When I heard that a deranged white man male, who hated black Americans, murdered three black people in a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, I pretty much expected the editorial response.
Progress exists, but Dr. King’s dream remains deferred | Editorial
America still has a ways to go to live up to the self-evident ideals of equality etched in the Declaration of Independence and invoked 60 years ago by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
by The Editorial Board | Monday, January 28, 2023
Sixty years ago this week, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic speech in Washington, D.C., in which he dreamed that one day his four children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character.”
While much progress has been made in realizing King’s dream, America still has a ways to go to live up to the self-evident ideals etched in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” This was made painfully clear this weekend when a white man gunned down three Black people at a Dollar General store in Florida.
The Jacksonville sheriff, who reviewed the gunman’s racist writings, said the 21-year-old shooter “hated Black people.”
The killings join a long list of mass murders fueled by racist hate, including a Buffalo, N.Y., grocery store in 2022, a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019, and a Charleston, S.C., church in 2015, where the white man who slaughtered nine people in a Bible study group said the massacre was “worth it.”
It was hardly just The Philadelphia Inquirer. President Biden condemned ‘white supremacy’ in the aftermath of the killings, and The New York Times, The Washington Post, and plenty of others told us how horrible it was.
Yet, when I looked at the Philadelphia Shooting Victims Database, I saw that 19 people had been shot in the City of Brotherly Love over the Friday-Saturday-Sunday weekend. That is 19 attempted murders, of which three were successful, with 15 of the victims, and two of the deceased victims, being black, and two more victims, including one deceased, being Hispanic. In the Inquirer’s terms, 17 “black and brown” victims, with three killed.
And I had to wonder: were the three black people, two men and a woman, somehow more dead than the three Philadelphians sent untimely to their eternal rewards?
According to the St Louis Police Department, there had been 105 homicides in the Gateway City as of Monday, August 28th. Of those 105 people murdered, 93, or 88.57%, were black, in a city in which 44.8% of the population are black, with another 4.0% being listed as biracial.
More, 79 out of 83 identified suspects, 95.18%, are also black.
No one wants to talk about that, of course, but someone should: why are the three black Floridians killed by a white guy, who was “once involuntarily committed to a mental hospital for examination“, so very worthy of editorial and presidential note, while the vast majority of black victims are mostly ignored, barely worth a mention in many newspapers.
As we have previously documented, unless the inclusion of race is useful for the newspaper’s political position, as the Tyre Nichols case has been,and at whict race becomes totally relevant, the Inquirer deliberately scrubs race from crime reports. Yet, in the editorial quoted above, the Editorial Board were quick to note the race of the killer and his victims, all for political gain.
According to Broad + Liberty’s Philadelphia Homicide Tracker, last updated on Friday, August 25th, out of 226 homicides in which the race of the victim could be identified from their sources — normally Philadelphia Police Department emails — there had been 4 Asians, 11 whites, 42 Hispanics, and 169 blacks murdered in Philly. The Philly Police do not provide a database in the same fashion as the St Louis Police, but it appears that 74.78% of murder victims in Philly have been black, and another 18.58% Hispanic. The editors of the Inky don’t want readers to have those numbers, for whatever reasons they have.
But all of these people are just as dead as the three in Jacksonville!
Perhaps the editors of these great newspapers see, as President Biden claimed, ‘white supremacy’ as “the most dangerous terrorist threat” to America, but at least in the number of people killed, it sure doesn’t seem that way.
All of those black murder victims, the vast majority of whom were not killed by whites? As far as I can see from politicians and the credentialed media, they just don’t count.