Editorial: What Is The Lessor Of Two Crimes?

Beating the shit out of a white kid for no good reason, or hanging nooses in an area where black kids hang out?

Well, according to the thousands of people marching today in Washington DC, it's the latter.

Mostly upset about the "Jena 6", protesters, lead by Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III are calling on the federal government to get tougher on hate crimes. Several incidents involving noose hanging are springing up, but under current federal law, it's a state issue. Unless the build one big enough to span two states, it's out of the Fed's hands. Undaunted, and severely ignorant to the way federal law works, marchers still demanded they crack down.

My beef is not with the Jena 6, or with the people hanging nooses, it's with the "leaders" of the black community that insist on calling racism on anything they can. Obviously hanging nooses is a racist act, but to rally the way they're doing today is stupid. Al Sharpton does more to divide the races and promote racism than any noose can, and spends way too much energy fighting white people on behalf of the black people than actually doing anything to fix the problems in the black community itself. Propagating a culture of blaming your problems on everyone else does not help your people.

And for the noose hangers? They're getting the reaction they wanted. So today is lose-lose.