My good buddy, and one of the smartest race-thinkers we have, the LA Times‘ Gregory Rodriguez has a very good question for America: “Why is everyone so anxious to elevate Latino-black violence to historic levels?” (Violent crime, generally, is down there due to police innovations like asking locals to help instead of only asking them to assume the position.)
As he wrote in his latest column, “A new study by three UC Irvine criminologists has concluded that Los Angeles is not on the brink of a major interracial crime wave. Surprised? That’s understandable. Because for the last several years, the media have been increasingly fixated on the specter of black-versus-brown violence.”
Sadly, violence remains intra-communal. It aint even close. Though Gregory’s analysis is great, as usual, I think there’s a puzzle piece missing in figuring out why everyone’s primed for a good old-fashioned race war.
It’s true that scaring readers sells newspapers and magazines. It’s also true that whites like to believe that black-white relations are good (75% of white Angelenos think so, given how well our racial rivenings work out for them), while black-Hispanic (black-anybody) relations must be bad (46% think so). Funny, then, that 68% of blacks and 59% of Hispanics think the opposite. True, too, that white racial fatigue, well underway while Kunta Kinte was getting his toes chopped off, compels them to flip the script. “We’re not the problem anymore. Look at how those people behave.” Career criminals are always bored by their victims’ complaints. Still, however real white fatigue may be, it’s only a slice of the phenomenon.
People see what they want to see. In this racially ridiculous country, people want, need, to see ‘the other’ reduced to the characteristics assigned to them by their worst enemy. Blacks and browns are lazy, rapacious animals who could never handle freedom. Raping, clawing and murdering each other in the Super Dome post-Katrina. Grandmothers at 14. Welfare queens. Super predators. Sing good, though and boy can they box/dance/shoot hoops. All’s right with the world when whites are socially constructed as beneficent, enlightened, long suffering. When white criminals are culturally understood as individuals, minority criminals: mascots. When there’s lots of blacks and browns to feel superior to. And here’s the bonus: jones-ing for minority crime ‘proves’ that our criminal justice system isn’t racist. Just a sad fact of life.
We all do it.
Worldcom, Enron, Halliburton’s no-bid Iraq contracts, Blackwater, insider trading, stolen elections, corporate kickbacks–we Negroes LOVE that stuff. Don’t even get us started on how sexually kinky we believe whites to be. I’m guessing, Hispanics get off on white corruption, too (but I have no idea how Asians fit into this except as the ‘model minority’). Even as we lose our jobs, pensions, and houses, wer’e crowing, we can’t forward each other emails fast enough, because we have the threadbare, pathetic joy of seeing whites exposed as their ‘true’ selves: hypocrites who’d deal with the devil for a dollar, happily selling their own mothers out for a time share in the Hamptons. Selling out the nation? No problem if the price is right.
It’s porn. Racial porn. And we all do it.
