Conservatives are desperately searching for their white version of Trayvon Martin. In service to this goal, their media are willing to lie, obfuscate, and twist the facts by ginning up White Victimology and White Racial Resentment
In Christopher Lane's horrible murder by three hooligans, the Right-wing media believes that they have found an example which can be used to neutralize the gross injustice visited upon Trayvon Martin by a racist cop wannabe street vigilante named George Zimmerman. The savage assault and murder of an 88 year old military veteran named Delbert Belton by two street pirates is a second shell in the shotgun of piss-poor reasoning by the Right-wing media, one that tries to find a false equivalence with the murder of Trayvon Martin whenever a crime takes place, and the accused perpetrators happen to be black.
The Washington Post is a reputable newspaper and a journal of record. I am surprised that they would be part of the race-baiting post-Trayvon Martin "news" frame by conservatives and the Right-wing media.
On Friday, The Washington Post published an opinion column by Kathleen Parker which suggests that Barack Obama is somehow responsible for the murders of Christopher Lane and Delbert Belton--and that their killers were inspired by Obama's display of empathy for Trayvon Martin and his family.
There she wrote:
The killings leading the news the past several days have been horrific in their apparent randomness. Were they racially motivated? Had the perps been white and the victims black, would Obama have identified with them? More to immediate concerns, did the president’s identification with Trayvon Martin nourish the killing passions of these youths?
Kathleen Parker's claim is abominable, unfounded, and irresponsible. Moreover, her suggestion is a better fit for Fox News or World Net Daily than one of the nation's leading publications.
In total, Parker's column on Friday is a potpourri of White Victimology, bizarre and inaccurate understandings of American history and empirical reality, and stinks of the worst sort of willful and intentional White Privilege.
Parker's race baiting stunt is designed to be intentionally provocative; it is not noteworthy or important because of that fact. The real affront was committed by The Washington Post: Kathleen Parker's column on Friday is a "polite" version of the White Supremacist tracts circulated by websites such as "Niggermania" or "Chimpout".
The editors of The Washington Post should have known better.
Instead, The Washington Post chose to pursue the many thousands of comments and page views that bigotry disguised as "punditry" from one of the nation's most respected newspaper could bring to their site.