As with the Trayvon Martin case in the era of Obama, the New York press relentlessly showed pictures of the subway “youths” as little kids. A message was being sent. We don’t see Hitler’s baby pictures. We don’t see the Duke lacrosse players’ baby pictures. When publishing these first-communion photos of politically correct victims/criminals, the media should be required to run disclaimers: “Full disclosure: These kids were actually nineteen years old at the time of the shooting” or “Photo of spokesperson model, not Goetz’s actual victim.”
Polls taken in the month immediately following the shooting showed that half of all New Yorkers enthusiastically supported what Goetz had done—and black people supported him every bit as much as whites did.
In a January 1985 Daily News (New York) poll of New York City residents, 52 percent of blacks approved of Goetz’s shooting the muggers, compared to 49 percent of all New Yorkers.30 A Gallup poll the same month showed that 52 percent of whites approved of the shooting compared to 49 percent of blacks.31
Georgetown professor Daniel Robinson raised doubts about the poll results, saying that if Goetz “had simply scared the devil out of the four, I think most people would be just as happy.”32 Unfortunately, there were no poll questions on whether Goetz should have “scared the devil” out of the muggers.
Talk radio shows were overwhelmed with callers praising Goetz. When the police set up a hotline for tips about the incident, it was bombarded with callers expressing their support for the shooter and offering to pay his defense costs.33
The Guardian Angels, a voluntary patrol made up predominantly of black and Hispanic youths, supported Goetz a hundred percent and began collecting money at the subway for his defense. Roy Innis’s Congress of Racial Equality supported Goetz, saying, “We applaud this kind of public spirit against crime.”34
Commenting on the enthusiastic response to Goetz’s self-defense, eminent political science professor Walter F. Berns said: “I am encouraged by what I see as a greater disposition to regard punishment of criminals as not only necessary but moral as well. There is a move by highly respected criminologists to, in effect, rehabilitate the idea of punishment. In a sense, the intellectuals are coming around to where the public has been all the time.”35
The experiment with “root causes” was over. The world only needed Rudy Giuliani to come in and make it official. (The government official who decided there would be no federal civil rights prosecution of Goetz? U.S. Attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani.)
But the media kept trying to refocus the public’s attention on Goetz’s possible racism. Days after the shooting, a New York Times article on the incident warned: “Just beneath the surface of last week’s debate was the question of whether the shooting may have been racially motivated. The four teenagers were black, the gunman was white.”36
Newsweek sneered that the “reality” of the shooting “was never very heroic” and called Goetz “a distressingly ordinary man.”37
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen blamed Goetz for getting mugged, demanding to know why he didn’t sit on the other side of the car from the trouble-making black youths. He hypothesized that Goetz “went looking for young blacks.” Fear of crime, Cohen noted, “is a code for fear of young blacks.”38 Meanwhile one of the shooting victims himself said, “I heard he had been robbed by some black guys before, so in a way I can understand why he might have been afraid.”39 The mugger grasped crime statistics better than Cohen did.
After a few months of the media haranguing the public to view the shooting as a racial incident and Goetz as a racist nut, ABC bragged that its poll showed support for Goetz had dropped 12 percent among blacks. Congratulations, media!
White liberals kept trying to turn the Goetz shooting into a racial incident, but black people apparently didn’t get that memo.
In Claremont Village, the South Bronx project where the four teenagers lived, there was no love lost for the victims. A Washington Post reporter interviewed people in Darryl Cabey’s building as the paralyzed boy remained in a coma and found surprising unanimity. Eighteen-year-old Yvette Green said “If I’d had a gun, I would have shot him.” Darryl Singleton, twenty-four years old, called Cabey, “a sweet person,” but said, “if I had a gun, I would have shot the guy.” 40
One woman told the New York Times, “Maybe he shouldn’t have shot them, but I can’t feel bad if four kids up to no good got hurt.”41 A black man wrote to Cabey’s mother: “[Y]ou get no sympathy from us peace-loving, law-abiding blacks. We will even contribute to support the guy who taught you a lesson, every way we can…P.S. I hope your wheelchair has a flat tire.”42
One of the trial witnesses called by Goetz’s attorney was Andrea Reid, a young black woman, who had been in Goetz’s subway car with her husband and child during the shooting. As she assessed the situation, those “punks were bothering the white man,” adding “those punks got what they deserved.”43 (She testified reluctantly, explaining that she had met the mother and brother of one of the muggers at a party.44)
Noticeably, defense lawyer Barry Slotnick did not try to keep blacks off the jury, nor did he need to. Three blacks and one Hispanic on the jury voted to acquit Goetz of all thirteen charges except for the minor charge of carrying an illegal firearm. Juror Robert Leach, a black bus driver from Harlem, was one of Goetz’s most vehement defenders, even persuading his fellow jurors not to convict Goetz for unlawful possession of the guns he had given to his neighbor, Myra Friedman. Leach said he didn’t believe Friedman’s testimony.45
But when the verdict was announced—attempted murder: not guilty, assault: not guilty, and reckless endangerment: not guilty—the usual racial agitators had their usual response.
