08/03/2020
Heavy.com did some serious Googling on alleged decapitator Jerry Thompson, who is black, and who is alleged to have decapitated Victor King, who was white.
When Heavy.com does an item called Jerry Thompson, Alleged Beheader: 5 Fast Facts You Need To Know, almost never is one of the "5 Fast Facts" what race the attacker or victim is, but they include helpful photographs.
In this case, since "Jerry Thompson" is a quite common name, they've also included a list of Jerry Thompsons who are not alleged to have cut off a white man’s head with a sword.
They write
This Thompson is not to be confused with:
- Jerald Stillwell Thompson, who competed in the 1948 Olympics as a long-distance runner and was inducted into the Texas Track & Field Hall of Fame.
- Dr. Jerry D. Thompson of Texas A&M University, a Regents Professor and professor of history, former Dean of the College of Arts and author of multiple books.
- Investigative reporter Jerry Thompson of the Nashville Tennessean who wrote the book, My Life in the Klan: A True Story By the First Investigative Reporter to Infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan.
- Oregon filmmaker Jerry Thompson, as well as multiple other writers and directors, according to the International Movie Database.
- Convicted murderer Jerry K. Thompson, who was accused of murdering a businessman by the name of Melvin Hillis and one of his employees in 1991; Thompson was then killed in state prison, according to local news station WTHR.
All of these people are white, including, counter-stereotypically, the long-distance runner (1948 was a different time) and the convicted murderer.
You might have suspected that, because they had a normal name like Jerry Thompson.
And there’s nothing wrong with blacks having normal names, I only mention it because in this case the picture was the only clue that Thompson is a black person who killed a white person.
A while back, John Derbyshire did a column on black names for National Review:
In more recent times, those black Americans who want their kids to stand out from the general run of Michaels and Lindas (or, to be more up to date, Kyles and Ashleys) have developed a stock of names that either express ethnic pride in some way ("Ebony," for example, or "Tawnee"), or are derived from Swahili ("Barika," which means "successful") or Arabic ("Rasheed," which means "righteous"), or are just made up ("Davon," "Tashira," etc.) There is also a scattering of European names favored solely by blacks. If you find yourself on the phone with a Tyrone or a Clarence or a Letitia, you can be 99 percent sure it is a black person. (Though "Clarence" will be at least forty years old — this name seems to have dropped out of favor in the 1960s.) …
The persistence of "black names" is at least in part a side effect of the great multicultural project of this past thirty years, an outgrowth of ethnic pride and a declaration of ethnic separatism, of "diversity." For blacks who want to be upwardly mobile, the consequences are mildly negative … . A lot of employers are reluctant to hire blacks. Possibly there is some "racism" here — an esthetic distaste for dark skin. A bigger factor, I am sure, is the affirmative action deficit — the suspicion that whatever references or qualifications a black applicant might present to an interviewer were obtained in part through racial favoritism or intimidation. And a much bigger factor is the simple fear of crippling lawsuits.
There is also the fact that black Americans in general, and very unfairly to the hard-working, law-abiding majority, have an image problem. It is considered "insensitive" for newspapers to tell us the race of criminals nowadays, but it’s hard not to notice that when we read about some crack addict torturing his girlfriend’s baby to death, or some 14-year-old cut down in a drive-by shooting, the names in the story are almost always something like Deshawn or Latonya. We think to ourselves: "Uh-huh."
Onomastic Diversity, January 20, 2003
Recently the Orlando Sentinel and Tampa Bay Times stopped publishing mugshot galleries because, in the words of a Tampa Bay Times writer, "they disproportionately show black and brown faces. "
Sometimes the only clue is in the name, as when Roger Stone’s jury foreman turned out to be named Tomeka Hart, or when a Party to honor Chicago shooting victim ends with 13 wounded, the only clue to what kind of party it was in the name of the "victim": Lonell Irvin. ("Victim" in quotes because he was more of a failed carjacker−he tried carjacking a Chicagoan with a license to carry.)
So if there’s no clue in a news story, maybe we should just assume the alleged killer was black — because if he was white, they would have said something.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.