On July 4, Rodolfo Rodriguez, a 91-year-old man, was walking down the sidewalk in Los Angeles. While he was passing a woman and her 4-year-old daughter, the mother suddenly pushed him to the ground and began beating him with a brick, screaming, “Go back to your country! Go back to Mexico!”
She enlisted several men to help her continue assaulting him, convincing them Rodriguez had tried to “snatch” her daughter. (That was false.) Rodriguez suffered a broken jaw, broken cheekbones, two broken ribs and bruises on his face, back, and abdomen. The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department determined the brutal assault was not a “hate-related” incident. How?
Because, surely, we all know what happened. After all, this is “Trump’s America.” Obviously, emboldened by the racist bigot currently occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, this white, female xenophobe decided to act on her prejudice toward a man she assumed was here illegally or just as a general matter shouldn’t be in “her” country and so savagely smashed his face with a brick.
Unfortunately for the progressive, race-obsessed “social justice” contingent of the political Left, a key fact about the crime didn’t cooperate with their master narrative: that all white people are wicked oppressors and their victims are sainted minorities.
The attacker? Laquisha Jones, a 30-year-old black woman. How do you like them white supremacy apples?
The media were basically silent on the incident, and we weren’t told about the attacker’s race until deeper in the news story. We certainly didn’t see the sort of headline hyperventilating we’re accustomed to having shoved down our throats whenever any white person anywhere does anything even remotely untoward.
Racism, Prejudice, and Double Standards
This really shouldn’t be difficult. The Left loudly proclaims how much it loves immigrants, even going so far as to demand that ICE be “abolished” as well as sanctimoniously bleating on about the “dignity” of every person in response to President Trump’s calling members of MS-13—a satanic gang that ruthlessly decapitates and stones its victims—“animals.” (Over 60 million aborted babies called; they want to know why the Democrats in Congress and around the country think they don’t have dignity.) So, why the crickets?
First, because the Left doesn’t actually believe that non-white people can be racist. I know this because I spent years in some of the deeper bowels of the Left: the housing department at the University of Michigan. This is where nonsense like “intersectionality” is born. This is where students are indoctrinated to think that when a white person offends a minority, he is “racist,” but when a minority offends a white person, he is merely “prejudiced.” (Racism, campus luminaries inform us, equals power plus prejudice—not merely harboring animus toward a person because of the color of their skin and then acting on it, which is a definition that only brutes profess; it’s 2018!) This is the belly of the “social justice” beast.
So, naturally, when a Latino like Rodriguez is assaulted, reporters get a little bit excited, hoping, perversely, that the assailant is white because that will be another data point used to help prove their thesis correct—that America is irredeemably racist. But, when the attacker is not white? Then they engage in linguistic jiu-jitsu, insisting that racism is about ratifying oppression, and since minorities by definition cannot be oppressors, then this attacker, a black woman, cannot be a racist. Easy, if you squint really hard and suspend all critical thinking faculties in service of a warped, collectivist monstrosity of an ideology.
Dangerous Assumptions
As far as that gets us in explaining the shameful silence from the media, it isn’t quite the whole story. The elderly man suffered crippling injuries, and violence is obviously a bad thing. Why let ideology prevent the vigorous denouncement of such an incident?
Because immigrants are a wedge issue. The Left doesn’t really care about them; they are, however, extremely useful to its long-term project: dismantling the American experiment through inflamed racial tensions (among other ways). When I mentioned the story to a friend and told her that all the stories only mentioned the attacker’s race several paragraphs from the top, she was astonished to learn that the attacker was black. “That’s not what the headlines made me assume,” she said. It didn’t occur to her that a Mexican man would be attacked by anyone other than a white person.
When people talk about media bias, this is partly what they mean: a set of activist institutions that subtly prime the citizenry to see racism (and all other manner of “-isms”) everywhere, to then think in terms of the primacy of group identity (i.e., “person of race A attacks person of race X/Y/Z” and not “individual attacks individual”—regardless of race), and, finally, to expect that “person of race A” must necessarily be some white skinhead who probably thinks Hitler wasn’t that bad.
The way we discuss and deal with race in this country is a moral atrocity, and the media and academia are doing nothing to improve our plight; in fact, they are actively fanning the flames of bigotry, cloaking it in respectable language. They are pushing racism, full stop. I don’t care how smooth they sound. We will never have an honest reckoning with these charged issues until these dishonest hucksters—in the media, in academia, in politics, in corporate America’s HR departments—are exposed and driven from the conversation into the wilderness of contemptible irrelevance.
President Trump’s attempts to re-forge a common meta-identity that we all can belong to, grounded in citizenship, protected by the Constitution, and spiritually sustained by the principles proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence, is a solid start. We need to commit to continuing that project long after he’s left the White House. Otherwise, we’ll remain ensnared by identity politics, and race in America will be a toxic and destructive quagmire, a cancer on the body politic.
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