White rampage in blue New York [updated]

In both of the racist attacks we’ve witnessed here in New York in the last week, local TV has featured friends of the thugs insisting they were ‘good kids’ and came from ‘decent families.’ Those supposed Norman Rockwell units produced the group that chased down 17-year-old Liberian immigrant Alie Kamara on Staten Island on election night yelling ‘Obama! Obama!’ while cracking him over the head with bats. One of Staten Island attackers was described by a teenaged girl on camera as ‘not like that at all’ and ‘decent,’ the proof being that he had planned to join the Marines.



‘Decent families’ also produced the six goons who went looking for a ‘Mexican’ to mug after a beer party in Patchogue on Long Island and found 37-year-old Ecuadorian Marcelo Lucero whom they proceeded to stab to death.

It’s tiresome to witness the old racist tropes just days after the inspiration of Nov. 4. Not just in the obvious aspect of the attacks themselves but more insidiously in the knee-jerk responses of the Caucasian event-filterers who would hardly be interviewing black teenagers to elicit laudatory comments if the roles had been reversed and a posse of hoodie-wearers from Harlem had just chased down and slaughtered a white kid for no reason.

Instead, we’d be hearing from psychiatrists and police captains demanding to know why these marauding kids’ parents were such deadbeats and what the city/county/nation was going to do about this pathological behavior once and for all. We’d see a series of candlelight vigils recalling the good deeds of the deceased, weeping and probably indignant relatives including at least one howling for blood and a careful avoidance of anything about the attackers’ world whatsoever. That would be ‘disrespectful’ to the grieving family.

In our racially-tinged worldview white kids from the suburbs just don’t have evil motives even when they ‘use bad judgment’ or ‘commit errors.’ But now it turns out, according to reporters, that the accused in Patchogue had a habit of getting loaded and roaming the streets for easy victims to beat up or rob, all of which sounds pretty similar to the hell-raising in urban ghettoes that constantly inspires law-n-order politicians and turns people into lifelong Republicans.

The other guaranteed reaction to these incidents is a police chief, usually of the lighter shade, immediately insisting that no racial or ethnic motive was involved, sometimes in the face of direct evidence to the contrary, as if the first order of business were to make sure no underlying social attitudes bear any share of responsibility. That’s particularly offensive in the Long Island case where the county supervisor is a fanatical campaigner against ‘illegal immigrants’ and fawned over openly by CNN’s despicable Lou Dobbs.

We now laud the civil rights movement as a shining moment in our history. But each of its achievements was immediately followed by a violent and sustained counter-reaction including acts that most of us would rather not think about right now. It won’t help to bury alarming signs like these two incidents and pretend they don’t mean what they mean.

[Update] I had just closed this window to open the news summary and immediately saw this from AP on an upsurge of post-election racist incidents.