The Other McCain

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Racial Paranoia in Post-Obama America

Posted on | April 13, 2022 | Comments Off on Racial Paranoia in Post-Obama America

As everyone knows by now, Frank R. James is the suspect in Tuesday’s mass shooting in a Brooklyn subway station. Remarkably, even the liberal media are covering this story — Andrea Mitchell led the top of the noon hour on MSNBC with a report on the manhunt for the suspected gunman.

J.J. Sefton at AOSHQ links to a couple of stories that outline the mass shooting suspect’s deranged anti-white belief system:

Heavy[dot]com, a fact-finding website, identified a Facebook page allegedly belonging to the person of interest which contained numerous posts that talked about shooting people and expressed other extreme views, including “black nationalism.”
Andy Ngo, Editor-at-large for The Post Millennial, tweeted out screenshots from the Facebook account that showed posts that promoted the Black Liberation Army, Black Lives Matter, a photo of the man who murdered five police officers in Dallas in 2016, a photo calling to “kill all the whiteys,” posts quoting communist Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, posts expressing support for shooting people, and posts demonizing former President Donald Trump.
YouTube videos allegedly uploaded by the person of interest also showed extreme views, including one where he allegedly called 9/11 “the most beautiful day, probably in the history of this f–king world.”
The person of interest also allegedly ranted in the videos about white people, saying “the vast majority of people, white mother******* are racist.”

More from the New York Post:

The person of interest ranted about race issues and claimed that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was proof that black people were treated with disdain in society.
“These white motherfu–ers, this is what they do,” he said. “Ultimately at the end of the day they kill and commit genocide against each other. What do you think they gonna do to your black ass?”
In his rambling conspiracy theory, James claimed that a race war would follow the ongoing conflict in Europe.
“It’s just a matter of time before these white motherfu–ers decide, ‘Hey listen. Enough is enough. These ni–ers got to go,’” he said.
“And what’re you going to do? You gonna fight. And guess what? You gonna die. Cause unlike President [Zelensky] over in Ukraine, nobody has your back. The whole world is against you. And you’re against your fu–ing self. So why should you be alive again is the fu–ing question. Why should a ni–er be alive on this planet? Besides to pick cotton or chop sugar cane or tobacco.”
The only options James could find, he claimed, was to commit more violence or become a criminal.
“And so the message to me is: I should have gotten a gun, and just started shooting motherfu–ers,” he said.

He was saying all this stuff not while living in 1952 Mississippi, but rather in 2022 Wisconsin, a state that twice voted to elect Barack Obama president. This points to an odd contradiction in the social justice calculus, namely that as there is more progress toward racial equality, dissatisfaction with the status quo actually increases for many people.

Genuinely oppressed people are so busy struggling to survive that they have no time to devote to political activity. Living in abject poverty does not allow the kind of leisure required for contemplating alternatives to the existing social order or organizing reform efforts. Yet as oppressive conditions are ameliorated, and economic opportunity is increased for those previously excluded, the situation changes. New opportunities are meaningful only to those with the ability to take advantage of these opportunities, and not everyone has the aptitude to become an office manager, a college professor, a software engineer, etc.

So while a certain number of black people are now enjoying success — some of them extraordinarily so — those who are less successful are tempted to seek excuses for their lack of achievement. Thus, the election of America’s first black president — which some interpreted as the conclusive proof that America is not a racist country — eventually gave rise to a resurgence of racial paranoia, with many prominent black voices proclaiming that America is an unjust regime of “systemic racism.” Simultaneously, of course, many white people are tempted toward a pessimistic assessment of race relations, as they witness violent anarchy in major cities fomented by Black Lives Matters activists (who cynically swindle millions in the name of “social justice”).

Viewed objectively, most people in America — black, white, whatever — have it pretty good, and ought to be optimistic about the future. But those who are disappointed in their own lives are apt to project their resentments outward, seeking scapegoats to blame for their failures, and so for every white Dylann Roof type out there turning to neo-Nazism as solace for their failures, there is the mirror-reverse case like Frank James, ranting about fantasies of a race war against whitey.

We can see the irrationality of Frank James in his choice of targets. Of all the places in the country where he could have attacked, why Brooklyn? Why the Sunset Park subway station? Sunset Park is 46% Latino, 35% Asian, 15% white. If his goal was to strike a blow against “systemic racism,” Frank James seems to have been way off-target.

Racial paranoia is a motive that straddles the line between mental illness and political terrorism. Frank James doesn’t seem to have been part of any organized movement, but we shouldn’t underestimate disorganized kooks as a terrorist threat, because there’s so many of them nowadays and, as you know, Crazy People Are Dangerous.




 

Category: Crime, New York, Racism, Terrorism

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