My article from the August 21, 2015 issue of FrontPageMag:
Black Skin Privilege: The Media’s Love of Black Racism & Violence
By Matthew Vadum
Editor’s note: Below is the fourth article in the FrontPage series “Black Skin Privilege,” based on the Freedom Center pamphlet “Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream” by David Horowitz and John Perazzo. (Click the following for Part I, Part II and Part III.)
It is a sad commentary on our nation that the mainstream media refuses to take a critical look at the increasingly violent, racist Black Lives Matter movement, and often promotes those activists’ depraved view of America, the least racist nation on the face of the earth.
The outrageous, even genocidal, statements issued every day now by hate-filled black nationalists and their radical allies who are part of what is becoming an African-American “Occupy Wall Street” movement, are barely examined at all. In a case of defining deviancy down, these antisocial, anti-white sentiments are accepted by the media as normal, even admirable.
Black Lives Matter rabble rousers didn’t say a peep in protest when the New Black Panther Party offered a cash reward for Wilson “dead or alive.” The same group also offered a $10,000 cash bounty for so-called white Hispanic George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer who shot young black man Trayvon Martin in self-defense. Zimmerman too was cleared by the courts and the Justice Department. This is not an exhaustive list of black criminals these activists claim are the real victims. Brown and Martin are far from alone.
The Wilson and Zimmerman cases are as dead as a doornail, yet these people keep lying about the facts in order to energize their dangerous supporters. To them, Brown and Martin were innocent young, college-bound angels, not vicious thugs.
Let’s look at some of the psychotic statements some black radicals routinely get away with in the media.
Take the comments earlier this week by Black Lives Matter protester Julius Jones. Jones made the astonishingly absurd claim Tuesday that the phrase “all lives matter” is “actually a violent statement.”
Jones said:
I would say temper your perspective with the urgency that black lives are actively under attack and we are in a terrible war with our own country, African-Americans are Americans and we are not treated like that. We are not treated as if black lives matter and when people say “all lives matter” it’s actually a violent statement because the only time that people say “all lives matter” is in opposition to black lives matter and it’s the most violent statement of love that you can do. It’s like “all lives matter!” yes, we understand that, it’s true, but in this country for the long time the United States acts like black lives don’t matter.
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who, has challenged some of these activists, made no attempt to challenge these bald-face lies. Nonetheless Jones’ statement is a helpful reminder that the Black Lives Matter is actually the Only Black Lives Matter movement.
Jones’ comments may just as well have come out of the mouth of unrepentant terrorist and Obama pal Bill Ayers. People seem to forget that Ayers’ Weather Underground terror group was part of the Black Power movement and dedicated to overthrowing so-called white privilege. Jones ought to be wearing a cape and pointy hood and burning crosses. He’s no different morally than a Klansmen and yet he gets taken seriously.
Other extremist blacks are handled with kid-gloves by the media.
The media barely raised an eyebrow when Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, a black Democrat, welcomed criminal gangs and radical groups into city government. Rawlings-Blake received hardly any media coverage earlier this year when she allied herself with race rioters. She’s the one who proudly boasted that she protected the First Amendment right to protest by providing space to those who “wished to destroy” local businesses.
Racial arsonist Al Sharpton is treated with admiration and respect. He even has a talk show on MSNBC that he uses to spread his racist venom.
In 2009 the media didn’t care much about Van Jones, Obama’s green jobs czar and self-described “rowdy black nationalist” and “communist.” Reporters only cared when Jones was revealed to have signed a 9/11 Truther petition and was forced out of the administration. Like Sharpton he was rewarded by the left-wing media with a talk show.
The media has only been barely interested over the years in President Obama’s 20-year membership in white-hating, America-hating, Jew-hating Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church in Chicago that is more or less a Christian version of the Nation of Islam. Wright and his ilk are no big deal the media assure us. They just speak in a different idiom that the rest of America is too ignorant and stupid to understand. In other words, white people can never “get” it because they’re not black.
Holding black people who do terrible things and hold repugnant views accountable isn’t fair, according to the media.
