It has long been common that authorities won’t identify a criminal’s race unless he happens to be white, ostensibly in the thinking that they don’t want criminality associated with minority status. But recently, in Portland, Oregon, police had another reason to identify a subject as white:
They wanted to convince Antifa to halt protests the latter had initiated.
Apparently, it was “Nothing to see here, move along — we only shot a white guy.” As the New York Post reports:
Antifa militants attacked police in Portland, Oregon, after news broke of a deadly police shooting — forcing the department to quickly announce that it was a “white male” to prevent riots, according to police and reports.
At least 50 protesters, most dressed all in black and carrying anti-fascist signs, gathered at a Motel 6 late Thursday where police shot a suicidal man who charged at them with a screwdriver, The Oregonian said.
…In the middle of the mayhem, cops tried to dispel “erroneous information being circulated on social media,” with local journalist Andy Ngo saying that “Antifa falsely claimed the deceased was a black or brown person” in flyers.
“We can confirm that the subject involved is an adult white male,” the department stressed.
The officer who fired the fatal shot was black, and was placed on paid administrative leave, which is standard practice, The Oregonian said.
Very interesting. As commentator Thomas Lifson puts it, alluding to the pseudo-elites’ fictional racial narrative, “So, please remind me again, which race is it that is so privileged?”
Of course, were the races in this incident reversed, it’s not just that we’d hear the police condemned for shooting a man wielding “only” a screwdriver, but that we could half expect to hear the cops condemned for shooting a man wielding only a drink.
In all seriousness, the screwdriver was the tool, of course. But here’s the point: Within the context of police shootings, this incident reflects the norm. That is, many more white than black suspects are shot by cops every year. Moreover, studies have indicated that not only are police more likely to shoot white suspects relative to the races’ different homicide rates and the rates at which they feloniously shoot cops, but that authorities are actually more willing to shoot whites.
This is wholly unsurprising. Being human, police respond to social pressure just like anyone else. And if they know there can be riots and recrimination — and that they can possibly become the next Darren Wilson or Derek Chauvin — it will create hesitancy.
Given this climate, it’s also not surprising that the Portland police corrected the record by pointing out the deceased’s race. Offering accurate information is usually laudable, too, yet the subtext here is plain. As a respondent to the Portland police’s tweet wrote:
Moreover, what’s happening currently has an interesting historical parallel. “In the bad old days of the Democrat-run Jim Crow South, the rumor that a White girl or woman had been attacked — or even looked at — by a Black male was sometimes enough to set off a mob,” wrote the aforementioned Lifson. “Today, in the Democrat-run big cities, mobs once again are set off by rumors — now, of the death of a Black man at the hands of the police. Democrats still run racist regimes, but the regions involved and the races persecuted or protected have flipped.”
The bottom line, however, is that everyone has a constitutional right to protest. But rioting and mob rule — which now often influence government officials — should never be tolerated. One of the government’s basic functions is to ensure domestic tranquility; if it can’t perform it, people really should wonder why they’re paying taxes.
But it’s no wonder why leftist jurisdictions allow Antifa and BLM action, and it’s not that leftists are pathologically incapable of clamping down on criminals. Just consider, for example, how they’ve been gratuitously punishing the January 6 Capitol trespassers and how they maliciously prosecuted Donald Trump ally Roger Stone. The reality is that not only are Democrats sympathetic to Antifa and BLM, but are also allies of them.
And if you’re someone to whom power is everything, you don’t clamp down on your own useful-idiot storm troopers.
