After Newark, Race-Baiting Lost its Charm
California, What's the Matter with
General
© Jack Cashill
WorldNetDaily.com - September 6, 2007
This is a tale of three cities: the one in which I was born and raised, Newark, New Jersey; the second in which I live, Kansas City, Missouri; and the third in which I have spent some time of late, Los Angeles.
At the heart of this tale is the procrustean effort by Hispanic activists to impose the black civil rights paradigm on their undocumented amigos. To do this, however, they need black support, and that is slipping away.
Here is how the effort plays out in an overly sensitive town like Kansas City. Earlier this summer, new mayor Mark Funkhouser, a maverick Democrat, picked an Hispanic guy to chair the traditionally blue-blooded Park Board.
Funkhouser, in fact, turned the Park Board into a veritable Mod Squad, adding an eccentric ex-councilwoman, a guy who wants reparations for slavery, a suburban rose-growing grandma, and a black male ballet dancer.
Hispanic activists and their fellow travelers, black and white, were not satisfied with just the chair. They insisted on a board that while “looking like America” thought exactly as they did. And one of Funkhouser’s picks clearly did not.
Yes, the grandma! To embarrass Funkhouser, an old line Dem rival had ratted out the 73 year-old Frances Semler as a card-carrying member of the not-so-secret organization known as the Minutemen.
Although a clear majority of Americans think positively of the Minutemen and their non-violent mission—volunteering to help the United States Border Patrol protect our borders—the racially enlightened in Kansas City do not.
My councilwoman, Beth Gottstein, counts herself among the enlightened. To prove it, she plucked a card from deep in the race deck and played it against Semler.
The Minutemen, Beth lamented, are “just one step from the KKK.”
Now admittedly, most of us would have a hard time linking an organization that works for peaceful, race-free enforcement of the laws to one that breaks laws in a violent, racist matter, but that’s why we don’t get quoted in the mainstream media, and Beth does.
“My world is totally rocked by this,” the soulful Beth reminded the Kansas City Star. “We fight this every day. I am grieving for my friends in the Hispanic community.”
Beth and her council cronies promptly voted 9-2 to condemn Semler and wish her gone. To his credit, Funkhouser ignored them.
On August 4 th, just a few days after I wrapped up my annual week at the Jersey Shore-- Seaside Park to be precise--my attention was forced back to New Jersey. All of America’s was.
Some unknown killers in Newark had lined up four promising, college-bound black kids, two of them girls. They sexually assaulted the girls, sliced at least one of them with a machete, and put a bullet in the back of all four of the kids’ heads. Three died.
In Los Angeles, the media, which I have been monitoring for my book What’s the Matter with California, would have known enough to sit on this story until they sorted out the details. The machete angle alone would have alerted them to how far wrong this story was about to go.
In fact, so effective have the LA media been in suppressing stories of brown on black violence, now epidemic in schools and prisons, that It was not until early 2007 that one such story escaped their grasp.
What prompted national attention was not so much the murder of 14-year-old Cheryl Green by Hispanic gang members in LA’s volatile Harbor Gateway neighborhood, but the killing’s gratuitous nature.
The gang had been looking for a black person—any black person--to shoot. Despite the horror of the shooting, it took weeks of concerted pressure by LA’s black community to break this story out of Southern California.
In the New York area, however, the politicos and their media allies are still a little naïve. They did not hesitate to beat their breasts loudly about the multiple killings in Newark, still one more seeming injustice in a city plagued by the same.
They quickly trotted out all the liberal bromides as to why such a horror could happen: suburban indifference, inadequate schools, and, of course, guns.
When it turned out that the chief suspect was an illegal alien from Peru and his partner-in-mayhem a Nicaraguan whose green card should have been revoked for an earlier crime, it was too late to put this undocumented genie back in the ink bottle.
The truth silenced the amnesty crowd just about everywhere but Kansas City. Here, incredibly, our Cesar Chavez wannabes continued to fret more about a law-abiding grandma than a gang of machete-wielding illegals.
The bodies of the three Newark teens were barely in the ground when the Kansas City Star resurrected still another hysterical front-page story, above-the-fold, about Semler.
This time, as the Star reported last week, “The nation’s largest Hispanic rights group is warning it may cancel its 2009 convention here because of a controversial Kansas City park board member.”
The “rights group” in question is La Raza, Spanish for “the race.” Whatever that race is, it is certainly not black, and black leaders are beginning to understand that.
Based much more on hope than evidence, the Star reported that the NAACP might also change its convention plans because of Semler.
The reporter had to concede, however, that she had talked to no one at the NAACP and that “national and local NAACP officials did not return telephone calls Thursday.”
No doubt, Democratic bosses are leaning on black leaders to pacify the base and keep the coalition together. The base, however, has a mind of its own, and, as black leaders know, it ain’t pacified at all.
Cashill’s new book, What’s the Matter with California, will be out in October.
