Hanna’s Harangues: Pulling the Race Card
Too many Americans are wrongly perceiving cases like Ferguson as inherently racist.
December 10, 2014
For the past few weeks, a majority of the country has been screaming racism and to be frank, it’s getting out of hand.
The recent happenings in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the death of Eric Garner, revived the hotly debated issue of racism in America. Senseless displays of fighting against the supposed race case were witnessed through the television screen—cars were burned down, stores were looted and glass was shattered.
Many Americans, especially blacks, unjustly dub whites as racists, claiming they are responsible for the plight of black America. Poverty, broken families and poor education somehow all point to white racism.
I understand where the black protesters in Ferguson are coming from. It’s always tragic to see a young life pass away and even more devastating to realize that events like Ferguson are causing a more definite divide between both races, especially when America has come so far. However, no way am I in tolerance of the shortsighted outlook of the protesters and the so-called civil rights activists,
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani slammed New York mayor Bill de Blasio for not mentioning black on black crime during the press conference after the grand jury decided not to indict Officer Pantaleo. I cannot agree more. Ninety-six percent of blacks are killed by other blacks. Instead of influencing black children in the way that will lead them to despise the police and distrust the criminal justice system, parents should invest a little more time in informing them about the real dangers that society poses.
The reason why so many American people are unaware of glaring truths such as those Giuliani stated is because politicians, media and self-proclaimed victims are intent on cherry-picking. They pick and choose things that will help their cause. What if former Officer Darren Wilson was black and Michael Brown was white? There would never have been such outrageous protests and we would have never heard a peep from people like Al Sharpton. Why is it okay for a group of black boys to jump a white boy, but inherently racist for a group of white boys to jump a black boy?
I really want to ask Ferguson protesters: How did you achieve justice by burning down your city? How does looting and busting out guns provide justice in your case? How will you show that black lives matter by shouting racism at every possible opportunity?
The situation won’t get any better unless the black community wises up and quits degrading itself. I’ll continue being hopeful, but I won’t hold my breath.
Justin Chuang
Dec 11, 2014 at 10:48 pm
I emailed the Bull’s Eye staff but I’m posting this here as well:
As an avid participant in the Ferguson debate and a victim of the increasing racism in America, this article personally affected myself and other students due to its harshly trivializing nature.
One of the many gripes I have with the article lies with Hanna’s accusation that everything is seen as a race issue—especially Ferguson—which she claims is not racial by any perspective. I’d like to underscore the trivializing nature of Hanna’s claims; when she believes that real race issues are twisted to include racism, it subverts any struggle by the black community to achieve equality. Ferguson is about race. As much as anyone tries to divert attention away from that, racial profiling and discrimination absolutely played a part in Wilson’s decision to murder an innocent and unarmed black boy, and Mike Brown’s death is emblematic of a deeply embedded racism in America, not simply an isolated incident. When a black person is killed by police every 28 hours, no one can deny that racism is a striking problem in our country.
Another point that struck a chord with me was her assertion to dismiss the protests because of her 96% black-on-black violence figure for which no sources are cited. Even if this ivory tower-esque figure is accurate, narratives of black people entirely outweigh empirical statistics. When one analyzes the overall sentiment towards the police by the black community, it becomes overwhelmingly clear that black people are victims — not “self proclaimed” — of police violence and police oppression. The fact that so many black people took to the streets to protest only underscores their own personal experience with the police and their subsequent drive to protest. Death figures take absolutely no precedent over oppression that does not end in a large number of dead.
The issue I found most glaring with this article was the overtly accusatory and inflammatory terminology that Hanna used. Her depiction of the black community and black people as “looting and busting out guns” and “degrading [themselves]” was extremely degrading and racist. Hanna only further perpetuates racism and stereotypes of black people in her article, and it’s a shame that a person in her position would advocate for such ignorance. Her grouping of black people into suffering from “poverty, broken families and poor education” and her accusation of parents to teach black children to not fear police struck me as sweeping generalizations and obvious bias. What needs to be realized is that black people are not responsible for making themselves look like “savages” and “looters”, but it is biased media coverage from major news organizations. These corporations paint black people as savage rioters that are out of their respective minds for protesting against an unjust system. Hanna cherry-picks events which demonizes these protesters and parallels the behavior of the media.
The coverage system is inherently built for black people to fail in their pursuance of equality, and fighting against the media becomes an uphill battle. Trivializing these struggles and painting the black community as destructive through her discourse and rhetoric only proves Hanna’s ability to be swayed by the media which smears the black community. Even though Hanna is not largely to blame for her subjectivity to invisibly biased news sources, to obliviously accept such principles as fact only hurts those who pursue black equality.
The reason there is so much outrage is because of the inherent disparity between black people and whites. No, if Mike was white and Wilson was black, there would be not as large of a reaction, precisely for the fact that abuse of police power is completely unlikely to happen in such a situation. The reason that there is no equal reaction to reverse-race situations is because of the inherent subjugation of black people — and hypothetical situation fabrication only serves to ignore such prejudices that make equal treatment already hard to reach.
I understand that Hanna may believe that race has been done to death and that there’s too much about racism, especially against black people. But simply believing that the prominence of race in media indicates a disproportional bias for blackness is unfair to the black community. Race issues are in our face precisely because they are a large problem.
I get that it’s easy to write about black struggles with such an emotional detachment because of the equality and positive environment that DBHS provides in comparison to other schools — I too am guilty of that — but Hanna’s demoralizing rhetoric does no favors for the black community and only sets them back further. Before making claims that all violence is bad and that the protests turning violent is morally repugnant, we must understand the long history of white violence against black people. Before saying that “fighting fire with fire” is ineffective to combat racism, we must also understand that decades upon centuries of peaceful rhetoric have had only minimal effect on American violence. Stifling any act of physical breaking from chains of racism with a “being the better person” claim only serves to keep the black community down, as it has been for the longest time.
This is not an indict of the Bull’s Eye in and of itself, but simply a response to an article that troubled me deeply, especially in such a sensitive time. I believe that the Bull’s Eye is a respectable school paper and that opinions such as these are not characteristic of the newspaper as a whole. I hope that this can effect some sort of change in the paper’s editorial approval policy as well as its decisions to pass such material.