By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
For as long as I can remember, liberals in the academy and the media have been making the case that the use of the n-word is to be deplored because it dehumanizes African-Americans, leading to everything from lynching to discrimination in employment and housing and racial stereotypes in the popular culture.
We have also been lectured about how the derogatory terms used for our enemies during wars — krauts, nips, and towel-heads, for example — can cause members of our military to commit atrocities against them. These terms can result, we are told, in our military seeing our opponents as less than fully human, promoting illegal acts of cruelty and torture from individuals who would never think of doing such things in civilian life.
I don’t quarrel with any of this. I am always struck by the old photos of white Southerners standing around lynched black men. Some of the men look like Charles Manson. But not all. A good number of them resemble the people you would see hanging around Floyd’s barber shop in Andy Griffith’s Mayberry. Not the kind of people you would think capable of such horrific behavior. Clearly, something led them to view their black victim not as fully human. The use of the n-word may have played a role in their thinking.
Similarly, we are told that many who knew Lt. William Calley in civilian life testified that he was a good and kind man. Calley, you may remember, was the Army officer charged with the premeditated murder of 109 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in March 1968. Calley knew about the brotherhood of man in civilian life, but did not see the Vietnamese men, women, and children he ordered to be shot as in that category. They were objects to him — dinks, slopes, unworthy of human respect.
It strikes me that it is time for the establishment media to apply the same yardstick to the Black Lives Matter movement. Clearly, a dehumanized perception of whites is now a part of the psyche of large numbers of young African-Americans. If you haven’t seen the videos of the crowds in Milwaukee in mid-August as they egged each other on to commit acts of violence, check out the following: http://dailycaller.com/2016/08/14/milwaukee-rioters-hunt-down-attack-whites-video.
There were repeated calls to “beat down white persons,” to “get the honkies.” Young women can be heard, urging the rioters not to burn down the “stuff we need” in the neighborhood, but to “get the suburbs” instead.
Violence and cruelty were seen as acceptable, even praiseworthy, by the blacks in these mobs, if it was directed against “whites.” Not a specific white person. Just “whites.” White people as individuals were not up for discussion.
It well may be that the young blacks in these mobs had amicable relationships with individual whites in their lives: teachers, merchants, social-service case workers. Yet no one in the mobs called for anyone to check if the individual motorists in the cars they were about to attack were “nice people.” It was enough that they were white. They were acting no differently from the white men in the lynch mobs. They were not interacting with individual human beings, but with objects they had been taught to hate.
We can see the same attitude in the news clips of the “knockout game.” The young black men walking down the street in search of someone to drive to the ground with a single punch are not looking for an individual with a history of being cruel to African-Americans. All they want is someone who is white, in the same way that redneck young men might drive around looking for a black man to terrorize. They don’t see a father, a grandfather, a veteran, a volunteer for his local parish. Skin color was all that mattered, an object, not an individual.
The same contempt for the humanity of an individual was evident in the story that appeared in the newspapers on August 19, about the killing of an 85-year-old white Korean War veteran from Birmingham, Ala. The man, Gene Emory Dacus, was liked and respected by his neighbors.
One said, “He was very sweet to all of the children. He kept our neighborhood clean.” Another told reporters from a local television station, “He was a good man. Uncomparably good man, the most kindhearted gentleman you ever met. He never met a stranger, and he helped anybody he could.”
None of that made any difference to Thomas Sims, an 18-year-old black youth, who beat the old white man to death and then set him on fire. “It’s disheartening to see someone this young go to this level of violence,” said the chief of police.
“To me, what he did to that elderly gentleman is evil at its finest. This homicide shocks the conscience of any reasonable person. Our hearts are hurting for the victim, his family, and our community. The suspect actually confessed to this crime but we have not received any logical justification to explain what happened.”
Dacus’ son told reporters, “The only thing I can hope to God for is that he was dead before he was burned. You expect your parents to die before you, but to die a horrendous death like that is unimaginable. My father’s death is a tragic loss. The community lost one of its pillars.”
Can we be certain that the Black Lives Matter rhetoric contributed to the hate that was on display in the Milwaukee riots and this killing in Alabama? More examination is needed to establish direct causation. But, for the time being, it seems reasonable to ask the opinion-makers in the media and academic circles to speak out against the “climate of hate” that is created when words like “honkies,” “whiteys,” and “pigs” fill the air at Black Lives Matter rallies and demonstrations, just as they do when white groups use the n-word, fly the Confederate flag, or engage in racial stereotypes.
It is perplexing when, rather than do that, they make excuses for — and sometimes even glamorize — the black activists who stereotype whites. It does nothing to promote racial justice, to act as if blacks should not be expected to adhere to the same codes of decency and fair-mindedness as whites in this matter. In fact, it is patronizing, maybe even racist.
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