The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Black People Say Casey Anthony Trial Proves America Is Racist or Something

Posted on | July 6, 2011 | 39 Comments

Having called her the “O.J. Simpson of baby-killers,” I honestly didn’t even think anyone could actually imagine a racial angle to the bizarre media circus that was the Casey Anthony trial. Evidently I was wrong:

I logged onto Twitter precisely as the verdict in Casey Anthony’s trial was announced. A good portion of the reactions I read in my timeline were ones of shock and anger. . . .
But there was another notable reaction. I read tweet after tweet with the following formulations: Had Casey been a black woman, she would have been convicted. . . .

That’s from Imani Perry at TheGrio.com, which is the “by black people, for black people, about black people” Web site. (Is a cracker like me even allowed to read TheGrio.com?) It’s kinda like those feminist Web sites where women get paid for being women writing about women’s issues for women, except that TheGrio.com is a commercial site owned by a major media conglomerate, NBC/Universal, so they’re really just workin’ for The Man, right? But I digress . . .

Lloyd Marcus asks, “Must everything be about race?” Why, yes — if the folks at TheGrio.com are going to earn their paychecks from NBC/Universal, everything must be about race. 

Race is their raison d’être, their sine qua non. (I thought about saying it’s also their weltenschauung, but I didn’t want to be a show-off.)

Beyond accusations of racial bias in the criminal justice system, there’s the racial theory of why the media went hog-wild for this particular murder case, as Andrew Cohen explains at The Atlantic:

Whether it’s right or its wrong, my theory is simple. Anthony is a white, middle-class woman — she might even have been a soccer mom if things had turned out differently — who had a darling, photogenic little girl. On many levels, her story connected with the vast swath of Americans who are themselves white, middle-class, and child-rearing.

But Cohen also observes that “the Casey Anthony story was made for Nancy Grace and Nancy Grace was made for the Casey Anthony story.” That is to say, Nancy Grace’s show on Headline News has become sort of the arbiter of which murder cases are “hot,” and the Casey Anthony saga had multiple elements that made it perfect for Nancy Grace.

So . . . Nancy Grace is racist? I dunno. Just throwing that out there as a possibility for Imani Perry to explore.

 TheGrio.com
Where Everything Is Racist
(Including the Honkies Who Sign the Paychecks)

Category: Crime, Racism

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