In his new column Bernie Goldberg takes on the media’s fascination, and hypocrisy, with a black boy killed by a “white Hispanic,” and the failure of civil rights activists to
It is understandable why so many Americans would demand justice for Trayvon Martin. But the hypocrisy and the high profile sanctimony of the oh-so-concerned media and the civil rights establishment is downright galling.
Let’s not be naïve: If Trayvon Martin had been shot that night by another black teenager there would be have been nothing from president Obama, no nationally televised demonstrations, no demands for justice by prominent civil rights leaders, and nobody outside his immediate circle of family and friends would even know his name.
We know about Trayvon Martin only because the man who shot him looks white. Actually, Zimmerman’s mother is Peruvian, which makes him half Hispanic, a fact you might not have known if you get your news from the usual places. That would only detract from the storyline: black kid shot by overzealous (and probably racist) white vigilante. For what it’s worth, the New York Times refers to him as a “white Hispanic,” a politically correct description to make sure we know Mr. Zimmerman is a white man – and not “a person of color.” You think the Times would call him a “white Hispanic” if he had won a Nobel Prize for curing cancer?
Then Bernie raises the murder of Delric Waymon Miller, a nine-month-old Detroit baby shot to death last month:
Police think the shooting may have been an act of retaliation stemming from a fight between rival gangs a few days earlier at a bar.
So of course there would be no national outcry, no comments from the president, no rallies led by Al Sharpton demanding justice for Delric, no pieties from Jesse Jackson about how “blacks are under attack” in America. It’s a safe bet the shooter was black. This was just one more case of black on black crime, the kind of story that gets ink in the local papers but that’s about it.
Hundreds of young black men are shot and killed in this country every year. In almost all the cases, the shooter is also black. Try to name one of those dead black men. Just one.
Journalists who work for the national news networks, or major American newspapers with a national reach, don’t spend a lot of time shining a spotlight on dysfunctional behavior in parts of black America. Stories about such things in black neighborhoods, imposed on black people by black people, would be tantamount to airing dirty laundry in front of the whole country. And that is something liberal journalists who are proud of their good racial manners (along with their friends in the civil rights establishment) do not want to do.