About time!! Check out this article (available at: [url]http://www.townhall.com/columnists/paulcraigroberts/pcr20010502.shtml[/url]
Paul Craig Roberts (archive)
May 2, 2001
Replacing Civil Rights with Caste
The 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed to reaffirm the constitutional requirement of equality in law. Paradoxically, the Civil Rights Act destroyed equality in law and put in place a caste system. The lack of response by the U.S. Department of Justice to outbreaks of black-on-white violence in Seattle, Wash., and Cincinnati, Ohio, reveals an entrenched racial caste system.
Earlier this year in Seattle, roving bands of black men brutally attacked whites during a Mardi Gras celebration. Many incidents were captured on video and in photographs. "Blacks attacked us because we were white," the victims reported. Yet, according to the Seattle police, the U.S. Department of Justice made no inquiry into the racially motivated violence.
In April, the pattern repeated in Cincinnati. Blacks went on a rampage of racial violence, looting white businesses, destroying white property and brutally beating white people. Robert Stearns, a white truck driver, was chased by a black mob screaming, "Kill the white man," and barely escaped with his life. Stearns says that he has yet to hear from the Justice Department about the racially motivated violation of his civil rights.
Even in the Republican Bush administration, the Justice Department is a civil-rights police only in the case of white-on-black violence. As white-on-black violence is rare, federal enforcement falls on white police who beat or shoot black suspects resisting arrest.
From the standpoint of the U.S. Department of Justice, nothing a black does to a white constitutes a civil-rights violation or a hate crime. In Cincinnati, the Justice Department is investigating only the Cincinnati police for shooting a fleeing black suspect who ignored police orders to halt and for firing a beanbag filled with pellets at a black woman during a protest that turned violent.
The Justice Department presumes that the suspect was shot because he was black, not because he was fleeing from police. Justice Department officials believe that the woman was hit with the beanbag because she was black, not because police were trying to keep a protest within bounds.