The casual racism of Phil Donahue

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The Casual Racism Of Phil Donahue

By David Horowitz

FrontPageMagazine.com | August 12, 2002

Last Friday, MSNBC TV talk show host Phil Donahue had a guest whose name — if memory serves — was Alonzo Washington and whose cause was the search for missing black children. Donahue described Washington as a local hero. (Imagine Donahue praising a local hero whose cause was lost white children and you'll know what's coming.) The two men sat there and commiserated over the "fact" that if black children are missing, nobody notices and nobody cares. According to the two of them, if Samantha Runnion had been black, you wouldn't be recognizing her name. Alonzo Washington expressed the somber hope that one day America would be a place where both media and citizens would care about a missing child, "even if the child weren't white."

Even on the face of it, this solemn and sanctimonious conversation was idiotic and insulting. After all, one of the most famous serial killer cases involved 27 missing black children in Atlanta, which made national headlines some years ago. Perhaps Donahue and his guest forgot this little episode because the killer (disappointingly) turned out to be black. But one hardly had to go back so far to refute the racial lies told by these two — what shall we call them? — out-of-control "liberals." During the very weeks when Samantha was on the nation's TV screens, there was an abduction in Los Angeles that also moved to the very top of the TV news cycle. This was the abduction of two teenage girls at gunpoint from the car they were sitting in with their boyfriends. It was front page all over the country. Putting the teenagers on the front pages actually saved their lives. A statewide manhunt eventually located the kidnap vehicle and rescued them. The perpetrator was shot and (mercifully) killed. The two teenagers were black and Hispanic. Perhaps Donahue and Washington blanked this one too, because the perpetrator was (disappointingly) brown.

This presumption that America is racist, that whites are bigots and that white America controls the media and uses that control to diminish and oppress minorities in general and black people in particular is a monstrous lie (and anyone who has thought about it for two seconds, knows it). Yet black racists like Mr. Washington and liberal racists like Mr. Donahue are somehow part of the mainstream conversation about race in America today.

In fact liberalism — if you want to call it that — has become a form of political extremism. It is conspiratorial-minded, blind to the obvious and filled with a venomous, unthinking bias against people whose skin colors include whiter shades of pale. Do black males abandon their children and commit five times the violent crime that males from other ethnic groups do? White racism is responsible. Do black mobs tear up a city like Cincinnati because violent criminals are shot by police? Progressives know that the problem is really slavery, segregation and institutional racism, and cheer the rioters on.

The facts of American life roundly refute the prejudices of liberal extremism, but to little effect. America is not racist. If anything, the social establishment and the media exhibit far more concern for the fate of black Americans than they do for any other racial or ethnic group. A three quarters white actress declares herself black to gain status in Hollywood. And everybody knows she’s smart to do it. The predisposition of the media is far more likely to believe the worst about whites and to bend over backwards to legitimize racial paranoia among blacks. How else could an inciter of racial hatred, convicted liar, wannabe drug dealer, paid snitch and shakedown artist like Al Sharpton become a "civil rights leader" and Democratic Party presidential candidate? Does an LA prosecutor indict O.J. Simpson for killing his wife because he beat and threatened her, skipped town and tried to flee the country after the crime was committed and was tied to the victim through blood and DNA samples? He must have been framed by racist whites on the Los Angeles police force. The reader is correct in recalling that the media didn’t draw this conclusion; but, then again, the media treats with respect the Johnnie Cochrans who did.

On January 19th of this year, a white man named Ken Tillery was lynched by four blacks in Jasper Texas — the very same, small Texas town where James Byrd was lynched by whites four years earlier. The Byrd lynching was on the front page of every American newspaper. The president made speeches about him. The nation hated his killers. Ken Tillery disappeared without a trace. You think Phil Donahue will make a show out of that?

-- Anonymous, August 12, 2002


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