Since it's been almost a week, I checked in with the victim of last week's race-related beating in Polish Hill.
Surely, I thought, with a license plate number from the suspects' vehicle & the telephone number of one of the 6 suspects, there had been an arrest by now.
Not so. The young man was informed that there was no record of an incident report for that day, time or location. Even though he was tended by Pittsburgh police officers & rushed to Mercy Hospital by city ambulance service, no police report has yet been filed.
Where is the outrage, Pittsburgh?
If this was a young black man beaten in the streets by white strangers, there would be marches & candlelight vigils & community groups would be demanding an audience with every politician.
There would be complaints to the Citizens Police Review Board & the federal DOJ, questioning the conduct of the responding officers & charges of racism & favoritism by police.
Every paper & local news station would be jockeying to tell you the facts over & over, beating a dead horse into the ground until you had memorized every insignificant detail to the point that you could recite it in your sleep.
But I guess a violent beating at the hands of racists with black skin is nothing compared to some white kid driving around with a flag.
What a sad, horrible world this has become for all of us.
2 comments:
"... a violent beating at the hands of racists with black skin is nothing compared to some white kid driving around with a flag." Exactly. It seems that racism is only considered racism if it is towards one tone of skin.
I can give you an example how it works here as well, last year on the 10th of June (the Day of Portugal, a national holiday) a group of gangs gathered something like 400 guys (they all had dark skin, and by this I don't mean all gang members are black) and went down to a beach, beating and robbing every white guy who was there enjoying the holiday (even those with women and children with them). There were black people at the beach too, but they didn't suffer anything.
During the following two weeks, the media talked and discussed and showed pictures of this crime, and you know what happened? Nothing. Not one complaint was filed, noone was identified and noone was arrested.
But probably the worst part was to see how the media handled the issue: those guys weren't a group of black men in a racial crime, it was only a "sign of social unrest due to the existing inequalities" performed by "a group of young men".
Sorry about the extent of the comment. And of course in the first paragraph I meant that "racism is only considered racism if it is towards one (darker) tone of skin".
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