It looks like the folks at Gawker Media might want to look into beefing up their private security. Over at Gawker's Deadspin sports blog, they actually posted a piece titled "The Police Are America's Terrorists." (The graphic above was included.)
Greg Howard is obviously in a highly emotional state over the unprofessional police shooting of Walter Scott in South Carolina. He’s so emotional that he thinks that white people have always killed black and brown people, and it's never happened in reverse, or black-on-black:
For as long as there have been white people and black people and brown people in America, white people have slaughtered black people and brown people. Over the years, the techniques have changed slightly, even as they've bled into each other. Slavery was slaughter, just as hanging and dragging and beating and hacking are slaughter, just as electrocuting and poisoning and shooting are slaughter. But whatever the method, whites have slaughtered minorities, and there is no reason to think they won't continue to do so.
The killings of minorities by police are instructive in this regard, not because all policemen are violent racists or murderers (the vast majority are neither) or because they are personally responsible for killing large numbers of black and brown people (they aren't), but because they are agents of the state, and so their actions, and the consequences they face, serve as a sort of index of the public will.
We know things about this sort of killing. Last year, ProPublica published a study concluding that black teenage boys are 21 times more likely to be killed by police than their white peers. (The findings have since been debated, but all agree that the disparity is enormous.) Mapping Police Violence reports that in March, 36 black people—one every 21 hours—were killed by cops. In big towns and small towns and cities across the nation, minorities are being killed by the very men and women sworn to protect and to serve them....
Then Howard shifts into the terrorism hyperbole:
Witnessing all these shootings and killings creates a constant state of terror within minorities, not altogether different from the effect larger populations feel witnessing passenger planes flying into buildings, or gunmen cutting their way through schools and shopping malls, or children blowing themselves up in cramped bazaars. The issue doesn't involve absolute numbers; it involves the effect of knowing that at any time, your number could come up.
The difference is that when the Boston Marathon is bombed, or people fly planes into buildings, or an aggrieved loner goes on a killing spree, we, as a society, pursue justice to the very ends of the earth, if only to sleep better at night. When killer cops rarely, if ever, even step foot in court, let alone get convicted, the absence of immediate justice or punishment leads to an unaddressed fear. It's a fear of ubiquity; a fear that the carnage can be easily replicated, virtually anywhere, by virtually anyone; a fear that our lives don't matter.
This fear is a virus that eats its way through a population, because the affected people despair, resigned to the fact that they're dehumanized and that there's a decent chance that nothing they do or have done even matters. It doesn't matter that Scott had just reunited with his brother, or that he liked to dance, or that he was getting engaged, just as it doesn't matter that you're someone's mother, or someone's son, or went to college, or have a career, or a gaggle of loving friends, or a sweet tooth. Your very essence is stripped until you're no more than a demon in baggy shorts, a shadow beneath a hoodie, a slab of brown skin.
Will anyone in the “mainstream” media have anything critical to say about smearing all American police as terrorists? Will this be a scandal for Gawker Media? Or will folks like MSNBC run to put Greg Howard on the air for more smearing of the hundreds of thousands of professional cops in America?