Al Sharpton slammed the verdict, saying the jurors had “legalized the rampant opinion that if you see young blacks look menacing, then it’s okay to shoot them—and don’t worry about prosecution.” 46
Don’t worry about prosecution? Au contraire! The district attorney had empaneled two grand juries just to get an indictment against Goetz on anything other than the illegal firearm possession charge, delaying the trial until April 1987, more than three years after the shooting.
New York Governor Mario Cuomo remonstrated that “some people” would read the verdict as a “license now to carry a weapon and to shoot everyone who looks mean to you.”47 And, naturally, the New York Times ran an article titled, “Blacks See Goetz Verdict as Blow to Race Relations.”48 This included NAACP director Benjamin L. Hooks Jr., (“inexcusable,” “a terrible and grave miscarriage of justice”) and Representative Major Owens, Democrat of Brooklyn (“The hysteria in the white community will be, ‘Yeah, we were right, let’s go get ’em.’”)49
The Times had not requested comment from defense witness Andrea Reid, juror Robert Leach, CORE president Roy Innis, any of the Guardian Angels or the muggers’ South Bronx neighbors.
For decades, liberal elites rewarded the worst possible black behavior while ignoring amazing courage in the black community. Only a white liberal could think Al Sharpton has been a blessing to black people. As, again, McWhorter says: “Sharpton would be hard-pressed to point to one positive development in black New York, much less black America, that he could take credit for.”50
This is not to say all problems of black people are caused by white people. But it has been white liberals in positions of power—in the media, academia, Hollywood and the judicial system—who thought it was fun (and quite hip!) to elevate all the worst elements of the black community as heroes and martyrs.
The beginning of Clarence Thomas’s dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger, about the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program, should be tattooed on every liberal’s buttocks. Thomas wrote:
Frederick Douglass, speaking to a group of abolitionists almost 140 years ago, delivered a message lost on today’s majority:
“[I]n regard to the colored people, there is always more that is benevolent, I perceive, than just, manifested towards us. What I ask for the
negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us.…I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us!…And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!…[Y]our interference is doing him positive injury.”51
Fittingly, New York Times columnist Bill Keller attacked Thomas for his dissent in this case, characterizing it as “the angry exclamation of a black man who feels personally patronized and demeaned” and calling Thomas an affirmative-action appointment.52 Liberals demand gratitude for their malignant interference.
CHAPTER 7
LIBERAL-BLACK RELATIONS
Their Landlord and Their Friend
It was the misfortune of black Americans that they were just on the verge of passing through the immigrant experience when these damaging ideas about welfare and crime took hold. It could have happened to the Italians, Germans, Jews or Irish, but luckily for them, there were no liberals around to “help” when they arrived.
Until liberals started driving the bus, black Americans were doing better in individual pursuits than immigrants.1 For about a century after the Civil War, black Americans had good reason to have a chip on their shoulder, but, somewhat amazingly, most did not—until liberals put it there.
Notice the absence of sullen resentment in massively accomplished black Americans in the first generation or two out of slavery—Kelly Miller, James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Archibald Henry Grimké, George Washington Carver, Jack Johnson, Huddie William Ledbetter (Lead Belly), Louis Armstrong, Thurgood Marshall, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson (whose middle name, Roosevelt, was in honor of the Republican president by that name2) and many others. And, unlike the immigrants, they had very good reasons to be aggrieved.
Liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt put a Ku Klux Klanner on the Supreme Court and refused to desegregate the military, but he was more than happy to put blacks on “Irish Welfare”—government jobs. With the proliferation of government work and welfare under the New Deal, black progress was instantly frozen, ineluctably tied to the growth of government. That is why, in the thirties, for the first time in seventy years, the black vote migrated from the Republican Party to the Democrats. That was, of course, limited to northern blacks: Democrats in the South still weren’t letting blacks vote.
The black writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston observed the change and commented: “Throughout the New Deal era the relief program was the biggest weapon ever placed in the hands of those who sought power and votes.…Dependent upon the Government for their daily bread, men gradually relaxed their watchfulness and submitted to the will of the ‘Little White Father,’ more or less. Once they had weakened that far, it was easy to go on and on voting for more relief, and leaving Government affairs in the hands of a few.”3
Liberals took blacks as their pets and then tried to kill them by patronizing them to death.
In the rainbow of diversity that is the left in this country, a remarkably large number of these white friend-of-the-blacks came from as far west as Riverside Drive, south to Columbus Circle, all the way east to Central Park—and as far north as Morningside Heights. Their basic assumption was that anyone outside of Manhattan—especially white people in Queens—sympathized with the Ku Klux Klan.
Michael Moore managed to be both self-flattering and groveling in his book, Stupid White Men. Nothing gives liberals a better sense of their own courage like attacking the only group it’s okay to malign and winning standing ovations from cretins.
Liberals have got to get some new material. They’ve been working that bit about sneering at nonexistent racists forever. Goddamn it, this may cost me my career but I’m going to speak up for racial equality and let the chips fall where they may!
