During a 2012 radio discussion, black economics professors Walter E. Williams and Thomas Sowell warned that the KKK couldn’t do as much to sabotage blacks as their “friends” could. Of course, the term “friends” was being used very loosely. At issue, in reality, were the wolves in sheep’s clothing who purport to be blacks’ saviors.
And now another prominent black figure is sounding the same alarm, blaming the once-mainstream media for harming the black community. Reporting on the story last Wednesday, Fox News wrote:
Civil rights activist Robert L. Woodson Sr. believes America’s mainstream press is “complicit in the self-destruction” of Black neighborhoods by excusing poor behavior and said the only way forward is a return [to] a media landscape that respects the agency of all Americans — regardless of race.
“The media has been really nihilistic. I really think they’re demeaning the values of the country in the name of promoting social justice,” Robert L. Woodson Sr. told Fox News Digital.
Woodson, who is Black and a longtime civil rights activist, penned an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal last week, urging the nation to “disregard race in how we judge one another” before it leads to “national ruin.”
“When a mob violently attacked two people in downtown Cincinnati last [month], video of the beat-down spread across social media. But not a single major television network covered the story. It didn’t fit the mainstream media’s narrative about racial violence in America,” Woodson wrote.
“The victims were White,” he continued. “Today’s media seems to conflagrate over violence only when the perpetrator is White and the victim is Black. Then the cameras roll, protests erupt, and hashtags fly.”
The destruction this double standard wreaks is profound. Commentator Jesse Lee Peterson has often warned that leftists purposely try to keep black Americans angry. This renders them easily controllable, as anger is like darkness: The more there is, the less you can see.
An analogy is warranted, too. Even if you thought your son was being disadvantaged in some way, you, if wise, wouldn’t cultivate anger in him. For indulging wrath is a type of self-harm. Yet what happens when media present only relatively rare white-on-black interracial crimes while ignoring the more common black-on-white ones? What happens when they obscure the reality that 92 percent of black homicide victims are killed by other blacks?
Anger and bitterness result. Black Americans will often conclude, “We really are under siege by a white establishment that would destroy us.”
Returning to Woodson, he made some other points as well:
Note, too, that the aforementioned Sowell, 95, once echoed Woodson’s comments on crime. He said that growing up in Harlem in New York City, he never heard a gunshot. Moreover, on hot summer nights, he and others would sleep out on their fire escapes to keep cool. This is unimaginable to young blacks today.
Yet the left-wing attack on black America is even worse than what the above reveals. Because, actually, blacks’ “friends” have tried convincing them to reject good — by calling it evil. Just consider critical-race-theory “training” I reported on in 2020. As I wrote in “The Democrats’ War on Blacks” (note that the “mainstream” media are essentially the Democrats’ public-relations team):
The trainers … claimed that “rugged individualism,” “a can-do attitude,” “hard work” and “striving towards success” reflected “white male culture,” which they said leads to “lowered quality of life at work and home, reduced life expectancy, unproductive relationships, and high stress.” I guess slacker bums who can’t put food on the table (when they have a table) have no stress.
But this Loser 101 indoctrination isn’t limited to … the bowels of federal buildings. It’s in schools (and corporations) as well, where teachers are being told that hard work, planning for the future, and punctuality are “white norms.” Try telling that to Asian-descent Americans, who, apparently, are just like white people — only more so.
(One race-theory activist, Glenn Singleton, does tell them that, saying that Asian-descent Americans are a “majority” group because of their “white” habits. Honorary white people, I guess.)
Ironically, this is the very attitude black educators lamented, and combated, just a generation ago. Back then it was slacker, criminally inclined black youths (usually driven by jealousy, mind you) accusing their higher-achieving peers of “acting white.”
Really, what’s at issue is an outgrowth of the relativism sweeping our time. As I also wrote, Louis Farrakhan actually once asserted that
“A White Man’s Heaven Is a Black Man’s Hell” [and] that whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women, etc. all have different “needs.”
The truth, however, is precisely the opposite. As Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, who is black, has put it, the black community’s problem is “immorality.” Often called sin, this is a universal plaguing everyone and causes most human woes. Now, the remedy for immorality is, obviously, morality. To be specific, if morality came in a jar, on the ingredients label would be virtues.
These are “good moral habits,” examples being hope, honesty, charity, fortitude, justice, temperance, prudence, chastity, patience, kindness, humility and love. Another virtue is diligence, which relates to punctuality and industriousness. Yet another is forgiveness, which forestalls the bitterness and hatred that can cause a person to focus on tearing society down instead of building himself up.
The point, however, is that virtues aren’t “white” or black, Hispanic or Asian, male or female.
They are divine.
They’re also universals. All people need them to live happy, prosperous, moral lives — there are no exceptions.
Anyone counseling against virtue — as the race activists do — is the worst enemy a people could have.
The “mainstream” media are part of that collective enemy, too. The good news is that they’re going out of business. In the mid-1970s, CBS, NBC, and ABC controlled more than 90 percent of the prime-time television audience. Today their share is down to 19 percent.
And who knows? Perhaps one day they’ll be as dead as the black victims of the wicked policies they support.