With rioting still going on, the New York Times chooses to run this column by its notoriously lowbrow hothead columnist Charles Blow:
Rage Is the Only Language I Have Left
Society has become horribly desensitized to police killings of Black men.
Do you ever get the feeling that the less true his statement is, the more Charles Blow believes it?
By Charles M. Blow
Opinion Columnist
Yeah, okay, it’s just another Charles Blow column in the New York Times …
April 14, 2021, 8:32 p.m. ET
One of the first times I wrote about the police killing of an unarmed Black man was when Michael Brown was gunned down in the summer of 2014 in Ferguson, Mo. Brown was a Black teenager accused of an infraction in a convenience store just before his life was taken.
The only reason Michael Brown was unarmed when he died was because he failed at his first attempt to take the policeman’s gun.
… Now there is another: Daunte Wright, shot and killed during the day in Brooklyn Center, Minn., not far from where Floyd was killed. There is video.
But once they [the police] are armed and anxious, they can be that way in all cases: against an armed suspect as well as one who is unarmed.
You know, telling which ones are armed and which ones are unarmed can be the tricky part. For example, Daunte Wright apparently did not have a gun in the car in which he attempted to initiate a high speed chase, but the open warrant for his arrest on Aggravated Robbery that the police were attempting to arrest him for was for when he held a gun on a woman and choked her while demanding her rent money.
A commenter points out that there was another warrant out for Wright’s arrest, this one for fleeing the cops and leaving a gun under the seat of a car. From Yahoo News:
Documents for two cases Insider reviewed are publicly available via a records website run by the Minnesota court system.
First case: Wright was accused of carrying a weapon without a permit and fleeing from the police.
Documents in the case are filed under 27-CR-21-4400.
They detail charges that Wright carried a pistol without a permit and ran from the police.
A complaint filed on March 4 said that Wright had had an encounter with the police on June 30 in Minneapolis.
It said officers responded to a call about a man with a gun and found Wright in a car with other people.
The complaint said Wright ran away from the officers, who chased but did not catch him. It said a loaded handgun was found in the car.
Back to Blow:
As for me, I no longer even attempt to manage or direct my rage. … I now focus on my rage.
I’m sure that pain and trauma are present in me, but I’m choosing to subjugate their import. Rage has ascended to my position of primacy. America scoffed and was unmoved when, for years, we spoke out of our pain. So be it. Now, rage is the only language I have left.
Okaaaay …
Should the nation’s largest newspaper really be egging on violence in the nation’s most violent race?
