The War on Black People in South Carolina: the First Casualty is Truth.
Mass murder was not enough. Not for the army of reporters who soon after the South Carolina killings surrounded this truth with a bodyguard of lies.
The shooting was part of a pattern of white on black violence wildly out of proportion, journalists told us over and over. The tragedy also reminded many scribes of the so-called epidemic of arson against black churches in the 1990s.
Neither of which are true.
MSNBC reflected the coverage of the day when it reported the church killings were "the second time in three months that violence, death and race mixed in Charleston, where in April a white police officer fired eight bullets at Walter Scott, an unarmed African American man, killing him."
In Charleston, locals know racial violence is far more widespread than that. Only it is far more likely to be black on white.
Greenville, South Carolina talk show Tara Servatius has been talking about the attempted assassination of a white deputy sheriff by a black man less than a month ago. And how it is part of a pattern of black attacks on white cops.
Police shot the man dead in Charleston after a ten-hour standoff. The deputy is recovering from a shot at close range to the back of his head.
"I'm getting a ton of email from police around the country thanking me for talking about that," said Servatius. "Some had not heard about it."
That's because reporters do not think it is a big deal.
Also earlier this month, the Charleston County Sheriff identified four black men as suspects in the killing of a five-year old white girl during a home invasion robbery. Neither did that make it into the war-on-black-people narrative that followed the shooting.
In April, Charleston reeled after the police released the 911 calls documenting the panic and terror created by a mob of 60 black people who rampaged through the streets, robbing people, assaulting neighbors, destroying property, and creating mayhem.
Violent crime in Charleston, like the rest of the country, is a black thing: Black on white violence is wildly out of proportion. The latest killings do not change that. Nor do the efforts of local and national reporters to ignore, deny, condone, excuse, encourage and even lie about it.
Even so, Slate, Salon, and dozens of other news sites pressed on:
"It's exhausting, just to be black in America," said Salon.
"It's risky -- and potentially lethal -- to be black and have the audacity to even begin processing what's happening in front of us. Because in this supposedly post-racial moment, we're not supposed to have -- or need -- the language to identify the root cause of so many of our problems.
"The truth is, black people are not safe. We're not safe in our pools. We're not safe in even the best neighborhoods and apartment buildings. We're not safe in our schools. We certainly are not safe in our offices.
"And, as the incident in Charleston shows, we aren't safe praying to our God. The Charleston incident fits into the long narrative of terrorist attacks on black churches. There's astonishing assault on black people, and we can't afford not to connect the dots."
The Guardian of London chimed in too:
"With each new well-publicised account of racial violence, be it at the hands of the state or the public, claims that the arrival of a black president signals the arrival of a post-racial era collapses under the weight of its own delusion.
"Racism isn't dead. We know this because it keeps killing black people."
This, of course, is easily recognized as a version of The Talk: The facts of life lecture black parents give to their children about how black people are relentless victims of relentless white racism.
But here is what they seldom say: Black people are far more likely to the victim of crime and violence from another black person. Not a white person. Not a cop. Not even close.
A black person is 50 times more likely to assault a white person than the other way around. The black on white rape numbers are even more out of proportion when compared to white on black sexual assault.
Black Twitter did not bother to cloak the black-on-white racial hostility. Thousands of tweets picked up these false narratives -- what people call lies today -- and urged violence against white people. They are as easy to find as they are disturbing to read.
The reality of black on white racial violence and hostility is something that white people live with every day -- and is documented in that scintillating best seller: Don't Make the Black Kids Angry --The hoax of black victimization and how that is the biggest lie of our generation.
But in the hours after the shootings, reporters by the boatload insisted that the attack was part of a pattern of violence against black churches -- another front in the white war on black people.
Also untrue.
National Public Radio, ABC News, MSNBC, and others beat the drum all day long about all the black churches that white supremacists burnt to the ground.
This shooting was just the latest manifestation of that.
"Such attacks were common," said Slate, "And they re-emerged in the mid-1990s, when arsonists attacked black churches in South Carolina and other states."
These so-called arson attacks became the object of the presidential attention of Bill Clinton, who assigned 200 FBI agents to find the culprits.
In 1995, Michael Fumento of the Wall Street Journal -- and later Scott Sweet of American Thinker -- dismantled that fairy tale as well.
Said Fumento:
"Responding to the reported wave of southern black church burnings, President Clinton proclaimed that "Racial hostility is the driving force" behind the church burnings and said, "I want to ask every citizen in America to say we . . . we are not slipping back to those dark days."
"Okay, Mr. President, I'll say it.
"I'll say it because this 'epidemic of hatred' is a fraud. A myth. A deliberate hoax. There is no good evidence of any increase in black church burnings. There is, however, evidence, that a single activist group has taken the media and the nation on a wild ride."
And when they did find a black church that was the victim of arson, the arsonist often turned out to be a black man.
"Federal officials reported that 44 individuals had been charged with setting fire to black churches in the South, of whom 16 were themselves black," said Sweet, in an article for American Thinkercalled "Fanning Imaginary Flames". "Only a few of the 28 white suspects were believed to have been racially motivated. Nearly half of all the suspects were under the age of 18."
Marlin Newburn was a prison and court-ordered psychologist for 30 years before starting his own practice in Granada Hills, California. He has no patience for the reporters who refuse to tell the truth about racial violence and the "war on black people."
"That's a lie," said Newburn. "There's no evidence to support that, even remotely. But that does not stop them from saying it."
"This is a persecution fantasy meant to fuel the handout agenda of the Democrats. This fantasy is all about how there is always somebody against them. The reporter from NPR even reminded us this is true because, after all, Charleston is in the South. And the church was just a few miles from the slave market, which was operating 200 years ago. If that were a few years ago, I'd say they have a point. But that was long ago and it is time to move on.
"It reminds me of the people in my practice who are fifty years old and who tell me they are still upset about how their mother treated them. I ask, 'is she still around?' They say, 'she's dead.' I tell them to get over it. Because if they don't, it keeps them from moving on and getting on with life."
Even so, the "white war on black people" has been a popular headline in the black press since the killing of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and others.
Maybe the war terminology is fitting in an unexpected way: More than one wag has observed that in war, the first casualty is truth.
Colin Flaherty is the author of the Don't Make the Black Kids Angry. For the latest news on racial violence, subscribe to his free email newsletter.
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