Black Skin Privilege: The Media's Love of Black Racism & Violence

My article from the August 21, 2015 issue of FrontPageMag:

Black Skin Privilege: The Media's Love of Black Racism & Violence

By Matthew Vadum

Editor's note: Below is the fourth article in the FrontPage series "Black Skin Privilege," based on the Freedom Center pamphlet "Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream" by David Horowitz and John Perazzo. (Click the following for Part I, Part II and Part III.)

It is a sad commentary on our nation that the mainstream media refuses to take a critical look at the increasingly violent, racist Black Lives Matter movement, and often promotes those activists' depraved view of America, the least racist nation on the face of the earth.

The outrageous, even genocidal, statements issued every day now by hate-filled black nationalists and their radical allies who are part of what is becoming an African-American "Occupy Wall Street" movement, are barely examined at all. In a case of defining deviancy down, these antisocial, anti-white sentiments are accepted by the media as normal, even admirable.

Black Lives Matter rabble rousers didn't say a peep in protest when the New Black Panther Party offered a cash reward for Wilson "dead or alive." The same group also offered a $10,000 cash bounty for so-called white Hispanic George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer who shot young black man Trayvon Martin in self-defense. Zimmerman too was cleared by the courts and the Justice Department. This is not an exhaustive list of black criminals these activists claim are the real victims. Brown and Martin are far from alone. 

The Wilson and Zimmerman cases are as dead as a doornail, yet these people keep lying about the facts in order to energize their dangerous supporters. To them, Brown and Martin were innocent young, college-bound angels, not vicious thugs.

Let's look at some of the psychotic statements some black radicals routinely get away with in the media.

Leaders of the Lynch Mob

My article in today's FrontPage magazine:

Leaders of the Lynch Mob

By Matthew Vadum

Leaders of the “Black Lives Matter” movement are obliquely endorsing killing cops and rioting as legitimate forms of political activism as the radical community organizers of the so-called Black Spring ramp up political violence and civil unrest.

For example, on-the-record statements by Twitter stars DeRay Mckesson, 29 and Johnetta Elzie, 26, are all over the Internet. Mckesson (Twitter handle: @deray) and Elzie (Twitter handle: @Nettaaaaaaaa) are influential activists who have become legacy-media darlings by using social media to push their racial-grievance agenda.

A very long, fawning profile of the duo by writer Jay Caspian Kang, who in his day job is an editor at The New Yorker magazine, elucidates what they believe.

Both of these community organizers bounce between reverence for nonviolent action and a refusal to condemn violent activism, which this writer would argue is tantamount to endorsing violent activism.

Mckesson and Elzie believe that the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. has been distorted.

“He is held up as an avatar of genteel protest,” Kang writes, “invoked by conservative politicians and leaders in the black community as a way to discredit their movement.”

But they “frequently point out that King was in fact a revolutionary who believed in the power of confrontation, and that it’s a crime against American history to confuse the real King with an appealingly passive one,” Kang writes.

“To make their point, they participated in an action called #ReclaimMLK, which sought to counter ‘efforts to reduce a long history marred with the blood of countless women and men into iconic images of men in suits behind pulpits.'”

“If you bring up nonviolence as the only civilized way to effect change, they will recite King’s words: ‘A riot is the language of the unheard,’ or they will say they don’t condone rioting, but they understand it,” he writes.

The New York Times Magazine notes, almost in passing, that respected activist Ashley Yates “created T-shirts and hoodies that read ‘ASSATA TAUGHT ME’ — a reference to the former Black Panther Party member Assata Shakur — and that became part of the protest iconography.”

Understandably, the article doesn’t bother to explain the historical significance of Shakur, a black fugitive from American justice who was long ago granted asylum by Communist Cuba. Doing so would disrupt the narrative that dogmatically reinforces the idea that Black Lives Matter must be viewed by all as a noble, nonviolent movement and that any suggestion to the contrary is inherently malevolent and racist. The left effected the same kind of whitewash with the rapists and fire-bombers of the ridiculously violent Occupy Wall Street movement even in the face of overwhelming evidence of rampant criminality among its activists and supporters.