“All crime data are convincing: The greatest threat to the Trayvon Martins in the U.S. is other Trayvon Martins.” – Dana D. Kelley, “The New Factionalism,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, July 19, 2013

Christmas truly has come early for Dana D. Kelley, columnist in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette; he has been able to write about race twice in less than a month.

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Previously he defended celebrity chef and television character Paula Deen, whose use of the n-word hasn’t prompted nearly as much national soul searching as one might have thought.

Now, with George Zimmerman being acquitted by a Florida jury in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, he has been unable to restrain himself yet again.

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As ever, one of his favorite subjects is black folks murdering black folks, ignoring the fact that most murder is, in fact – if he even knows – as segregated as other areas of life.

Most white people, in fact, are killed by other white people.

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http://www.upworthy.com/5-black-crime-myths-which-ones-did-you-believe

Where is the national outrage? The posturing on Fox News?

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You won’t find it in Comrade Kelley’s columns. Kelley, as ever, isn’t that good at fractions.

Kelley claims that if all interracial crime in which blacks were the victims were to vanish overnight, young black men would still be dying at a “heart-breaking” (sorry, Dana, I ain’t for real sure you actually feel that here) rate.

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Yes, because whites kill whites, and blacks kill blacks – for the most part. Despite what we may see in movies.

Kelley then goes on to quote our first president, the slave-holding George Washington, when he wrote in his Farewell Address about factionalism.

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Or, as Dana D. Kelley puts it:

“He defined a faction as ‘often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community’ seeking to create ‘artificial and extraordinary force – to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party.’”

Kelley goes on to write:

“The ‘continual mischief’ of factions, he warned, ‘agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another.’”

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There is something . . . oh, I don’t know . . . almost wonderful in a universe in which a columnist can twist the words of a slave-holder warning about political battles to satisfy his need to warn us that folks (agitators) would use the Trayvon Martin case to stir up trouble in America.

Comrade Kelley then springs from “racial factionalism” to briefly mention other things which keep him up at night . . . Abortion, homosexuality, secularism, gun control, education . . .

Education, of course, leads to talk of consolidation, and his long-held contempt for that.

Getting back to the late Trayvon Martin, and other instances of young black men struck down entering the prime of their lives, Kelley can’t resist a jab at the “race hustlers” seeking to promote their own careers, rather than justice. Or, or Dana writes:

“But that’s never been the issue. If it were, the NAACP and Al Sharpton and the major media pundits would be going all out to try and create a national intervention to reduce black crime against black victims.”

Oops.

From a piece I found just this morning (is there a high student willing to teach Dana how to work his way around Google?) I found this:

Black-on-black crime widely ignored, say African American activists

http://news.yahoo.com/black-black-crime-widely-ignored-african-american-activists-190404331.html

Just a further search of Google would show that many in the black community are concerned about crime, and are talking publicly about it.

Crime rates, by the way, are going down. Why not mention that?

******

My first real experience with bigotry

The first actual display of racism I ever saw was while waiting for a train in England as a kid in the mid-1960s, an old man (maybe he was drunk?) was yelling at a young woman who seemed to be from either India or Pakistan, screaming in her face, “We don’t want your kind here! Just go back where you came from!” The young woman stood quietly under his tirade . . . no one came to her aid.

That became one of the incidents that began to shape who I became in the years to come.

*****

Quote of the Day

We are all familiar with the argument: Make war dreadful enough, and there will be no war. And we none of us believe it. – John Galsworthy

rsdrake@cox.net

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