Monday, January 29, 2007

Halloween Justice Talkwise



The Halloween Beatings in
Long Beach CA this past year and the subsequent verdicts have crystallized some of the glaring problems our communities are facing regarding traditional views on
and justice. For those who are unaware of what happened that terrible night, three young women were vicisously beaten by a mob twelve youths shouting racial epithets. The women were selected and brutally assaulted because of their race. Had it not been for a Good Samaritan, those three women could have died.

This case did not make national headlines unlike other racially motivated attacks nor did the community conduct candle light vigils, march in protest, or resort to civil unrest. With the recent guilty verdict, amazingly the twelve defendants were categorized as victims right along with their three targets of hatred. The mayor and city council made responses that did not endorse the verdict nor support the victim’s rights and families. Instead, everyone was a victim, the assaulted three and the twelve thugs because of one reason, race.

Why is this? Simple, in this case the victims were white and the criminals were black. The national media did not care because racially motivated crimes can only be white on black, not the other way around. Black on white crime is tacitly excused by the political establishment as a hang-over from the days of segregation and lynching.

The day the verdicts were read, there were gatherings outside the courthouse in support of the defendants but no where were the prayer groups found for the victims. The mayor spoke of a community needing healing, rather than the trial being a triumph of justice. If a community’s leadership is paralyzed by the issue of race, unable to support the judicial system’s verdict because their skewed and racially clouded vision of society our cities especially Long Beach are in store of more trouble.

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