Hate Crime Reversed by Armstrong Williams

Reginald and Jonathan Carr's final attack began on the evening of Dec 14, when the two brothers burst into a Wichita, Kansas town home and pulled out their guns.

Several days earlier, the Carr brothers had taken a man hostage at gunpoint, robbed him of $800, then and left him stranded on a dirt rode. A few days after that, they discharged a bullet into the skull of 55 year old a female cellist, as she parked her car outside of her home.

Now, the Carr brothers had taken five Wichita residents-three men, two women--hostage. The brothers forced their captives to perform sexual acts for their amusement, before raping the two female hostages.

Later that night, the Carrs drove the five people to an ATM machine, where they withdrew money-less than $1,000 each. The car pulled off onto an abandoned soccer field. The brothers directed their captives to get out of the car and lie in the snow. The victims pleaded for their lives as the brother's shot each of them in the back of the head.

One survived. She appears as the prosecution's sole eyewitness in the court proceedings which began last week.

Like the James Byrd dragging death, in which two white men chained a black man to their truck and dragged him down a dirt road, the Carr brothers acted without provocation. The two black Americans simply picked four white people, then brutally and arbitrarily violated their right to live. Both murders were pointless acts of racial aggression. Both assaults represent a savage disregard for those basic rules that keep us huddled together as a society.

Unlike the Byrd murder however, the Wichita massacre received little national exposure, largely because the victims were white. That means no Jesse Jackson screaming into his megaphone about how the government needs to wipe out racial violence. And no Rev. Al Sharpton fulminating into his power horn about the need for a special category of law dealing with racially motivated crimes. Hardly anyone even raised an eyebrow when Wichita officials declined to try the case as a hate crime.

Had the victims been four black people killed by two white assailants, the hate crime prophets would have come streaming into Kansas, carrying the national media in tow. Yet, when an equally savage and racially motivated crime is perpetrated against white people, the response is muted.

Apparently, the supporters of hate crime legislation are concerned with stemming racially motivated violence against blacks--as opposed to racially motivated violence in general. This inconsistency suggest that hate crime legislation is not about justice. After all, the crime of murder is sufficiently covered by the law. Hate crime legislation is not about redressing inequality, or it would be equally concerned with all racially motivated crimes-as opposed to just white on black crimes. Hate crime is about twisting the law to accommodate the all-encompassing view that blacks are forever victims of whites. It's about how whites can never truly empathize with the first hand effects of racial injustice. It's about the politically correct view that racial injustice is "a black thing."

Tell that to the families of the four people who were left to die on a cold, damp soccer field.

Now there is something we can do to guard against racially motivate crimes. It does not mean applying the law selectively; as is the case with hate crime legislation. It means setting up community organizations to consider the brutality of racially motivated crimes-white on black or otherwise. It also means leaving the law to judge one's crimes-not their motives. In the Wichita massacre, as with the Byrd death, the courts should finish the job, by employing the death penalty. They should do so not because the assailants murdered whites or blacks, but because they killed humans.


Armstrong Williams can be contacted via e-mail at: arightside@aol.com

Armstrong Williams

Wednesday, October 23, 2002