If there's a shortage of hate crimes in your community, you can always try to dig one up from the remote past. In Duluth, Minnesota, the closest thing to a hate crime anyone seems able to find is the lynching of three blacks in 1920 by a white mob that believed them guilty of raping a white woman. It might not be a hate crime by modern definitions, but it's still close enough for guilt-mongers and Afro-racists to exploit it for their own dubious purposes.
The lynching took place on June 15, 1920, so the 81st anniversary of the event was upon us last week, and the Associated Press rehearsed all the details. The details of what happened back then are not the point, however. The point is how the incident is being used today—to induce guilt in whites and to push the racial-political agenda of blacks.
"When they first came to me, I thought, 'Why would I want to tell the world that something so horrible happened in my city?'" Duluth Mayor Gary Doty asked. He soon got his answer. It's precisely because the lynching was horrible that those who seek to make use of it demand it be resurrected.
An organizing committee to rake up the horrors and inflict them on the present was formed, and last week it went to work. "The committee has held poetry readings, a concert, [and] a fund-raiser to create a memorial sculpture," just to make sure it stays raked up. There also were "celebrity readings" from a book about the Duluth lynchings. It all sounds like too much fun, but the mayor, quickly persuaded of the value of telling the world of the horrors of his city and his race, also came to "look at the memorial as a 'stepping-off' point for race discussions." Here we approach the meat of the festivities.
"Race relations in this community are good," the hapless mayor told the AP. "But then you're talking to a white, middle-aged guy, so there must be some things we need to work on." What would white guys know about race relations anyway? If they think race relations are good, it's only because they're not plugged into the real horrors their race is perpetrating to this day. That's why we need "race discussions," don't you see?
The discussion was kicked off by organizing committee member Portia Johnson. "There's other ways of lynching folks," the learned Miss Johnson preached. "Like no jobs, like you have a number of blacks in jail disproportionate to the number in society. That's a lynching."
Well, no, it's not a lynching, but it is a convenient opportunity to grouse and whine about what the Afro-bigots call the "victimization" of blacks by the "institutional racism" of whites. There may or may not be "no jobs" in Duluth, but whether there are or not probably has little to do with the racial attitudes of whites. Nor does the number of blacks in jail, who are there because of the crimes they've committed, not because whites are mean and cruel and like to put blacks in jail.
The memorial observances may be transparent racial-political theater to push a few points, but transparent or not, they apparently had their effects. Asked about her reaction to the memorial, the white owner of the funeral home that took in and buried the lynching victims 80 years ago told the press, "It makes you embarrassed to be a white person."
That, of course, is the final point and purpose of the whole spectacle, to make whites ashamed of their race and their history and thereby to undermine whatever political and cultural power they have left. It's a tactic often deployed in the wake of "hate crimes," and it often works.
Similar "racial discussions" took place in Jasper, Texas, after the 1998 murder of a black man by whites, with the result that many whites apologized to blacks for their "feelings" of years earlier. There are no recorded instances of blacks apologizing to whites for any of their feelings of the past, let alone for any racial horrors they may have committed. There never are.
"Racial discussions" are always a one-way street down which only whites are made to travel, to force them to wallow in racial guilt and push into their minds the sentiment that gushed back from the white woman in Duluth: "It makes you embarrassed to be white."
Once that sentiment is embedded in the white mind, the path is open to any and every anti-white racial demand. Until whites themselves see through the fraud of "racial discussions" and the guilt and fear they're intended to instill, that will be the path down which more and more whites will inevitably be driven.
COPYRIGHT 2001 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
June 21, 2001
