Dog whistle piece places blame where it doesn’t belong. It doesn’t matter that the prescription of radical individualism, ritual shaming, collective guilt, and mandatory colorblindness only applies to white people.
by Toure’
If you found the Trayvon Martin situation frightening, then you should find the story out of Tulsa to be a nightmare. A pair of white men,*one of them angry about the murder of his father by a black man two years ago, drove through the Tulsa night early on Friday, shooting blacks at random. Two were injured, three are dead. This is hate crime serial killing. Any black person who happened to cross their path was gunned down. And it was clearly premeditated. Jake England, one of the accused, wrote this on his Facebook page earlier that night: “It just mite [sic] be time to call it quits I hate to say it like that but I’m done if something does happen tonite be ready for another funeral later.”
(Note: See below. Clearly, one of the shooters is not white. Why does Toure’ deny that obvious fact?)
This is scary for so many reasons. Jake England (right) may have seen himself enacting specific revenge but it seems there is something larger going on. Historically, after a surge in black power there is a retort, a reassertion of white power. After emancipation and Reconstruction came Jim Crow. After the Civil Rights Movement came the rise of mass incarceration, which Professor Michelle Alexander calls “the New Jim Crow” because legalized discrimination against ex-convicts means that they lose all the rights won in the Civil Rights Movement.