It's Not About Race, It's About Racism

I try not to watch much Fox News these days. Well, any days. I mean I've never watched any Fox News, except for that one time when Stephen Colbert went on the O'Reilly Factor. But in general I try to keep my exposure level to Fox, and to conservative media in general, to a minimum. That's the kind of thing that gets you rather criticized in some parts, but seeing a few clips of Fox's coverage of the Ferguson situation has reminded me why I have this policy. It... was kind of shocking. And disturbing.

But anyway, one of the themes of the rantings of the people on Fox was that it was wrongful of liberals generally to make Ferguson and the shooting of Michael Brown about race. So here's what I have to say about that: it's not about race. It's not about race at all. Michael Brown's shooting is not outrageous because Michael Brown was black. It's outrageous because a young man was murdered. (Yes, that's conclusory, but as far as I can tell there's no reason to think it was anything other than murder, except that the perpetrator was an on-duty cop and there seem to be people who increasingly think that it's just a logical impossibility for an on-duty cop to commit murder). It's doubly outrageous because the murderer was a member of the government, of law enforcement, sworn to protect the people. Which, you might think is a bit inconsistent with murder. And the outrage is compounded by the fact that this happens a lot. And it pretty clearly doesn't have to: other countries simply don't experience significant numbers of murders by their police officers (and also don't suffer rampant violent crime by the thus-emboldened criminals).

So where does race enter the story? Because essentially all the victims of police murder in this country happen to be black. Or to put it another way, race only enters the equation because racist, violent police officers put it there. Michael Brown's death was an outrage simply because he was human and he was murdered. The point is that he was murdered because he was black, as an awful lot of other people have been. So it's really not about race, and it's certainly not really about his race. It's about racism, and the racism which seems to spawn most of the police violence and brutality in this country. This is also, of course, why you see lots and lots of white people every bit as outraged as any black person about Ferguson (or at least very nearly; I wouldn't want to presume that those of us who don't live under this threat can quite understand just how terrifying it is). The conflict here isn't white against black, it's racists against non-racists. The former are a rather large subset of white people; the latter are a coalition of non-whites and white liberals. And those of us in the not-racist coalition are all equally outraged about Brown's death, and about the conservative indifference to his death (sorry, did I say conservative? I meant racist, it's so easy to get confused these days). We'd be equally outraged at the shooting of a white person by cops, except that, well... that doesn't happen so much.

Any guesses why that might be, Fox contributors?

::crickets::

Common

I just watched the interview where Jon Stewart and Bill O'Reilly argue about whether the rapper/poet known as Common ought to have been invited to the White House. Basically this debate strikes me as inane, insane, and silly, so I haven't bothered to write anything about it, but I was just struck by this thought hearing Bill'O's arguments. The crux of his argument seemed to be that President Obama should have known that to invite someone who had written lyrics or made statements or gestures that seem kind of controversial from a left-wing black radical perspective to the White House for a poetry jam would be controversial and get him, President Obama, a criticism he doesn't need. Never mind that right now I don't think Obama is really worried about his "oh no, people think I'm an anti-American Muslim radical" flank. O'Reilly's criticism of Obama is that he should have known this action would lead to criticism. Like the criticism O'Reilly was making. "You shouldn't have done that, because I am criticizing you for it and you should have known I would." It's just silly: if his only problem with it was that it would get Obama criticized, then maybe he could try, I don't know, not criticizing Obama. Then he wouldn't have a reason to criticize Obama for doing the thing that would get him criticized, because it wouldn't have gotten him criticized.

Oh wait, he's on FOX. I believe there's a clause in his contract saying that if he ever passes up a chance to criticize President Obama he gets fired.