I got a thoughtful email from a devoted WND visitor recently who describes herself as a black, Christian conservative.
“I simply wanted to email you because I am SO disturbed by your website constantly running stories about black-on-white violence,” wrote Bonnie. “Why? Please help me understand WHY? If you did both sides, I would understand you are making a statement about our culture. Please do not say that you are simply reporting a truth – there is a one-sided purpose here. It seems to me that you are intentionally planting seeds of racial resentment within your conservative and predominately Christian readership. This truly grieves me as a Christian since you offer so many good resources otherwise. I just don’t understand how you reconcile your Christian faith with, what seems to be, your one-sided racial bias.”
Because I get thousands of emails a day, when I answered Bonnie personally, I didn’t have the time to address her concerns as thoroughly as I might like. Because there surely are other Bonnies out there, I thought I’d take the opportunity here.
Are there heinous examples of white-on-black violence in America today? Of course. There are 350 million Americans. Are WND reporters and editors uninterested in covering white racial violence when it rears its ugly head? Of course they are interested, willing and eager to report it.
But understand what WND is and represents. WND is not a local or regional news agency. It is a national and even worldwide news agency. As such, we must use our precious and limited editorial resources to bring you news that is not duplicative of the thousands of other news sources out there.
One of the many disturbing trends the rest of the media have ignored over the last two or three years is the rapid escalation of black mob attacks on whites. I would characterize it as an epidemic of violence – racially motivated violence usually involving multiple attackers.
Because other news agencies are not reporting these incidents, it is literally impossible for Americans – black or white – to understand the problem or to come to grips with the truth. There’s no doubt the absence of honest reporting by others spurred WND’s conscious decision to report the trend, and, more importantly, to illustrate it frequently with coverage of individual attacks, usually supplemented with video.
In addition, WND is publishing the book that brought this trend to our attention as well as to the attention of many distinguished black Americans who are as alarmed about them as I am. That would be Colin Flaherty’s “White Girl Bleed A Lot,” now available as an e-book and soon, for the first time, as a paperback with national distribution.
Thomas Sowell, a scholar, prolific author and WND columnist, said this about the book: “Reading Colin Flaherty’s book made painfully clear to me that the magnitude of the problem is greater than I had discovered through my own research. He documents both the race riots and political evasions in dozens of cities.”
Wishing this violence away – or covering our eyes from it – will not cause it to disappear. It never does. Evil first needs to be exposed before we can hope to defeat it. And make no mistake about it, we’re talking about something profoundly evil here.
Is it racism that motivates me to do this? Yes, but not my racism. We’re reporting on an outbreak of black racism and violence that others are afraid to recognize and report – probably in part because of the fear of being labeled racist. We don’t report it to exploit it. We don’t report it to sensationalize it. We don’t report it to fan the flames of racism. We report it because when cruelty and hatred and violence go unnoticed, they go uncorrected, unchallenged and unaddressed.
Is a white person who is victimized by violence motivated by black racism any less a victim? When we see a pattern of escalating racial violence of this kind, is it not justified and appropriate and even our moral responsibility to expose it? That’s the way we overcame white racial violence a generation ago, and I believe we will not overcome black racial violence unless we approach it the same way.
So what does Bonnie have to say about all this in the limited exchanges we’ve had?
“I do wish to clarify a couple of points. I have no doubt that there is real black-on-white violence crime,” she says. “Most recently, in my home state of Georgia there was a tragic case of an 18-year-old black man shooting a 1-and-half-year-old white baby in the face, in front of his mother, killing him. The media downplayed the race angle. But I do recall when I first heard the story the teen spouted racial resentments in the process of the shooting. My point in emailing you was not to deny that black-on-white violence exists. Nor do I deny that the media are completely ignoring it. What I wanted to bring to your attention is that in your effort to ‘balance the scales’ and write stories of cases of black-on-white violence so frequently it alienates me and the black community. I do not feel comfortable forwarding links to your website to my black, Christian friends because of this.”
At the end of the day, I’m afraid my friend Bonnie and I will just have to agree to disagree.
Anyone who understands the fearlessness of WND and our passionate commitment to the truth knows we are not in the business of making people feel “comfortable.” We are in the business of discomfiting people with the sometimes hard and ugly truth about what is going on in our world.
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