-By Gary Krasner
Hear me out, before you get outraged. That’s been the problem with this and similar incidents far too often. Everyone’s on a hair trigger to condemn anything that seems “racist”, or anyone who doesn’t agree that something is racist.
Need I mention, as an example, the liberal riot called “Ferguson”? All that death and destruction from a rush to judgment, based on a pack of lies, which the media was eager to believe over more credible witness testimony to the contrary. In fact, it was because there were threats against anyone to might testify to the truth which discouraged them from coming forward to the media much sooner, which could have stemmed the fomentation. The looters in Ferguson painted the words “snitches get stitches” on the convenience store that the “Gentle Giant” had robbed.
So give me the patience that’s required for rational, analytical thought.
OK Gary, didn’t you see the frat boys singing that racist song?! Let’s begin with what I saw. I saw a bunch of kids acting giddy over a song that, by any standard, is considered taboo, because it’s racially insensitive. Racism is the new pedophilia today. Kids know it. Kids like do things that are stupid and outrageous, because they’re stupid and outrageous. Just to trigger that reaction. What they do is intended to shock people, or just to one-up each other in such adolescent exercises.
There’s the “Jackass” movie series, for example, in which kids the same age as these frat boys perform dangerous stunts. Kids, like some adults, also resent restrictions on their freedom. Actions and words are used that would not ordinarily be used, if not for its verboten status. It’s an act of defiance against political correctness and the status quo. Insensitive to other people’s feelings? Yes. Does it prove race hatred? No. So the reaction of the public and the governor was therefore overwrought, such as shutting down the fraternity or expelling members.
Ironically, not even young people who behave outrageously understand why they do it. Twenty year-old Levi Pettit sure doesn’t. He was one of the University of Oklahoma students who appeared in the video singing the racially insensitive song. On March 25th, he gave a press conference, and standing alongside him were Sen. Anastasia Pittman, a black woman, and chair of the Oklahoma Black Caucus, and other black people. Pettit profusely apologized, and said “What you saw in the video is not who I am.”
I’m not certain Pettit even knows who he is. He’s too young. Just as Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were. Before they become full adults, young men tend to act foolishly. But I believe Pettit. Today it’s rare to find young people who truly hate others based on race. The exception today is the young black schooled in victimology by the grievance industry. But despite his lack of self-awareness concerning his actions, Pettit will be apologizing for his actions for a long time, and to perfect strangers. Sadly, it would require long discussions, if anyone’s really interested, with Pettit and his frat buddies to determine if they actually hate black people. But that too is not necessary. And not just because these are just kids we’re talking about, as opposed to highly credentialed, senior Islamic clerics explaining why Jews descended from pigs and monkeys, and deserve death or dhimmi status. No, I’m referring to the right of privacy!
Huh? Yes, this video was not intended for public viewing. Someone secretly videotaped them, or stole the video, showing them horsing around among a limited audience. If you share Jennifer Lawrence’s outrage that her private photos were released to the public, then you should be outraged here too. Really? Yes. What if Lawrence performed an act or uttered something objectionable on her private video? Are you justified in expressing outrage? No! The video was not intended for your eyes! She had the expectation of privacy. You may talk nasty or use language unacceptable to the wider public, but very acceptable to your inner circle or people familiar with you. Should you apologize to the wider public who found your language intolerable? No! Neither should Jennifer Lawrence or Levi Pattit. Mind your fuckin business!
Liberals don’t lack excuses to explain bad behavior by minorities. They come up with what they consider mitigating circumstances. They also have an excuse for racism—-the kind of racism that furnishes black students with preferences not extended to white students. We all know the liberal rationales for racial preferences and quotas, and there’s no need to debunk them here. But if you’re a liberal who condemned those frat boys as racists, where are your rationales to explain and otherwise mitigate their insensitive behavior? Do you think they were born racists? Of do they harbor resentment that black students get preferred treatment on admissions, because they’re black, that are denied white students like them? Liberals don’t indulge in those considerations. Not when it might exculpate or mitigate the behavior of white kids.
Indeed, while the foolish antics of these frat boys left me un-phased, I did get angry that their nonviolent nonsense is inflated by MSM as the nation’s greatest threat to racial and ethnic harmony, yet Jewish students peacefully assembling on campus are getting their brains beaten in by Muslim thugs, and defamed with vile epithets by pro Palestinian activists, and that the latter is never covered by the evening news. Meanwhile, we’re obsessing over foolish frat house excesses.
In fact, liberals never run out of pretexts to justify or mitigate Islamic terrorism and hate crimes occurring on a daily basis world-wide. Obama suggested the Crusades recently. But over the years, Islamists and leftists alike have suggested zionism, Madonna music videos, global warming (Ossama claimed), cartoons portraying the prophet Mohammed, some backwoods preacher who threatened to burn the Quor’an, alleged abuse of the Quor’an by prison guards, forcing Muslims in Abu Ghraib prison to wear panties, alleged abuses at Gitmo, poverty, political oppression (the non-Sharia kind) by arab autocrats, western imperialism, Christianity, Israeli ‘occupation”, zionism, consumerism, sexism, corporations, western decadence, US intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, US troops in Saudi Arabia by invitation, etc.
And that’s just to excuse terrorism. The pretexts to excuse or ignore Sharia law (“Political Islam”) as practiced in most Muslim majority nations (making it the mainstream of Islam) requires liberals to pretend that child marriage, honor killing, stoning, beheading, misogyny laws, female castration, slavery, death penalty for apostasy, dhimmitude (like apartheid) (etc.) doesn’t exist.
The search for rationales under every bush for Muslim behavior is endless. Whereas the atrocities committed by Pettit and his frat members doesn’t merit their attention.
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Disclaimer: I neither know, like or dislike Levi Pettit. His opinions are unimportant to me, as are most kids, including young minimum wage-earning baristas at Starbucks opining on race relations in the U.S.! And for decades, I felt college fraternities should be discontinued. I could write a book listing the reasons.