I was over in Oakland having dinner with a friend on the evening of "Pink Saturday", an informal Castro celebration that's part of Gay Pride Day. The neighborhood was already filling up when I left. When I got back home at 11.45, there was wall to wall people for blocks.
As has become the case in the last years, most of them were not gay. And most of them were very young. And the neighbor was vastly less white than usual. I noticed several police cars with lights flashing but took a roundabout way home. Next day I read that I had unknowingly walked right past a murder scene. A guy shot another guy to death and wounded two other people.
The papers were distinctly vague. "A 19-year-old man" was arrested. The dead fella's name was given, though, "Stephen Powell". And the cops and the supes were quick to tell us that this was not a hate crime, but a personal dispute.
I'll bet money that we're talking about blacks here.
Why? Because the anxiety to be vague is so clear. When there's a crime and you can't tell much about the criminal, he's almost always someone of color.
I am sure that the folks who follow this very PC protocol think that they are doing a good thing. Not fanning the flames of racial sterotyping, etc. But anyone with eyes and a capacity to read knows that violent crime is an uncontested specialty of blacks and Latinos. The stats are clear and consistent.
What this delicacy, which is really lying and condescension and manipulation, actually produces, at least in me, is precisely what its high-minded practitioners hope to prevent, a kind of racial contempt. I find myself thinking: If these people must be so elaborately and transparently protected from the simple truth, then something must be really really wrong with them. They cannot be treated like adults, much less equals; hell, their friends and allies can't even treat them that way!
Do I universalize the criminality of some blacks --though a disproportionately large set of blacks-- to a rank stereotype of all blacks? Not any more than Jesse Jackson does.
In the comments section of the paper, people who witnessed the shooting wrote in...to fill in the blanks left by the team of PC reporters who are afraid to tell the truth. Black on black crime.
Where do I collect my money?
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