It’s apparently hard for some people to grasp that it’s not brave to tell an audience what it already believes.
Start with the title of Moore’s book. Really. White men have contributed nothing? Since you brought it up—no one wrote a book called Smart White Men—shall we compare SAT scores, cultural contributions and inventions of white men compared to others? It’s one thing to say pink is white, or beige is white. But to say black is white is to have no compunction about sounding like a complete idiot in public.
Reminiscent of a modern-day Jimmy the Greek, Moore urges whites to marry blacks and procreate so we can breed the whiteness out of the country.4 Hacks think statements like that make black people like them, when it’s just creepy and weird. Only a very, very few blacks get to be Al Sharpton. The rest of them have to live in the same world we all do.
Liberals pioneered the method of calling anyone who disagrees with them on politics a racist, based on standards that they themselves could never withstand. It’s a favorite hobby of MSNBC hosts to count the number of black faces at a Tea Party rally or the Republican National Convention. James Meredith, the first black person to attend the University of Mississippi in the face of violent attacks, worked for Jesse Helms. How many blacks work for Michael Moore?
How about Chris Matthews? He is an aggressive bean counter when it comes to the number of blacks at Tea Parties—as if the Tea Partiers can control who shows up at their rallies.
Blacks as a group are overwhelmingly one-party voters. Jews have more Republicans. As a result, any group that espouses Republican principles obviously isn’t going to have a lot of black people—although probably more than the schools Chris Matthews’s children attended.
While living cheek-by-jowl with the nation’s capital, which happens to be a majority black city, Matthews’s kids managed to go to schools that are probably about 3 percent black. When Matthews had an opportunity to associate with blacks by sending his children to public schools, he chose not to. His obsession with race is all about self-congratulation. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”
The Tea Parties weren’t as white as Chris Matthews’s office. They weren’t as white as Matthews’s neighborhood or television audience. (It’s doubtful that even Eugene Robinson watches Hardball.)
This is New-York-Times-Charlie-Rose-PBS thinking. We’re not racist, they are. This pompous self-perception allows liberals to be offensively, self-righteously preening in the positions they take, such as demanding school busing for other people but sending their own kids to private schools.
If we attended a party at the Matthews home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, how many blacks would we see? Could we at least wave to the black neighbors? The New York Times write-up of his son’s wedding5 included a panoramic shot of the church, showing nearly a hundred guests. Not one of them is black. You may check for yourself here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/fashion/weddings/04vows.html?pagewanted=all.
A Republican saddled with the facts of Matthews’s life would be convicted of racism in five minutes.
No one is required to be a friend to someone else because it’s good for society, and people should be able to hire anyone they please. But you better have your own house in order if you’re going to run around accusing everyone else of racism based on a dearth of black associates.
Like Matthews, New York Times columnist Tom Wicker made a career of proclaiming that America was a deeply racist country. But he sent his own kids to lily-white private schools and then retired to the whitest state in the nation, Vermont. Wicker being so right-thinking and the scourge of racists, people were curious about why he didn’t send his kids to New York public schools. Did he just screw up? Asked about the hypocrisy of sending his own children to sanitized private schools, Wicker said, “It gives me a lot of intellectual discomfort, but I am not going to disadvantage my children to win more support for my views.”6
It’s not a question of winning support for his views, it’s whether he really held
those views to begin with. The surest proof of racism is not what people say, but what they do. The only thing in his whole life Wicker could have done that wasn’t just running his mouth was to send his kids to public schools, and he didn’t do it. On what basis did Wicker have a right to self-congratulation on his racial attitudes? Because he worked especially hard to make sure other people’s kids had to go to crime-ridden schools?
It’s often said that those who are unduly bothered by gays are latent homosexuals. Isn’t it possible that people obsessed with racism are themselves racist?
Treating blacks like special-needs children, liberals bury them in ludicrously gushy praise. In a field where the competition is brisk, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow stands out. When not spinning conspiracy theories, Maddow can usually be found patronizing her very, very special black guest, Melissa Harris-Lacewell with fulsome, flowery praise.
Harris-Lacewell (who became Melissa Harris-Perry toward the end of 2010) is professor of being a black woman, which is one of the most demanding, hardest-to-qualify-for positions at any university (you have to be a black woman). She is never treated like some regular nerd guest. Maddow is compelled to tell her she’s “amazing,” “wicked smart” and “one of the smartest people I’ve ever talked to about anything, anytime, anywhere.” (Then again, the smartest person at MSNBC is the guy who replaces the toner, so that last one might not be false praise.)
Here are a few examples:
1/19/09: Joining us now is a woman who couldn’t sound stupid if she practiced it for a week, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, associate professor of politics and African American studies at Princeton University.
7/29/09: Melissa Harris-Lacewell, associate professor of politics and African American studies at Princeton University, I think that’s a tremendous insight. That sort of insight is the whole reason that I sought you out in the first place and had you back on the show so many times. It’s really invaluable. Thanks, Melissa.