Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee’s oversight hearing, Attorney General William Barr stated: “Rioters and anarchists have hijacked legitimate protests to wreak senseless havoc and destruction on innocent victims.”
As shown nightly on televised news coverage and as appeared in print, most of those protesting the unjustified killing of African Americans by local police were peaceful. Some jerks, protesters and local police, screwed things up. Compared to many other protests, they were tame.
Let’s assume the AG is correct. Based on the overall peacefulness of the protests, America must be raising some of the most incompetent rioters and anarchists in the world. They’ve hijacked nothing.
His remarks remind this old fart of those by Richard Nixon and George Wallace in 1968. Their clarion for law and order grew louder when African Americans protested. Like Nixon and Wallace, Barr pulled out some tired rhetoric: “’I don’t agree that there is systemic racism in police departments generally in this country,’ and he quoted statistics that more white Americans had been killed by the police than Black Americans.”
He’s deluded. Racism permeates every aspect of our society for one simple reason: Too many people are racists, and a society and all its elements are created and run by people. I’ve dealt with deluded Whites. They fear the coming “changes” in America, much as the Anglo-Saxon Americans feared the Irish and Italians.
The second half of his sentence raises more concern, especially when an intelligent individual utters the phrasing as a rebuttal. Of course, more Whites die at the hands of police. Some 330 million people live in the U.S, of which 47 million are African American and 200 million are European American and non-Hispanic. In other words, there are more than four times as many European American as African Americans. Of course, more Whites died more frequently at the hands of police. What matters is why and how they die. George Floyd and others didn’t deserve to die, and it was for him and others BLM protesters filled the nation’s streets.
It’s bold and offensive when an attorney of Barr’s stature abandons common sense and surrenders to specious logic. His lack of reason was outdone by Jim Jordan.
Jordan, a Republican representative from Ohio, ran a video montage, showing the jerks. If it had been done logically, the video could have effectively made Barr’s point. Jordan wanted to make another point, a misleading point.
Jordan showed the video in a hearing about the response of federal agents in Seattle. The video didn’t focus on Seattle. It scanned the nation for every idiotic and illegal thing done during the protests. He created the illusion of our nation’s cities crumbling, and the featured actors tearing down our cities--African Americans.
Let’s ignore one simple concept: When you suppress, threaten, and illegally kill people based on one condition, the color of their skin, you foster violence. It’s no longer a question of will people protest and maybe riot but when will they. Our history has taught us this. World history offers the same lesson. Biblical stories tell the same. The marginalized remain quiet only so long. Think of Moses’s Jews.
More damning: Jordan’s video had nothing to do with the testimony of the AG. Nothing. It sensationalized a moment. He was race baiting, playing to his fears and those of many White Americans today and for more than 400 years. They fear African Americans. Why? I think the reason is simple. They don’t respect, trust, or like African Americans. They think Nat Turner was a murderer, not a liberator. Harriet Tubman, a thief, not a liberator. Martin Luther King Jr. an agitator, not a liberator. Barack Obama a usurper, not President.
As a White American, I wish I had something positive to say. I am at a loss.
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