Friday, November 16, 2007

Tough Questions

USA Today has a couple of unusually tough stories today about the difficulty of talking rationally about race and corrections sentencing. This one involves charges of racism against a white guy who shot two of three burglars who were beating his stepson so severely that the kid has permanent incapacitating brain damage. The third burglar organized the break-in and is now being charged for murder under a weird law. His mother apparently thinks that, since he didn't kill those two, he shouldn't be charged. It does sound like the guy will be put away forever even without the murder charge (no capital charge has been made), but the NAACP is making claims that don't seem to be warranted that this was racism rather than self-defense. Sorry but I think this is right up there with supporting Michael Vick in intelligence and public relations. And this story details a black blogger's efforts to start focusing our attention better on black-on-black crime, why the black community defends young black men with serious criminal records, and raises serious and necessary questions about why white women being brutally murdered get national news coverage but black women killed brutally don't. That's where your attention needs to be, NAACP, not defending robbers who destroy young people's lives and then attacking people trying to save those young lives.

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