Soft targets. That’s what the rampaging, villainous mob of black youths who attacked white victims at the Wisconsin State Fair were looking for.
The back-story: in early August the Wisconsin State Fair opened in the town of West Allis, which is pretty darned near Milwaukee. The first night, a fight broke out. According to some news reports, the initial fisticuffs involved black youths fighting black youths.
Somewhere along the line, some of the young combatants took the notion to make the fracas an interracial thing. Some young blacks started attacking whites. It seemed like a repeat of some incidents in Chicago a couple of months ago and, though not as publicized, in Baltimore a few years back when bands of black youths attacked white tourists near the city’s famous Inner Harbor.
Many have asked what inspired this spate of black-on-white mob attacks. The most obvious answer is the one we don’t want to mention.
Plain, simple racism.
I don’t know what else to call it when mobs of blacks single out whites to attack. But there still exists this notion that blacks can’t be racists. Racism requires power, the thinking goes. Since blacks have no power, they can’t be racists.
Such nonsense is bad enough when left-wing loonies and Black Nationalist types parrot it. But the Rev. Jesse Jackson is a prominent black leader. He, at least, should know better.
Alas, he does not. A few years ago the good revvum spoke at Johns Hopkins Hospital up the road in Baltimore. During his speech, he claimed the Los Angeles police officers who beat black motorist Rodney King after a high-speed chase were “racists.”
After Jackson’s speech, he held a news conference. I was the only journalist who asked him if the black rioters who beat white truck driver Reginald Denny to death during the Los Angeles riots were racists. This was his answer, verbatim, and I kid you not:
“They were reacting to being victims of racism. They were driven by race. To be a racist you have to have power. One cannot equate black fugitives from slavery fighting their masters as racists.”
So in the curious alternate universe where Jackson lives, Denny wasn’t some hapless victim who drove into the wrong part of Los Angeles the day of the riot. Noooo. Denny was some slave master getting his just desserts from the revolting fugitive slaves of early 1990s Los Angeles.
It was bad enough that Jackson uttered such idiocy. What was worse was that Kweisi Mfume, who had recently resigned as president of the NAACP, and six black members of the Maryland legislature joined him at the press conference. Not one of them took issue with Jackson’s remarks.
With such a failure of leadership, is it any wonder you have crowds of young blacks attacking whites in Chicago, Wisconsin and Baltimore? Jackson, with his words, condoned the racist practice of black mobs attacking whites. Mfume and those six black Maryland legislators, with their silence, condoned the same thing.
Which brings me to that other racism: black mobs perceiving whites as “soft targets.” In addition to the fantasy that blacks can’t be racist, there exists this fiction: that blacks are superior athletes because African Americans dominate the National Basketball Association and the National Football League.
Such dominance might convince flash-mobbing blacks that whites are soft targets, but I guarantee you that these mobs will run into a Jack Dempsey or Rocky Marciano type one day. I hope they run into several at one time.
Here’s what else I hope: that the black flash mobs will run into a white or group of whites who take seriously the Second Amendment and their right to carry.
Wonder what old Jesse will say when that happens.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
