Given the utter lack of national media attention devoted to this story out of Phoenix, I'm not surprised to only be reading about it in the Steveosphere a week after it happened:
Despite (or, more cynically, because of) the potential racial angles the Phoenix shooting presents, the national media aren't running with it. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the New Black Panther Party are nowhere to be found. President Obama hasn't said a word. As Steve Sailer soberly notes, in a huge country of over 300 million people, tragedies like this occur with much greater regularity than we'd like them to, and it's of course absurd to expect nationally known figures to descend on every crime scene braying righteously about the need for justice.
More interesting than the predictable indifference of the usual suspects, however, is the lack of grassroots outrage in the Phoenix case as compared to the Martin case. With the latter, we're seeing bounties being announced, cop cars being shot up, random whites being savagely attacked by blacks as a way, I guess, of avenging Martin's death, and public gatherings clamoring for the shooter to be shackled up or killed. In the former, the slain man's sister sounds pretty upset about the whole thing, but that's about it.
The contrasts between what has transpired in the wakes of the Phoenix and Sanford incidents highlight the differences between the cohesiveness, or lack thereof, of the black and Hispanic 'communities' in contemporary America. There are plenty of self-anointed Hispanic activists willing to spit out foam-flecked hysteria to a soliciting media organ, as a recent profile piece on Kris Kobach in my local paper demonstrated last weekend:
In contrast, every urban hip hop station evinces just how plugged in blacks are to the concerns and going-ons of the 'black community'. The black guy on the street knows who Juicy J, MLK, Barack Obama, and Taye Diggs are. Precious few blacks could identify any policy differences between Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 Democratic presidential nominating process, but no doubt existed in their minds as to who they had to support.
The Hispanic on the street probably can't do much better than Jennifer Lopez or maybe Cesar Chavez since the Cesar Chavez Boulevard trend has started picking up (though it has a long way to go before it attains Martin Luther King Boulevard infamy). As for voting, si, Democrat is berry good, if they bother voting at all.
I'm making some assumptions here, but the gist is that when black cultural kingpins say "jump", blacks around the country start hopping. When Hispanic activists say whatever it is that they say, Puerto Ricans in New York, Cubans in Florida, and Mexicans in California don't know they're speaking and don't make an effort to hear them. By persistently clamoring about the coming Hispanic electoral tidal wave and censuring Republican pols who say anything about border security, the media establishment is trying to get Hispanics to adopt the same kind of visceral tribalism blacks exhibit in the US, but up to this point it hasn't had much of an impact.
About 7:30 p.m., a 22-year-old man and his girlfriend ordered food at the Taco Bell drive-thru and were told to pull up while their order was prepared.As Blode explains, this case is quite similar to the Trayvon Martin one, except that in the Taco Bell tussle, the victim--a mentally-disabled 'white Hispanic' man, presumably of Mexican descent--appears to be less culpable than Martin was. While Martin allegedly broke Zimmerman's nose, subjugated him, and then pummeled a supine Zimmerman, it sounds like Adkins swung at and possibly pounded the shooter's car with his fist a few times before being shot. Arizona, like Florida, has a stand-your-ground-law on the books, and perhaps unlike the Martin case, it could conceivably turn out to be relevant here.
At the same time, Adkins stepped around a corner into the path of the vehicle and angry words were exchanged between he and the driver.
They got into an altercation and Adkins was shot once by the driver. He died at the scene.
The driver, a 22-year-old black male, called police but has not been arrested.
At first, the couple claimed that Adkins had a metal pipe that he swung at them -- but it turns out he was holding a dog leash with his yellow lab on the other end.
Family members want that driver arrested, but he's claiming self-defense.
Despite (or, more cynically, because of) the potential racial angles the Phoenix shooting presents, the national media aren't running with it. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the New Black Panther Party are nowhere to be found. President Obama hasn't said a word. As Steve Sailer soberly notes, in a huge country of over 300 million people, tragedies like this occur with much greater regularity than we'd like them to, and it's of course absurd to expect nationally known figures to descend on every crime scene braying righteously about the need for justice.
More interesting than the predictable indifference of the usual suspects, however, is the lack of grassroots outrage in the Phoenix case as compared to the Martin case. With the latter, we're seeing bounties being announced, cop cars being shot up, random whites being savagely attacked by blacks as a way, I guess, of avenging Martin's death, and public gatherings clamoring for the shooter to be shackled up or killed. In the former, the slain man's sister sounds pretty upset about the whole thing, but that's about it.
The contrasts between what has transpired in the wakes of the Phoenix and Sanford incidents highlight the differences between the cohesiveness, or lack thereof, of the black and Hispanic 'communities' in contemporary America. There are plenty of self-anointed Hispanic activists willing to spit out foam-flecked hysteria to a soliciting media organ, as a recent profile piece on Kris Kobach in my local paper demonstrated last weekend:
"He definitely is very focused on putting forth at the local and state level anti-immigrant proposals that seem to be progressively more punitive and more and more repressive," said Clarissa Martinez, director of immigration at the National Council of La Raza.But the people they claim to represent aren't much stirred by their war cries, if they even know who they are at all. The Pew Hispanic Center found that by more than a 2-to-1 margin, Hispanics in the US do not think of themselves as sharing a broad social culture with other Hispanics, but instead as being comprised of lots of different communities tracing back to their particular countries (or regions within those countries) of descent.
"From our perspective, it just seems he is more interested in pursuing the scorched-Earth, anti-immigrant tactics that he believes in than in the well-being -- economic or otherwise -- of the jurisdictions that follow his misguided lead on these issues," Martinez added.
In contrast, every urban hip hop station evinces just how plugged in blacks are to the concerns and going-ons of the 'black community'. The black guy on the street knows who Juicy J, MLK, Barack Obama, and Taye Diggs are. Precious few blacks could identify any policy differences between Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 Democratic presidential nominating process, but no doubt existed in their minds as to who they had to support.
The Hispanic on the street probably can't do much better than Jennifer Lopez or maybe Cesar Chavez since the Cesar Chavez Boulevard trend has started picking up (though it has a long way to go before it attains Martin Luther King Boulevard infamy). As for voting, si, Democrat is berry good, if they bother voting at all.
I'm making some assumptions here, but the gist is that when black cultural kingpins say "jump", blacks around the country start hopping. When Hispanic activists say whatever it is that they say, Puerto Ricans in New York, Cubans in Florida, and Mexicans in California don't know they're speaking and don't make an effort to hear them. By persistently clamoring about the coming Hispanic electoral tidal wave and censuring Republican pols who say anything about border security, the media establishment is trying to get Hispanics to adopt the same kind of visceral tribalism blacks exhibit in the US, but up to this point it hasn't had much of an impact.
