Eric Holder, 'Hate Crimes,' and 'His People'

A group of those whom Eric Holder described as "his people," at least six young men, repeatedly punched a 24-year-old white woman in the face, then proceeded to kick her face over and over when she was on the ground helpless.  This occurred in Buffalo, New York last week, but the event has received no attention by the mainstream media because the victim was white and the attackers were black.  This was no friendly urban jostling: the woman was left with a broken nose and cracked bones in her face.

There must have been a little bit of hate in at least one of those kicks to the face, but you can bet it won't be charged as a hate crime.

Instead, those Eric Holder described as "his people" seem to get a pass on hate crimes charges when they select whites for their blood sport.  But is it unfair to suggest that young black criminals are Eric Holder's people?  The attorney general didn't say "my people when they are law-abiding," and he didn't say "my people when they are doing good things."  The attorney general exclusively, categorically identified, by race, with one racial in-group as "his people."  In post-racial America, it doesn't seem right that the chief law enforcement officer is referring to a racial group in such terms.  

In Buffalo, the unidentified woman happened to be caught up in the tail end of a flash mob.  Before attacking the woman, the mob first pillaged a convenience store, filling their pockets with nutritious food which society had deprived them of.  The video of the looting doesn't look like something that would happen in a developed country.  When the young men ran out, the soon-to-be victim just happened to be outside the store.  That's when the group of attackers, which included a few teenage girls, attacked the young woman.  As the victim described it:

Within five seconds, [I] was surrounded by a group of boys who just started punching me in the face. And when I fell to the ground they kept hitting me, and I stood up once and they knocked me down again and started kicking me in the face and back.

According to a local news report, "[s]he was mercilessly beaten by six to ten people."  The young lady will require surgery.

Missing from the reporting on this crime is any mention of the attackers' race.  We know their race only because of the video of the looting, which occurred prior to the attack.

This beating reflected at least some degree of hate.  By way of comparison, mean spray-painting gets investigated as a hate crime.  Surely the vicious and unprovoked beating of a young white woman by a pack of black teenagers should at least give rise to a few questions.  Would this young woman have been selected as a victim if she had been black?

The fact is that, generally, racial mob violence is not charged as a hate crime.  I've catalogued and written about these acts of racial mob violence, which I define as unprovoked beatings committed by a group of four or more "youths" against a defenseless, innocent victim.  There have been at least 50 such incidents since 2009, occurring in cities around the country, in every region.  With few exceptions, the attackers are black and the victims are non-black.  Consider the following examples:

• A young white lady named Shaina Perry was brutally beaten by a black mob in Milwaukee.  After beating her, the group taunted and laughed at her, and one of the attackers remarked, "Oh, white girl bleeds a lot."
• At the Wisconsin State fair, groups of black teens numbering anywhere from 25 to 100 "were targeting anyone who was white or appeared to look white" and beating them, according to the local police chief.  At least 18 people were injured, and 30 of the attackers have been arrested.
• In Denver, couples leaving restaurants were being attacked by a group of black men with baseball bats.
• A young white man named Carter Strange had his skull fractured by a mob in South Carolina.  He was attacked while jogging.
• A young white man named Dawid Strucinski was beaten into a coma, for no reason, by a mob in Bayonne, NJ.
• Anna Taylor and Thomas Fitzgerald were beaten to the ground and stomped in separate Philadelphia flash mobs, each completely unprovoked.
• "Every weekend in July" of 2011, according to local news, "police have battled large, flash-mob beatings and vandalism" in Greensboro, NC.
• A white female liberal writer for The Onion named Emily Guendelsberger was attacked by a mob of black teens who broke her leg and beat her.  She took to the internet to insist that the attack had nothing to do with race because her boyfriend is "brown" (he is Indian) and he was beaten up as well.  The inference here is that a black mob isn't racist if they attack an Indian along with white people.

Because there is supposedly no proof that the attacks are racially motivated, officials almost always label the attacks "random."  There is nothing random about a consistent pattern of group violence by blacks against non-blacks.  If the attacks were random, then the victims would be randomly distributed, and there would be numerous black victims of flash mobs.  These "flash mobs" represent a social problem, the victims are not chosen randomly, and if whites were committing similar attacks against non-whites, we would be in an officially declared racial crisis.

The victims' stories must be told, and the attackers' motives and actions have to be understood.  With hate crimes, there is an army of experts dedicated to exploring "root causes."  If whites were forming groups and beating blacks for sport, then the judicial system would be cracking down, politicians would be bloviating at full force, professors would be calling conferences, and the media would be calling for national soul searching to expiate the racist demons that still lurk within our collective soul.  Well, who needs to do the soul-searching after the beating of this white woman in Buffalo?

A good start would be those responsible for a cult of anti-white resentment named Critical Race Theory.  This theory is being taught in schools across the country.  Its core ideas are that "racial subordination maintains and perpetuates the American social order," according to Derrick Bell, who was a Harvard and NYU law professor and an ally of the president.  "[W]hite society" is guilty of 'spirit-murder' because of the ongoing unwillingness of dominant white society to acknowledge the historical fact and injury of slavery, and the correlative ongoing ordeal for African Americans of living with that unacknowledged legacy," writes Patricia Williams, a Columbia law professor [1].  Minorities have "a shared sense of being under collective assault," according to Kimberle Crenshaw, a UCLA law professor.

If anyone thinks that kind of incendiary ideology can be taught without inciting violence, then they have no understanding of human nature.  It is madness to continue piling historical guilt upon the majority, in the face of widespread racial violence today.  In terms of the karmic debt for past sins, we're even.

The welfare state fosters hordes of selfish and undisciplined young people, their cruel and ignorant culture drives them to violence, and when a pattern of racial violence emerges, a politically correct media does its best to conceal that pattern from public view.  Surely this set of social problems should be included in the national conversation that liberals want us to have about race.

John T. Bennett (MA, University of Chicago, Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences '07; JD, Emory University School of Law '11) is a writer living in Atlanta, GA.  Comments, criticism, and news tips are welcome at jthomasbennett@gmail.com.

[1] Quoted in Robin West, "Murdering the Spirit: Racism, Rights, and Commerce," 90 Michigan L. Rev. 1771, 1773 (1992) (reviewing Patricia L. Williams, The Alchemy Of Race And Rights: The Diary Of A Law Professor 73; 61-63 [1991]).