If you believe discrimination against white people is rampant, that Donald Trump supporters face persecution, that Chicago is a war zone, and the media is dishonest, then your entire worldview is likely to be confirmed by one awful story.
Chicago police have detained four black teenagers after one of them streamed a live video showing the group striking and shouting at a young white man, who was bound and gagged. In the video, the assailants say “f — Trump” and “f — white people” and say that the victim “represents Trump,” though it is unclear whether the man actually backs the president-elect.
The pro-Trump Infowars website described the episode under a provocative headline: “White man kidnapped, gagged, beaten by racist black anti-Trump gang.”
“Provocative” is the new “controversial.” When I started reading the News and Feature sections of newspapers, rather than just the Sports section, around 1969-1972, “controversial” was used as praise and “provocative” meant “hubba-hubba, you’re going to want to check this out.”
Now both words imply deplorable, low class, Aryan Nation prison gang-level lack of respectability.
“Will the media even cover this footage or will news networks like CNN bury the story?” the article asked.
The cruel act captured on video is, in fact, receiving extensive media coverage — and universal condemnation — on CNN and elsewhere. But some conservatives are not satisfied by the response.
“If this had been done to an African American by four whites, every liberal in the country would be outraged, and there’d be no question but that it’s a hate crime,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich said Thursday morning on Fox News. He added his belief that “there has been a dramatic rise in racial tension under President Obama.”
Gingrich might be right about different reactions, but he conveniently ignores the reason. If the attackers had been white and the victim had been black, the incident would have, of course, conjured America’s ugly history of white mobs committing violence against black people. There is no parallel history of the reverse happening on anything remotely approaching the same scale.
Really?
Obviously, if you stop and think, hundreds of thousands if not millions of white individuals have suffered violence at the hands of mobs of multiple blacks over the last 50+ years, but that’s not a Thing in our national discourse. That’s just noise. Regrettable and forgettable.
How many memorials to crime victims are there in this country? (I believe there is one in Orange County, CA and one in Long Island, NY.) Why do you even know such things? Are you racist?
…
The message in conservative media is clear: Reverse discrimination — particularly against white Trump voters — is a big problem that the liberals in the media refuse to acknowledge. Oh, and by the way, Chicago (the part inhabited mostly by black people, anyway) is a super-dangerous place, just like Trump said.
A Huffington Post survey conducted in November showed that 45 percent of Trump voters believe white people face “a lot of discrimination” in the United States today. Just 22 percent of Trump voters said the same about black people.
The result was consistent with the findings of researchers at Harvard and Tufts, whose 2011 study concluded that whites, overall, now view discrimination against white people as more prevalent than discrimination against black people.
“This perception is fascinating, as it stands in stark contrast to data on almost any outcome that has been assessed,” the researchers, Samuel Sommers and Michael Norton, wrote on the Post Everything blog in July. “From life expectancy to school discipline to mortgage rejection to police use of force, outcomes for white Americans tend to be — in the aggregate — better than outcomes for black Americans, often substantially so.”
Similarly, white Jews outperform white gentiles on a host of important life statistics, such as making the Forbes 400 list per capita, which does not prove Jewish Privilege, since that is not a Thing. Instead, it proves, obviously, that white gentiles are lazy and dumb.
You can’t argue with data!
The worldview of many Trump voters might not be supported by data. But now they can find support in one awful video out of Chicago.
Callum Borchers covers the intersection of politics and media. Follow @callumborchers
By Callum Borchers January 5 at 10:49 AM