The case has raised issues of race, sex and class

Media afficionados will immediately recognize those words from countless articles in the New York Times on the Duke rape hoax (not that they'll ever recognize it as such - I can just imagine the Times a year from now: "While most legal experts consider the allegations to be, in retrospect, unfounded, the case nevertheless raised important issues of..."). Here's some other samples: the case has touched historically tender nerves of race, sex and class...The case has drawn national attention to Duke and Durham while underscoring issues of class and race...pointing to underlying issues of race, class, sex and privilege. While I feel I know as much about the lacrosse case as the players' attorneys, I was completely unaware of a more recent, and far more disturbing, case that raised similar issues in my mind. But somehow, I must have missed the wall-to-wall saturation coverage in the media (rather ham-handed bit of sarcasm there, sorry).

I am speaking of the double murder in Knoxville a week ago. A young white couple (pictured here), while visiting friends, decided to go out and grab a bite to eat. The exact details of what happened next are not known at this time, but they were apparently car-jacked or set upon by two to four black men (pictured here - two might be mere accessories after the fact). The two were bound and dragged to a semi-occupied apartment. The young man was brought outside, beaten, executed, and his body set on fire near a railroad track. The young girl was not so lucky, allegedly being repeatedly raped over a couple days, then killed and her body stuffed into a trash can in the apartment.

If you search Google News on "Newsom Christian" (the surnames of the victims) you get a pathetic 77 hits (that's as of 8:07pm EST). "Knoxville double murder" brings an even sadder 24 hits. In contrast, googling the Times alone on "lacrosse race class sex" garners 26 hits. Googling the Times on "Duke lacrosse rape" fetches 368 hits! The Times of course has not deigned to cover this Kentucky case, presumably because it presents no issues of race and sex? Let's see - black street thugs kidnap, torture, rape, and murder a young, attractive, college-educated white couple - no, no interesting undercurrents of race, sex and class there!

In an otherwise unrelated post, Lawrence Auster writes about the Left's ever-more fervent attack on "Christian Theocracy". He ascribes it to Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society.

The First Law states that because of the modern liberal belief in the moral and substantive equality of all peoples and cultures, the worse any minority or non-Western group really is, the worse the West must be made to appear, as the guilty cause of the non-Western group’s bad or dysfunctional behavior, or as simply bad in itself.

So with the Duke rape hoax, even though the charges were obviously fabrications from the onset, the story had to be played out, with all its sub-context of "race, sex and class" as if it were real, because actual cases of brutal white-on-black rape simply can't be found. While there are about 15,000 black-on-white rapes each year, the opposite is statistically non-existent. Brutal murders present just as much of a problem. So if blacks are to be depicted as no worse than whites, the media (particularly the Times) must ignore black crime as much as possible while loudly trumpeting any white violence that may surface. The pickings are slim however, typically limited to some Howard Beach ruffians who might happen on some black kids wandering into their neighborhood (the last such involved a local known as "Fat Nick" beating up a would-be car thief with a baseball bat - no sex, no class, just race - hey, you take what you can get and you go with it). The last great opportunity was the James Byrd murder in 1998. Even though the killers were the embodiment of white-trash, and the crime universally condemned across the nation, the Times made every effort to cast its net as widely as possible, and Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote at the time that the murder "reflects [a] growing national problem of race hatred and other forms of prejudice and intolerance that has to be addressed".

It has to be addressed, indeed, but not in the way Mr. Herbert would like it to be addressed. Of course horrific black-on-white crimes are relatively rare, but how much less rare would they be if so many whites did not organize their lives around avoiding contact with African-Americans? And I wouldn't exactly call it exceedingly rare - just last year there was the Imette St. Guillen murder in NYC (which received alot of publicity since she was missing for a week) and the Harvey family slaughter in Richmond (that wasn't well publicized) that immediately come to mind. Yet white efforts to racially isolate themselves - all-white neighborhoods and schools, for example - is depicted in the media as irrational prejudice rather than as an understandable response to statistically valid fears.

But Bob Herbert - well, not just Bob, but the media, the educational establishment, the corporate culture - everyone who decides what is acceptable to say and not say - prefers that this racial discussion occur in one direction only. We can talk about Bull Connor, Medgar Evers,
George Wallace blocking the school door, busing riots in Boston, Rodney King, and recognize them all as unobstructed signposts along the road of hatred and oppression that has led us to this divided state; or we can talk about black illegitimacy, crime, or New Orleans as the outcomes of poverty and hopelessness, both inevitable products of racism. Even the stomach-churning scenes of the L.A. riots were aired with the drone of guilt-ridden commentary implicating inequality and despair as the real force behind the flying bricks. White racism, prejudice, isolation, and fear have no context - they are just evils that dwell in the white man's heart. And so fictional white crimes are more valid and important to discuss than actual crimes committed by Afrian-Americans (remember Willie Horton - it was the ad that was bad, not Willie and not the furlough).

Do I sound angry? I am fed up, is what I am. No more excuses - no more nonsense. Too bad there's little I can do but vent in this lonely corner of the blogosphere.

Related:
Nicholas Stix's Definitive Account of the Duke Rape Hoax

Dennis Dale - The R-word

See this 'gc' (the former blogger formerly known as 'Godless Capitalist') comment from which I nicked a few thoughts above and read the whole comment thread as well (and of course the original post).