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vendredi, 13 mai 2011

A Clash of Victimologies

A Clash of Victimologies

 

In recent days, a video has been circulating online depicting the savage beating of a customer at a Baltimore McDonald’s by two teenaged African-American females. Richard linked to it in one of his recent posts. Here it is again. The victim of the beating appears to be a Caucasian female. After repeatedly taking some rather brutal blows, the victim is shown apparently going into a seizure. Loose hair that had apparently been torn from her head (or wig) is shown on the floor near the victim. The employees of the McDonald’s in question apparently stood by and did nothing to assist the victim. The only effort at intervention was made by an elderly white female customer. The incident was filmed by a McDonald’s employee by the name of Vernon Hackett whom we are told has subsequently been dismissed from his position.

It has since been revealed that the victim was a 22-year-old transgender woman by the name of Chrissy Lee Polis. (For those unfamiliar with PC terminology, a “transgender woman” is roughly defined as a former “he” turned “she” in terms of self-identification though not necessarily surgical alteration.) It also turns out that Chrissy Lee Polis is an epileptic, which likely explains the onset of a seizure during the attack. The probable motivation for the attack was the two perpetrators having taken offense to the fact that Polis was attempting to use the women’s restroom. For a time, the video was being circulated in some white nationalist circles as a chilling example of a brutal crime being inflicted on a white person by ghetto blacks (which it clearly was). Upon the revelation of the victim’s proclaimed “gender identity,” some in the white nationalist milieu indicated their inclination to withdraw or scale back their sympathy. But clearly this was a horrific and despicable crime, regardless of the racial or sexual identities of either the victim or the perpetrator. Predictably, gay rights and “sexual minority” organizations have demanded that this incident be investigated and prosecuted as a hate crime.

Of course, what is interesting about this case is not merely that a violent crime occurred. Murders, assaults, robberies, and rapes are routine daily occurrences. Nor do the racial or sexual identities of either the victim or the perpetrators make this crime particularly unique. The fact that the crime occurred at a McDonald’s is no big news either. Someone was shot to death at a McDonald’s a few blocks from my residence some years ago. If Chrissy Lee Polis had been just another “normal” white person, this case would be getting scarcely any attention at all. There might be a few posts on various paleoconservative, white nationalist or alternative right websites about the hypocrisy of a mainstream media that turns hate crimes against racial or sexual minorities into front page news and national scandals whose memory lingers for years (the Matthew Shepard case, for instance) but ignores comparable crimes committed by minorities against whites (for example, how many Americans have ever even heard of the Wichita Massacre?). But that would be about it.

If she had not been a sexual minority, the victimization of Chrissy Lee Polis would not likely be receiving the attention of the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, San Francisco Chronicle, and other representatives of leftist opinion. Nor would she be receiving the attention of London’s Daily Mail, the Australian, the India Times, or other outlets of the international press. It is unlikely that she would be getting the recognition of even neocon mouthpieces like Lucianne.Com. Even the “movement conservative” press generally had little to say about the events in Wichita at the time of their occurrence. Nor would her attackers be facing the prospect of having hate crimes charges brought against them. In fact, the crime would likely be just another among countless routine criminal assaults reported to local police departments, though if Chrissy Lee Polis’ attackers had been skinheads or stereotypical “white trash” types rather than equally stereotypical “ghetto” types it is likely her case would be receiving much more attention than it currently is.

What we have here is an example of the “clash of victimologies” that is likely to become more evident as political correctness becomes ever more institutionally entrenched and as the realities of demographic transformation become ever more difficult to ignore. If indeed the two girls who perpetrated this are prosecuted for a hate crime against a transgendered woman, tensions between the organized African-American lobby and the organized “LGBT” lobby are bound to escalate. It is the standard political line of Sharpton-esque race hustlers and demagogues that virtually every black criminal, no matter how obvious the offender’s guilt or how malicious the offender’s actions, is somehow a victim of racism, social injustice, white privilege, this, that, or the other thing. The most obvious and celebrated case of this type was the elevation of O.J. Simpson, a wealthy celebrity with a lengthy history of severe domestic violence who became a cold-blooded double murderer, into an ostensible civil rights martyr, as though he were some poor black kid railroaded for a petty burglary by racist cops and unable to afford a competent defense attorney.

It will be interesting to observe to what degree the self-appointed spokesmen for African-Americans call for solidarity with the two teenaged hooliganettes, make excuses for them, attempt to absolve them of responsibility for their actions, or attribute their legal status to racism. Perhaps they will try to make the issue go away by simply ignoring it. However the high priests of the civil rights industry respond to this situation, this incident is bound to raise doubts in the minds of many “LGBT” people about who their political friends actually are. After all, a transgendered woman who attempted to wander into the women’s restroom in a McDonald’s located in some stuffy white bread suburb might get some funny looks, maybe some teasing. At worst, some shocked little old lady or concerned soccer mom might summon a couple of patrol cops who in their bewilderment would go about their usual routine of asking for ID, running a name check, issuing a warning, and cracking jokes as they drove off in the squad car. No doubt the recipient of such treatment would consider herself harassed and embarrassed, but it hardly compares with being a victim of aggravated assault bordering on attempted murder. No doubt many from the “LGBT” community might begin to recognize that “victim” status does not necessarily translate into “tolerance," and subsequently start to wonder if replacing the traditional European-American majority with Third World immigrants would be in their best interests, given that the majority of immigrants originate from countries where “sexual minorities” are not exactly honored.

This incident has created an interesting dilemma for the Left. Which class of official victim groups are they going to side with on this one? The Battle of McDonald’s provides an illustration of why, I believe, the Left as it is presently constituted will fail in the long run, whatever its present level of institutional influence and however much it may be able to endure for a few more decades. The Left will eventually self-destruct because its core tenets are self-contradictory and cannot be sustained in real world social practice. The Left’s core constituent groups: racial minorities, immigrants, the LGBT community, feminists, “secular humanists,” the black and Hispanic underclass, wealthy Jews, etc. have interests that are ultimately incompatible with one another. As the Left becomes more powerful in the short run, as the realities imposed by mass immigration become more apparent, and the tensions between the official victim groups begin to surface to an ever greater extent, the coalition of the officially oppressed will begin to self-cannibalize. Each interest group within the victimology paradigm will begin to battle each other for the “More Oppressed Than Thou” championship title. This will be the death blow for PC. It’s only a matter of time.

 

 
Keith Preston

Keith Preston

Keith Preston is the chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com and holds graduate degrees in history and sociology. He was awarded the 2008 Chris R. Tame Memorial Prize by the United Kingdom's Libertarian Alliance for his essay, "Free Enterprise: The Antidote to Corporate Plutocracy."