Ron Walters --- