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A Kidnapping Reopens Our Racial Wounds -- If We Let It

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

It didn't take long for the emails to arrive, as I expected.

"Chicago hate crime today against Trump!" said one. "Let's see your column justify that one."

He was writing about the big news of the day, the "Facebook torture case," as some called it. It involved the kidnaping and torture -- streamed live on Facebook -- of a white teenager with special needs, allegedly by two 18-year-old black men and two black sisters, aged 18 and 24.

The four suspects were charged Thursday with aggravated kidnapping, aggravated unlawful restraint, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and a hate crime.

Justify? Why would I want to "justify" such barbaric bullying?

Why would I want to excuse the barbarism that compelled the youths in that video to laugh lustily as they drank alcohol, smoked blunts, cut out a piece of their victim's scalp and force him to drink water from a toilet bowl?

 

I have no sympathy for the young idiots who can be heard spouting racial epithets and obscene remarks about President-elect Donald Trump and "white people" in general. They could not have produced a more effective video insult to hard-working, law-abiding black Americans if they tried.

In that vein, I brace myself whenever a high-profile violent crime committed by an African-American. I know I'm going to hear from a certain grouchy subset of trolls, energized in part by the notion that black people are getting away with too much or only getting ahead at the expense of white people.

As my Southern-born mother used to say, bless their hearts. You can't lift yourself up, she would say, by keeping somebody else down. Yet once race enters a crime story, especially a brutally vicious crime like this one that crosses racial lines, so does an ugly brand of racial politics.

Shortly after the Facebook video spread on social media, for example, it was followed by social media comments -- unsupported, it turned out -- that the attackers belonged to the well-known anti-police-brutality movement known as Black Lives Matter.

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(c) 2017 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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