Watching the Zimmerman trial, I wonder whether we may not be in for big trouble. Racial hostility is much higher in the United States than it is allowed to appear. In the Twittersphere there is much traffic from blacks, saying that if Zimmerman walks, they will kill him themselves, riot, or kill random whites. On many sites around the web, whites of a sort not found on NPR are saying, “Bring it on.” This is not your granny’s recipe for domestic tranquility.
Let’s not kid ourselves. Race underlies almost everything in this country that spends half its time denouncing racism. This is true of trials, and particularly true of show trials. When the police who beat Rodney King, were acquitted by a white jury, the cops being clearly guilty, blacks burned Los Angeles. When OJ Simpson, clearly guilty, was acquitted by a black jury, whites didn’t burn anything, but were angry and perfectly aware that the verdict was political.
How did we get here? It’s a long story.
An important part of the world view of blacks is the belief that whites enslaved them. This makes sense if you believe a race is a coherent being with a life stretching over the centuries, as a man’s life stretches over decades. (Compare The Jews Killed Christ. “Gosh, Rachel. You don’t look old enough. You sure you did it?”)
It makes no sense to whites who reflect that no white in America has ever owned a slave, and no black has ever been one. Blacks know this, but it is hard to focus anger on things done by dead whites long before you were born…