KSTP’s outrageous Pointergate story has caused quite the stir on the Internet. Daily Kos called it the most racist piece of journalism in 2014. I think it fits right in with the stories that suggest that Black people are going to riot if there isn’t a grand jury indictment of Darren Wilson in the Mike Brown Jr. case.
Somebody said something rather astute about this that bears paraphrasing: “You can’t sustain a belief system without some social sanction to it and without feeding it.” What belief system does this story feed? The idea that Blacks are different in a subhuman kind of way, in an animalistic and criminal kind of way. It reinforces the propaganda that says “They are just not right. They can’t or don’t even do the simple things right. They can’t even express simple gestures of affection.”
And yes, one can’t help but wonder if some folks would still have caught it, if our lighter-skinned Mayor Betsy Hodges had not been targeted as well as the young man. I noticed in the comment section in a Strib article about the foolishness that when someone suggested this may indeed have been overlooked had the White mayor not been victimized as well, someone else accused them of playing the “race card.” Curious notion the race card. Centuries of racist injustice and oppression and detractors — or rather deniers — reduce all that ugliness to some kind of game. Racism is as Americana as Thanksgiving.
The story also reinforces another creed that has taken hold without anyone going on a philosophical or theoretical crusade, and that is “once a criminal always a criminal.” It codifies the idea that in so-called Christian America, Navell Gordon, once marked with the scarlet letter “C,” can’t be redeemed.
I can’t recall the stated reasons why the politicians we love so much passed laws in your state and mine that continually punished folks even after they’ve done their time. But you know why they did it: It was to keep a perpetual underclass, a perpetual class of folks that could always be discriminated against, always held as second class. When the time is convenient, you can scapegoat them and you can even make money off of them when they return to a life of crime, which is ultimately the design of a system that does everything possible to keep ex-offenders from reintegrating into society.
And the KSTP yellow journalism is reinforcing all of those negative messages in simply a much cruder way. And who can blame Jay Kolls and KSTP for sticking to their story. Racism, stereotypes sell. Hell, they have been doing it all along anyway. They got their message out. They put real doubt in some people’s minds.
Those uniformed geniuses that are leading the Minneapolis Police Department, who suggested that merely pointing represents gang signs, were actually doing their job. They are the armed mercenaries, the pit bulls of the power structure who know only one thing — sic them ni***rs.
The mayor has tried to tell them that that is no longer the acceptable way to do their job, but they only know one gear. Criminalizing Negroes is all they know. They don’t understand the new orders calling for a bit more civility as they carry out their orders to lock up as many of us as they can.
So this story is, after all is said and done, this is not really that surprising and is just a more blatant attempt to do what the big business media and other institutions that spew misinformation have attempted to do, and that is keep us divided.
Rather than being outraged, we should work to change a system that finds this kind of thing necessary.
Mel Reeves welcomes reader responses to mellaneous@yahoo.com.
Reach the MSR staff at msrnewsonline@spokesman-recorder.com.