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Guns don't kill black people, other blacks do | page 1, 2, 3, 4
Nonsense like this is proposed daily by the entire spectrum of the civil rights leadership from racist bloviator Al Sharpton to urbane Urban League President Hugh Price. Against the intimidating atmosphere this consensus creates, to suggest the obvious -- that too many blacks are in prison because blacks commit too many crimes -- is to be identified as an apologist for racism, and perhaps even a closet racist oneself. The NAACP's anti-gun lawsuit comes on the heels of the crusade to defend crack dealers because 90 percent of them are African-American and their sentences are considered "too harsh." This insipid campaign was launched by Jesse Jackson at the Washington rally of race-hater Louis Farrakhan. That 90 percent of crack cocaine dealers are black cannot be seen, of course, as a moral stain on those crack dealers or as a massive social problem for the community that produces them. It can only be the result of a white legal system that stigmatizes crack as a more dangerous and more culpable drug than the powder cocaine it uses itself. Forget that the heavier penalties were originally demanded by black leaders who claimed that crack was associated with street violence in the black community and the white criminal justice system did not care enough about its destructive consequences to make the penalties harsh. That was then, this is now. And now, lessening the sentences that were previously raised has become a crusade for "social justice" that overshadows the need to combat the crime wave itself. Because racial oppression is the main enemy, the villainy of the crack trade is transformed into yet another symbol of white unfairness. This kind of race baiting has now intruded into the presidential contest as a means of smearing the Republican leader, George W. Bush, who is distinguished by his outreach to minority communities and by his support among blacks. Is there a vast left-wing conspiracy that sees Bush's black support as a political threat? Well, of course there is. It is precisely because Bush is perceived as a candidate who can break the vicious stereotyping of Republicans as anti-black that he has to be smeared. Bush was thus labeled Governor Death in a Christopher Hitchens column. The clear implication of Hitchens' attack was that Bush is collusive in a racist justice system in Texas that executes blacks in disproportionate numbers. "Perhaps you wonder if capital punishment is unevenly applied, as respects race and class, in the state of Texas," wrote Hitchens. "Wonder no longer. Just read the Amnesty report Killing With Prejudice: Race and the Death Penalty in the USA."
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