Racist black American radicals get a pass because bad things were done to their ancestors 150 years ago by people who are long dead and have faded into the mist of history. This line of thinking ignores the fact that slavery, in its various iterations, has been around perhaps 4,000 years or more and was widely accepted nearly everywhere in the world. Slavery still exists today in various forms in the Muslim countries of Afghanistan, Mali, Mauritania, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Yemen.
But America long ago atoned for its original sin of slavery. Following an enlightened trend, Vermont abolished slavery in 1777 and the United States prohibited the importation of slaves in 1808. President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and at the end of a bloody civil war in which as many as 750,000 soldiers perished — proportionately equivalent to 7.5 million U.S. deaths given America’s current population — slavery was abolished in the U.S. in 1865 by the Thirteenth Amendment (although Democrats and their terrorist wing, the Ku Klux Klan, resisted this by murdering blacks and their supporters and enacting the odious Jim Crow laws).
To these radicals who seem intent on resurrecting the profoundly ugly Black Power movement, it is as if the Civil War never happened. They refuse to accept that the United States has changed dramatically over the years and that many of those who sold Africans into slavery were Africans themselves. Their loud demands continue as they dishonestly try to appropriate the mantle of noble anti-slavery campaigners like Frederick Douglass.
This colossal double-standard in the media is a function of what David Horowitz terms “black skin privilege.”
This preferential race-based treatment of African-Americans fuels violence and social media-driven reigns of terror. It encourages today’s race-baiting lynch mobs to troll the Internet to satisfy their desire to be offended and outraged. When the cranks and low-rent bigots of the so-called Black Lives Matter movement target an enemy, they get plenty of support from the media, and in many cases, from politicians.
Horowitz explained that he “coined this term because it encapsulated the facts that are indispensable to understanding our national crisis over race … [that has it origins in] the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s [which] outlawed racial categories in governmental regulations and laws.” The civil rights left “began to reverse this historic victory by reintroducing racial categories and privileges into every aspect of public life from job applications to college admissions, to presumptions of innocence and conclusions of guilt.”
Horowitz continued:
The term “black skin privilege” — which is an indubitable fact of our social life — hoists the racial hypocrites on their own petard. You want to talk about racism? Let’s talk about the racist attitudes and policies of progressives and lynch mobs of color that they inspire.
(Horowitz and John Perazzo co-authored the David Horowitz Freedom Center pamphlet, “Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream.” The PDF version of the pamphlet is available here.)
There is no limit to the accolades heaped on racist black radicals and to the excuses their defenders in the media will manufacture.
The New York Times Magazine published a long puff piece about young Black Lives Matter micro-bloggers DeRay Mckesson and Johnetta Elzie who endorse killing cops and rioting as legitimate forms of political activism. Both activists refuse to condemn violent activism.
Mckesson and Elzie believe that the legacy of the Martin Luther King Jr. has been distorted. “He is held up as an avatar of genteel protest,” the magazine author writes, “invoked by conservative politicians and leaders in the black community as a way to discredit their movement.”
But they “frequently point out that King was in fact a revolutionary who believed in the power of confrontation, and that it’s a crime against American history to confuse the real King with an appealingly passive one,” the article states.
“If you bring up nonviolence as the only civilized way to effect change, they will recite King’s words: ‘A riot is the language of the unheard,’ or they will say they don’t condone rioting, but they understand it,” the article continues.
The article notes, almost in passing, that black activist Ashley Yates “created T-shirts and hoodies that read ‘ASSATA TAUGHT ME’ — a reference to the former Black Panther Party member Assata Shakur — and that became part of the protest iconography.” It leaves out the fact that Shakur is a fugitive who murdered a New Jersey State Trooper.
Today’s media fawns over the vile meanderings of black racist and fabulist Ta-Nehisi Coates. A professional whiner and race-baiter, Coates hasn’t done much worthwhile in his life. Despite not having a college degree, he somehow blundered his way into a visiting professor gig at MIT.
