Posted by
"Happy" Jake Greene on Thursday, July 30, 2009 6:30:22 AM
The depths to which people on the Left will dive to perpetuate racism astound me. The Henry Louis Gates case has claimed another victim of Leftist libel and abyssal stupidity. The latest is that Lucia Whalen is now considered a racist. Who, in the name of all that is holy, is Lucia Whalen, you ask? Lucia Whalen is the Cambridge, MA resident who, acting as a Good Samaritan, called the police when she saw two people with suitcases trying to break into Gates’s home. Her crime? According to the Leftist blogosphere, she called the Cambridge PD and reported that two black men were breaking into a home.
There are a couple of problems with this story. First off, no, she didn’t. She did not say that two black men were breaking into Gates’s home. She said that two men were breaking into his home. She did not volunteer race as she was across the street and couldn’t see them well. She could see that they were trying to shoulder their way into the house through the back door, but not get a description. When pressed by the 911 operator, she said one of the men “might” have been Hispanic. She does a good deed for a black man and gets called a racist for it. Boy, you hatemongers on the Left are brilliant, aren’t you.
Here’s the second problem. Let’s say she did say it was two black men (or African-American or whatever the politically correct term is these days). If she was right, why is that bad? When you witness a crime, it can be useful to get a description of the perp if possible. Race, while not a good method on which to base employment decisions, is a perfectly acceptable and often necessary descriptor precisely because it dramatically affects outward appearance. If I tell you that a 6’2”, 225 lb bald black man with a goatee committed a crime, you can immediately visualize what the perp looks like. If I say a 6’2”, 225 lb bald man with a black goatee and a dark complexion committed a crime, different people might visualize an Arab, a black, an Italian, an Indian, a Greek, an Asian, or a Nordic type with a suntan and a dye job. Using race to justify helping or harming someone is absolutely wrong. Using race to describe someone, particularly when a description of outward appearance is required, is basic common sense.
Make no mistake, the Left profits by the persistence of racism. They secretly lament the ending of segregation and the beginning of true equality between blacks and whites. This has nothing to do with the Left hating black people, mind. It has to do with the fact that if you believe the Left, every time something bad happens to a black man, it’s caused by racism. And because bad things must be caused by racism, only the Left are “enlightened” enough to “assist.” And the people they “assist” make every effort to keep them in power because those people want to believe that their problems are not their own, but the responsibility of someone else, some nebulous force they cannot define. And so, when a cop asks a man for his ID to ensure that he didn’t just break into a home, rather than simply showing the ID, the man starts yelling at the cop and calling him names and refusing to cooperate and cries racism before he is arrested.
President Obama called this a “teachable moment,” and he’s right. It is. But the lessons to be learned here are falling on willfully deaf ears, and his are among them.