By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO –Some folks enjoy the easy, racially-tinged declaration, after viewing an African American man on the television news being indicted or sentenced for some gruesome crime: “Well, of course.” The assumption, the throw-away epithet, is simple, coarse, and poorly-informed. It is driven by the insipid racism of too many people and it is nourished by the prevailing ignorance that remains a staple of American culture.
Yet here are some facts: the suspect in the most recent gun horror, which took place in and around a Sikh temple near Milwaukee, is a white male (with the perfunctory three names). The man in jail for the multiple killings last month during a showing of the Batman movie in Aurora, Colo, is white.
The man accused of massacring 77 people not long ago in Norway—white. From Columbine to Copley, Ohio to San Ysidro, Ca. (white guy, three names, McDonald’s) to Binghamton, NY (Asian fellow), to Chapel Hill, NC, the pattern is grisly and unswerving. The perpetrator is not black. Charles Joseph Whitman, the sniper who murdered 14 people from a tower at the University of Texas in 1966 was a white derelict.
Lee Harvey Oswald, assassin of President John F. Kennedy, was a white male. James Earl Ray, who killed Martin Luther King Jr. with a hunting rifle, was white. Sirhan Sirhan, murderer of Senator Robert F. Kennedy—not black. Mark David Chapman, slayer of John Lennon—white.
Adolf Hitler, responsible for the annihilation of 59 million people, was not only a Caucasian but he galvanized the European community to systemically exterminate 6 million Jews based on the most heinous white supremacy ever activated in the history of humankind. Black men or women have rarely been associated with such things nor does “black” appear in the classic profile of the kinds of people who continue to bloody our malls, schools, community centers, and houses of worship.
This is not to rationalize the disproportionate number of black felons currently languishing in US prisons or to dismiss the appalling level of black-on-black crime that pervades this nation and has, for example, converted Chicago into an armed camp of ghetto hoods, gang butchers, and child killers. Nor shall we ignore the sad inability of today’s African American leadership to inspire more black youth in favor of education or to admonish black fathers to stay by their children.
But none of this should blind us white, judgmental citizens, increasingly wary of stepping out to places that used to feel safe and joyous, to assume that a black face lurks in the shadows. Apparently, he’s brandishing an AK-47, he’s severely troubled, and he fits a profile that has little to do with dark skin and everything to do with evil.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com