While the mainstream media lavished endless attention and emotion on the George Zimmerman trial for the killing of Trayvon Martin last weekend, the body of a 17-year-old black boy was discovered on basement stairs, face down, behind a boarded-up house in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. His body was so badly decomposed that local news reports originally suggested that he had died of blunt force trauma. An autopsy demonstrated that he had in fact been shot to death. His family blamed his death on his refusal to join a gang at school.
The boy's name was Darryl Green. Thus far, no non-local media outlet has told the story of Darryl Green. That's because Darryl Green was likely killed by another black person.
This is the world in which we now live: a Hispanic man kills a black boy, likely in self-defense, and the media portray the killing as evidence of a brutal white power structure looking to reinstitute Jim Crow. Melissa Harris-Perry of MSNBC laments that the not guilty verdict in the Zimmerman trial means it's OK to kill innocent black children. Commentator Andrew Sullivan suggests that the verdict means a return to "the era of lynching." The cover of the New York Daily News links civil rights martyr Emmitt Till to Trayvon Martin. As John Nolte of Breitbart News tweeted, we now live "in a country with a twice-elected black president and the media acting like Mississippi is still burning."
The sad fact is that the media do not care about dead black Americans, unless those blacks are murdered by whites. Never mind the fact that blacks constitute 13.1 percent of the American population but 49 percent of murder victims. Never mind the fact that black life in the inner cities is plagued not by white people stalking down black kids, but by black kids hunting down other black kids.
Such facts don't forward the leftist narrative that America is a terribly brutal and racist country requiring endless government interventionism to fix. Such facts don't forward the leftist narrative that white folks, particularly conservative white folks who believe in judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, are the true threat to black success. Such facts undercut the liberal agenda of ignoring problems in the black community in favor of cobbling together a coalition of people dedicated to fundamentally changing the system.
The left is committed to changing America in basic ways. But in order to create enough support for changing the greatest and most tolerant nation ever to grace the planet, the left must portray America as an evil, nasty place. Doing that requires promoting the lie that non-black Americans hate black people, and would dig their old white sheets and burning crosses out of storage if given half a chance. Both the media and the Democratic Party are complicit in that propaganda effort. Building on the fact that America used to be a racist place, and ignoring 50-plus years of American transformation, the left has convinced many Americans, both black and white, that America is a grotesque and monstrous place.
For many Americans, it feels so good to buy into that notion. It provides an easy dose of unearned moral superiority -- "America is racist, but I'm not, because I believe America is racist." It allows Americans to ignore real and pressing problems in favor of moaning about vague and undefined ones -- "forget about Darryl Green, let's talk about institutional racism." Most of all, it carries with it an easy and dismissive solution -- "let's turn power over to a chosen few who can fix everything."
Meanwhile, more Darryl Greens will die. So will more Trayvon Martins, given the fact that Martin was the product of a broken home, had a criminal history and a history of fighting, and was caught up in drug culture -- all factors in his death, and all problems the media refuse to talk about. But the media don't care about those deaths. All they care about is the larger goal: fixing America, one fake racial scandal at a time.