Attorney General Eric Holder has called us a nation of cowards, afraid to discuss race. Confusion regarding the exact nature of race relations in today’s America lies at the root of our silence.
Our nation’s news media must shoulder much of the blame for that confusion; media constantly shapes the news to ensure 2013’s complicated race relations picture mirrors the legendary 1960s civil rights struggle.
For example, at the outset of the Trayvon Martin case, NBC doctored Zimmerman’s 911 call to make him seem crudely racist. In the case’s aftermath, on NBC’s Today Show, Oprah gravely compared Trayvon’s death to Emmett Till’s death in 1955, a nearly hysterical overreach.
This past week, NBC’s Florida affiliate, WFLA, disingenuously handled the beating of a 13-year-old white boy by three, 15-year-old black boys as simply a brutal beatdown by three 15-year-old students of a 13-year-old snitch.
The accompanying cell phone video showed the three 15-year-olds pounding and kicking someone conveniently out of camera view. Neither voice-over nor video gave the slightest hint that, since 1960, we’d “progressed” to the point where we can now have blacks who victimize whites.
There can exist no honest discussion without all the relevant facts fairly and fully disclosed. That’s media’s job, but when it comes to race-related events, we get only carefully managed disinformation designed to freeze our frame of reference to the 1960s long-running narrative.
The resulting confusion feeds our cowardice.
Leonard Hoy, Greenwood
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