." As with all humor, there is some truth at the root of this barb. Certainly, the shooter was extreme in his willingness to take offense. But, really, he was no more extreme than many of the extremely silly people who write at Salon or sit on diversity boards or who stand up and make a nuisance of themselves on contemporary college campuses. If one believes that the culture causes people to pull triggers -- and again, I don’t but many do -- then one has to be ecumenical about it. For what reason is this guy exempt? Why do we not need to have a "national conversation" about hypersensitivity?

The answer, I imagine, is politics, for this instinct seems only to run one way. The same people who tend to think that ugly strains within our culture lead inexorably to murder did not seem to care much that the man who killed three Muslims in North Carolina earlier this year was a progressive atheist with strong views about Islam. Likewise, they were not greatly interested that the guy who shot up the Family Research Council was inspired by the always hyperbolic output of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and they saw no connection whatsoever between protestors calling for the execution of police officers and a host of incidents in which angry men did just that. Hypocrisy.

This idea is getting some minor play on the right, but I personally think it should get a lot more. Pride of authorship, I'm sure, egotistically suggests to me this is a more important point than it might otherwise seem to me -- yet I cannot help but think that if the left wants to talk about the "tone" of discussion and the "hot words" used in politics, then we should in fact have a very serious conversation about all the actual, palpable venomous hatred the left stirs up daily in claiming that, for example, Amy Schumer is responsible for the Charleston terrorist attack because years ago she told a couple of jokes about Mexicans.

Either we can and should take one man's outrages and blame an entire race or religion for them or we ought not to.

The Racist Left, however, has played this game for years, speaking of whites and Christians as if they were actual demons on earth deserving of extirpation, all the time piously "calling out," mob attacking, and firing anyone who said anything untoward about any other group.

So I ask again:

Is the white race alone among races, and the Christian religion alone among religions, uniquely prone to "backlash" type attacks on innocent people?

And if the Left's answer is yes -- and indeed, their answer is in fact yes; they just don't say this aloud very often-- they they should be called to account and defend their obvious racism and Christophobia.

posted by Ace at 03:32 PM

| Access Comments