This Week in Hate Crimes

It’s not okay to be white. It’s deadly.

On Tuesday this week, 19-year-old Karmelo Anthony was convicted of murder for fatally stabbing a competitor at track meet in Texas last year. The killing quickly became national news because Anthony is black, his victim was white and black people were rooting for the stabber.

The events that led to Anthony’s plunging a knife into Austin Metcalf’s heart are these: Driven for some reason to sit in a rival team’s tent, Anthony was repeatedly asked to leave by Metcalf. He refused, and tauntingly dared, “Touch me and see what happens.” Metcalf pushed him, whereupon Anthony knifed him.

For killing a white kid who had the affrontery to 1) ask him to leave a tent he was not supposed to be in, and 2) touch him, Anthony collected more than $600,000 in donations and gained a small group of protesters outside the courthouse, yelling racist abuse at white people.

Anthony’s admirers claimed to be protesting “white supremacy.” Don’t these white people realize Anthony is black? You can’t ask a black person to move! A minister outside the courthouse denounced the entire justice system as the “final frontier of racism and it’s legalized here.” A potential juror admitted, “I don’t know if I feel right putting a brother in jail.”

One thing you’ll never see is a group of white people rooting for whites who kill blacks — or anyone else for that matter — just because the accused is white. Nobody protested the arrests of Derek Chauvin, Kim Potter, George Zimmerman or Jake Gardner, and two of those were accidents, the other two self-defense.

[Point of law: Lying on your back, having your head smashed into a concrete sidewalk, or being locked in a chokehold so lethal that police are no longer allowed to use it, is not remotely similar to being pushed.]

Gardner, for example, an Omaha bar owner, shot and killed a black career criminal who was choking him to death during a BLM riot. The district attorney, along with his entire homicide department, investigated and concluded the shooting was justified.

But realizing he was white, the Democratic D.A. recused himself and assigned a black special prosecutor to the case. The black prosecutor promptly issued an arrest warrant for Gardner’s arrest, charging him with manslaughter, attempted first-degree assault, making terroristic threats, and use of a weapon to commit a felony.

With a legion of white people rushing to disavow him, evict him, destroy his business, and manipulate the system to ensure his conviction, Gardner killed himself.

In other news this week, a 14-year-old black kid in Indianapolis fatally shot a 23-year-old white man in the head during a carjacking. The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department chief of police (the city’s first female police chief!!!) and deputy chief of police (a black guy, naturally) held press conferences, emoting over the horrible thing that had happened — to the killer.

Chief Tanya Terry, who looks like Janet Reno’s younger, more butch sister, barely mentioned the victim, Brett Scrogham, a serious Christian, who’d been returning from having dinner with his family when he was attacked. Terry began by saying she had “mixed emotions” about his murder — as one does when an innocent man has been shot in the head.

In her telling, the vicious cold-blooded crime was merely a “tragic incident.” Tearing up, she bemoaned the fact that the suspected killer would “face lifelong consequences,” his life “forever impacted and changed by short-sighted, impulsive, and reckless decisions.”

You know, if you think about it, you could say that Scrogham’s life was also impacted, in a way. Finally remembering him, Terry added, “There are victims on the other side of those decisions. And those victims matter.”

Yes, we all remember the “tragic incident” in Minneapolis when police officer Derek Chauvin’s life was forever “impacted and changed.” It’s easy to forget, but there was another victim in that encounter, too.

Deputy Chief Kendale Adams also called the unprovoked attack a “tragedy,” saying it was “a setback for all of us.” Yes, especially Scrogham. He then called on the community to ensure that potential teenage killers feel valued. “I know that those community-based organizations are out there doing this kind of work, and I would like to keep encouraging them to continue to do the work. … we have to do more.” Everybody has to step up and “do more,” except the teenagers who keep killing people.

This is like Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) saying, the day after the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, that she grieved for both “the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost yesterday,” or Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) referring to the 9/11 terrorist attack as a day when “some people did something.”

Sometimes it seems as if, no matter who kills whom, it’s either the white person’s fault or it’s nobody’s fault.