Hating white people and policemen isn’t hatred to Ebony magazine

The other day I talked about hate crimes, but I left out an important proviso. Apparently killing white people or policemen doesn’t qualify as hate crime even if explicitly perpetrated out of hatred for those groups.

Thus Micah Johnson, who murdered five Dallas policemen and wounded seven others, didn’t commit a hate crime even though, according to Police Chief David Brown, “The suspect said he… wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”

That to me qualifies as a hate crime or specifically a crime motivated by racial hatred. However, Jamilah Lemieux, Ebony’s editor, disagrees:

“When we use a phrase like ‘hate crime,’ we’re typically referring to crimes against people of colour, people of various religious groups, LGBT people, people who have been historically attacked, abused or disenfranchised on the basis of their identity. To now extend that to the majority group and a group of people that have a history with African-Americans that has been abusive, and we can apply that to either police officers or to Caucasians, I think gets into very tricky territory.”

The ability to use English with anything resembling professional expertise is clearly not a job requirement for the editor of that venerable publication. Neither is logic or any reasonable frame of moral reference. Hostility towards whites and policemen, offset by an all-abiding love of sexual deviants and Muslims (her name suggests that’s the religious group Jamilah had in mind) seems to be a sufficient qualification.

“Don’t shoot until you see the whites” appears to be a philosophical premise with which Ebony sympathises, even if the magazine doesn’t manifestly call for putting it into practice. Now I’d suggest that there’s something wrong with any society that fosters a climate in which such scurrilous rags can thrive or indeed survive.

Slavery hasn’t existed in America for over 150 years, and race discrimination has been outlawed for over half a century. One would think this is long enough for the blacks to bury the hatchet (or the rifle, as it were) and for the whites to assuage their sense of guilt and start treating blacks as equals, not as retarded children to be mollycoddled lest they might harm themselves and others.

My dictionary defines racism as “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior”. There isn’t one word there to suggest that black prejudice against whites is exempt from this definition.

Yet such an exemption is openly demanded by black ideologues, such as those at Ebony, and eagerly accepted by white ‘liberals’, a group that dominates the US opinion-forming media, including all TV networks bar one and all major newspapers bar none.

Hence Miss Lemieux’s statement wasn’t a rant by a marginalised nutter: it was a measured expression of vox populi, that dummy seemingly enunciating words actually being uttered by a wire-pulling ‘liberal’ ventriloquist.

This is lamentable on too many levels even to mention here, never mind to enlarge upon in any detail. I’ll still mention a couple, such as the very concept of hate crime.

Not only in America but also in Britain, hatred by category is treated as an aggravating circumstance in, for example, murder. Yet I can’t see any valid moral distinction between a murder committed out of, say, greed and one perpetrated out of racial or any other hatred.

Or rather I can see a distinction but not a difference. Murder, the unlawful taking of a human life with malice aforethought, is a capital crime seen as such in the founding moral code of our civilisation, the Scripture. How murdering a man just because he’s chromatically different is any worse than murdering a man because he’s richer escapes me entirely.

In fact, drawing such a distinction does untold damage to the very principle of – and therefore respect for – the law, by implicitly denying the absolute value of a human life. Human lives can’t be listed in the descending order of importance. The life of a white policeman is no more or less valuable than the life of a black handyman – and hatred by the latter towards the former is every bit as reprehensible as the other way around.

This is so basic that it pains me even to have to mention it. One should, however, ponder the tectonic shifts in society that have made this a legitimate topic for discussion. Some invisible plates clamped together to produce an earthquake whose shockwaves have never been attenuated. On the contrary, they seem to be getting more destructive as they spread out.

Alas, it’s impossible to do anything about this without revising the founding concepts of Western modernity, starting with those enunciated during the American and especially French revolutions.

All such principles are expressed in words that turn out to mean exactly the opposite of what they really mean. Hence liberty means bondage, equality means inequality and brotherhood means egotism. What Messrs Orwell and Huxley wrote was meant to read as dystopic fantasy. Instead it reads as reportage.