His fawned-over new memoir, Between the World and Me, is a wealth of “pseudo-Marxist legalisms in which ‘black bodies’ are the engines of commerce and culture on which a vast evil white conspiracy squats,” according to Daniel Greenfield. The book is “bad poetry” and “a racist screed that masks its hatred in self-pity.”
“If it weren’t for the self-pity and the fake black preacher rhythm, you could easily imagine that Ta-Nehisi Coates just picked up some of Goebbels’ greatest hits and swapped out Aryan for Black,” Greenfield writes.
Coates, who fancies himself some kind of intellectual, writes in his book that the police officers and firefighters who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks “were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”
Coates writes “America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist … One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard.”
His predictable answer to this invented dilemma is forcing U.S. taxpayers to pay reparations to the descendants of slaves. He’d prefer that laws not be enforced against African-Americans instead of risking the horrors of so-called racial profiling. He claims the popular backlash against New York City’s small-c communist mayor Bill de Blasio is happening because the mayor has two (half) black children. He dismisses the threat posed by Islamists as irrelevant, claiming America has no right to judge terrorists “in a country built on theft, blood and slavery.”
Coates is richly rewarded for this racist, anti-American pabulum. He is “the beneficiary of big liberal media privileges,” Greenfield opines. “He turned down a New York Times column while getting paid to blog about his thoughts on Spider-Man for The Atlantic. His only struggle is deciding which frustration with a taxi, waiter or butler to turn into a column about racism this week.”
In a book review, the New York Times hails Coates as a courageous soul who “speaks, unpopular, unconventional and sometimes even radical truths in his own voice, unfiltered.” Acclaimed author Toni Morrison lauds the book for filling the “intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died.” A Guardian (UK) reviewer slobbers, “I am in near-total agreement with Coates’s view of this world we share.” Slate drools that the book “is a monumental work about being black in America that every American urgently needs to read.” U.S. News & World Report declares that Coates “writes in the tradition of black writers who have held the American dream up to the light and exposed its barrenness: Frederick Douglass asking, ‘What to the slave is the Fourth of July?’, Malcolm X proclaiming, ‘I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.'” The Christian Science Monitor calls the memoir “a highly provocative, thoughtfully presented, and beautifully written narrative about the ongoing racial struggle in America.”
And so on and so on.
Then there is Salon which is in a league of its own. As I wrote at FrontPage recently, the far-left commentary website Salon publishes morally reprehensible full-throated defenses of the Black Lives Matter movement whose supporters now openly endorse murdering cops and waging “war” against America. Salon cheered on the rioters in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., accepting as gospel the idea that blacks like Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin were murdered by racist white people running wild. Black violence is routinely dismissed at Salon because it doesn’t fit the Left’s narrative. Black people are always victims and white people are always evildoers.
Its writers embrace genocide against whites, claim the troubled Sandra Bland was murdered by the police, ignore black racism, claim Americans’ supposed racism “can literally make black people ill,” and claim white supremacist mass murderer Dylann Storm Roof is receiving preferential treatment in police custody because he benefits from “a textbook example of White Privilege.”
Its writers lie about almost all of the high-profile deaths of black Americans at the hands of police in recent years.
It is worth noting that there are some black Americans who recognize the danger inherent in racializing everything.
The Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson warned of the dangers of applying double-standards to black Americans and coddling black leftists years ago.
I’ve been saying to white Americans for years now that they need to start speaking up, they need to get over this fear of being called a racist, because they have allowed this to happen for 50 years and they have trained other young blacks that Jesse Jackson and others can get away with intimidating us and you can do the same thing and now we have a far-left liberal socialist black Democrat who believes in the redistribution of wealth, he wants to take it from the white man and give it to those who are not earning their way because they’re trying to destroy the white man and that’s what this is about and if white people don’t get over the fear of being called racist it’s over for America.
So far not too many people are listening.
If they don’t start paying attention soon, America in the not-too-distant future will become unrecognizable as a country, assuming the nation doesn’t disintegrate before then.