posted by Mike Jefferson
That’s a photo of Brian Milligan with his girlfriend, Nicola Fletcher. He’s white, she’s African American. Young and in love. Here’s the short version of the story:
On August 18, Milligan was beaten nearly to death on a Buffalo street by a group of black males because he was dating Fletcher. By all accounts, that’s factual. He’d been threatened many times by various black males for “being in the wrong place” and “being with the wrong girl.” But they were in love…until August 18th when the threats manifested into reality.
Though this story is still developing, it offers an useful opportunity to look at the subject of “hate crimes” in the context of hypocrisy, racism, and free speech/thought. Given Sam’s definition of racism as “believing that some person or group is superior or inferior than another person or group because of some identifiable physical characteristics that they can not change,” I think most everyone would agree that this particular crime, and true hate crimes in general, are amongst the most egregious forms of racism.
But what about the hypocrisy surrounding this event? In my experience, hypocrisy is a foolproof indicator of ignorance and intellectual dishonesty. And let there be no mistake, there is a great deal of hypocrisy in this incident of a white boyfriend being assaulted for dating his black girlfriend. I’ll admit that I may have missed some of the details of the case but to my knowledge Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson (nor any other Civil Rights activist, for that matter) have not been to Buffalo to protest this hate crime. Sharpton doesn’t miss many opportunities to publicly demand justice in hate crime cases. And to be fair to Sharpton, I haven’t heard a peep out of any of the race baiters, black or white.
At this point, you probably think I advocate having the Feds roll into town and arrest everybody involved for violation of Federal Hate Crimes law. You’d be wrong. Make no mistake, I think the punks that ganged up like a pack of animals to beat one lone guy nearly to death need to be locked up. Or forced to face a 
real fighter mano-a-mano, but then we’d have to clean up the mess that would be left. And then they need to be locked up for what they DID (e.g., assault, attempted murder–take your pick) and not WHY they did it or WHAT they thought.
Our constitution actually demands that people be allowed to wallow in their ignorance. They just can’t act on their ignorance when it adversely affects others. Let me clarify that. With a few exceptions, you can say and believe and read and write most anything you want. And your thoughts and words can be really, really dumb–like rock dumb. But when your stupidity infringes on the safety of others, as it inevitably will do, like when you decide to blow up a tree stump in your back patio with five sticks of dynamite, then “the man” will come knocking on your door.
Hate crime laws cross the line by attempting an end around “double jeopardy” in criminal cases that are not properly prosecuted the first time. [Double jeopardy is prosecuting someone twice for the same crime.] They came about because of some missteps of justice in the past where crimes were committed against individuals but the guilty were not brought to justice. These miscarriages of justice were often attributed to racism. But instead of doing the hard work of fixing the corrupt judicial systems, the “powers-that-be” decided to exert more federal control over the populace and punish thought rather than deed.
The problem is, if you have an interest in freedom of speech, you might want to recognize that hate crime legislation is just one more step down the slippery slope of constraining this important right.
And so I cry “foul.”
On another note, if black and brown people want to be treated as equals, then why do so many cry “foul” when hate crime laws are applied to them? Is it only white people who hate? Is it only white people who victimize others because of their ancestry? In the case of Brian Milligan, it took nearly two weeks for some prominent members of the black community in Buffalo to stand behind this young man. This occured when a number or preachers excoriated their parishioners for not helping to find the culprits:
“The story [finally] touched a nerve with several members of Buffalo’s African-American community, including a local pastor who leads a predominantly black church in Buffalo. ‘At first, it didn’t affect me the way that it would have if I heard it was a black teen attacked,’ said the Rev. Darius Pridgen, who spent years fighting for civil rights for African-Americans. ‘But after I saw his father on TV pleading with the community to find the assailants, I decided I had to go after the people who beat this kid.’ Pridgen said he felt that the community has turned a collective blind eye to the beating. So he gave a fire-and-brimstone sermon at the True Baptist Church on a Sunday after the attack, appealing to his congregation to help find the culprits. ‘He didn’t deserve to be beaten this way,’ Pridgen recalled saying at the service. ‘If you believe this, put your hands together.’ If it was a black teen, Pridgen said, ‘We would have been protesting with flags and everything else.’” [CNN]
By the way, this is where the hypocrisy enters the story. You either walk for justice for everyone or you don’t walk at all. People know who these attackers are…and I want to ask them what they’d say to the white people whose silence protected white thugs who attacked a black or brown man.
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It’s unfortunate that this story is written only with examples of liberals not being able to convince conservatives because the latter are not thinking straight. There are an equal number of examples of conservatives not being able to get through to the “misguided liberals” because such purportedly progressive thinkers can’t get outside their locked mental cages of short-sighted intellect.
