Race

NBC's flagship news program completely garbled one of the week’s top stories: a deadly fight among teenage girls in Columbus, Ohio, which ended with a policeman shooting and killing a knife-wielding attacker, 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant. The network’s coverage was an abomination. NBC omitted vital information and distorted what actually happened. The Biden White House immediately piled on, insisting that the Columbus shooting was the product of racism. They did so at an incredibly sensitive moment — minutes after a Minneapolis jury convicted policeman Derek Chauvin of murdering George Floyd. Since NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt and other media programs did not report the Columbus story fairly or accurately, let’s do so here.

Being a somewhat old-fashioned person, Cockburn is skeptical of latter-day feminism and the utter sanctity of a woman’s right to choose. So it’s quite odd that he also feels compelled to defend progressive womanhood from Planned Parenthood, which quite unexpectedly has come out in favor of misogyny. ‘I’m the Head of Planned Parenthood. We’re Done Making Excuses for Our Founder,’ says the headline from current Planned Parenthood president Alexis McGill Johnson. The context is Planned Parenthood’s ongoing cancellation of Margaret Sanger over her support for ideas that are today unpopular, such as sterilization, eugenics, and freedom of speech.

Another day, another killing in America, another depressingly instant social-media argument over the perpetrator’s skin color. This time a man rammed his car into two Capitol Hill police officers in Washington DC. One, Officer William Evans, died. The other is seriously injured. The attacker then emerged from his car wielding a knife at other officers before he was shot and killed. Once again, various blue-checked Twitterers decided to assume that the killer must be some angry white Trump supporter, presumably because the last time the Capitol was attacked it was by a horde of angry Trumpists. But there was no evidence to suggest the killer was white. Indeed, in a video clip of the man being wheeled away having his chest pumped, his skin appeared dark.

Poor Colin Kahl. The Stanford professor is qualified, experienced, and shares President Biden’s views on defense and foreign policy. Ordinarily, that would be enough to get confirmed to a job like undersecretary of defense for policy. But no more! Three and a half years after #MeToo, the casting couch has migrated from Hollywood to Capitol Hill, thanks to Sen. Tammy Duckworth. On Tuesday, Sen. Duckworth announced that, since President Biden’s political appointees were insufficiently diverse, she would be voting against any Biden nominees with white skin color, starting with Kahl. The only exception, Duckworth said, would be for LGBTQ nominees. Well, Kahl will have a hard time pulling off a racial rebranding this late.

The bodies of the victims hadn’t gone cold, the families had barely begun grieving, when the familiar cottage industry of activists and journalists jumped in to speculate and spread misinformation on social media. What drove someone to slaughter eight people in three Asian massage parlors in Atlanta on Tuesday? A clear storyline took hold: this was white supremacy at work. A young, white man murdered six Asian women and two 'others' made the framing a foregone conclusion. Not even new information from the investigators could slow down the risk to judgment. Atlanta police chief Rodney Bryant said that it was too early to classify the shooting as a hate crime and FBI director Christopher Wray affirmed that it 'does not appear to be racially motivated’.

As I write, jury selection for the murder trial of Derek Chauvin is about to begin in Minneapolis. You remember Derek Chauvin, right? He is the (former) policeman charged with the murder of St George Floyd, race martyr (also drug addict, woman abuser, and career criminal). Chauvin and his three colleagues disgusted civilized opinion last spring when a bystander’s video clip of Officer Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck was released. Nine minutes. Chauvin kept Floyd pinned to the ground for some nine minutes. ‘I can’t breathe,’ Floyd can be heard crying. An ambulance eventually came to whisk Floyd off to hospital. Too late. Floyd died, murdered by the brutish policeman who cruelly, gratuitously, asphyxiated him by kneeling on his neck, cutting off his air supply.

It’s hard to keep them all straight, but among the many diktats emitted by the Biden administration during its first days in office, one deserves special commendation for its brazen mendacity. I mean the ‘Executive Order On Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government’. The key word, as we’ve heard over and over again these last few weeks, is ‘equity’. The diktat (a more accurate term for what is happening than ‘Executive Order’) promises ‘a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all’ by ‘affirmatively advancing,’ well, ‘equity’. If you think you discern a little whiff of tautology, you’re right. You are also right if, on second sniff, you catch the acrid scent of contradiction.

Countless emergency 911 calls requesting aid for a mentally ill person behaving inappropriately are made every day. Recently, many cities and states have begun changing their protocols to answer these calls. Unfortunately, the injection of race into the discourse can unnecessarily create tensions and may weaken efforts.The latest inappropriate inclusion of race was an ABC story reporting on New York City’s proposed initiative to better respond to these 911 calls. Its misplaced focus is captured in its headline — ‘How Sending Mental Health Responders instead of Police Could Save Black Lives’.