Abolishing America (contd.): Double standards in Cincinnati

If there is going to be a white awakening in this country, a realization among whites that they are slowly becoming a subordinate class of citizens and victims of an emerging non-white, racially conscious majority, it may start in Cincinnati. In that city, ripped apart by three days of race riots in April, some whites are now beginning to see that both local and federal authorities are pursuing racially selective double standards—against whites themselves.

In Cincinnati, 837 suspects were arrested in the course of the riots, and 64 have been charged with looting, vandalism, arson, and physical assault. Sixty-one of those arrested are black, and not a few of the offenses committed were in fact "hate crimes" deliberately directed against whites because of their race.

Witnesses and videos of the riots show clearly that black rioters stopped cars with whites in them, pulled the whites from the cars and beat them savagely. In one well-known case, a black woman, Roslyn Jones, who happened to be an albino, was mistaken for a white and assaulted. When her race became known, someone shouted, "She's black." The assault ceased.

So, are the 63 suspects charged with violence also being charged with hate crimes? Well, no. There is only one suspect charged with a hate crime in the Cincinnati riots. He's a white man.

Craig Carr, a 20-year-old white male, was charged with "ethnic intimidation, criminal damaging and aggravated menacing," after allegedly shouting racial epithets and throwing a brick through a window in the course of the riots. "Inexcusable," is how Hamilton County prosecutor Michael Allen characterized Mr. Craig's behavior, and federal officials may also wind up charging him with a hate crime.

Don't imagine the federal leviathan is a sluggard when it comes to busting white hate criminals. Attorney General John Ashcroft at once dispatched a team of federal lawyers to launch a civil rights investigation of the shooting of the black fugitive whose death at the hands of a white policeman ignited the riots. "The attorney general," The Washington Times reports this week, (April 30,2001) "instructed civil rights attorneys to focus on accusations that Cincinnati police officers used improper procedures or lacked training." There is no federal investigation of black rioting.

Then there's also the case of the black woman who was shot with a bean-bag by local police. The bigoted bean-bag seems to have been fired in the course of the funeral of the martyred black fugitive, ostensibly to prevent the riots from starting all over again. Nowhere is there any evidence that whites were shot with bean-bags. So there you are!

White people may be dumb, but sooner or later even they begin to wake up to the kind of blatant hypocrisy that ignores dozens of vicious beatings and assaults committed for transparent racial reasons and punishes instead the one white man in the entire city who may have yelled the N-word while throwing a brick. Indeed, at least one city councilman in Cincinnati has already awakened.

"What's happened here is there has been a switching of victims," says City Council member Phil Heimlich. "We have a situation where violent riots took place and many innocent people had their businesses looted and their property destroyed and a host of innocent people were brutally beaten apparently because of their race." Asked about a double standard for blacks and whites, Mr. Heimlich said, "That's exactly the question to ask, that is my concern."

He's not the only one to ask it. A Cincinnati law enforcement source told the Times, "My understanding is that we may have a double standard of hate crime prosecution at the federal level." Hundreds of whites calling local radio talk shows have raised the same issue.

But of course the double standard is not merely at the federal level, as the charging of Mr. Carr by the county shows. Nor is it confined to Cincinnati and its riots.

The racial double standard runs through civil rights law, affirmative action, immigration policy and law enforcement as well. It exists because non-whites have succeeded in converting their own racial consciousness into a formidable political and cultural weapon before which the mainly white political establishment trembles, while whites themselves lack the racial identity and shared consciousness that must be the foundation of political and cultural power.

If whites don't like the victimhood and second-class citizenship into which they are slowly but surely being forced by their own government, they can stop whining about the unfairness of it all and start working together to resist it. But they need have no illusions that they can mount an effective resistance until they too create the kind of common identity and consciousness that allows non-whites to get what they want from a government too cowardly to govern.

May 03, 2001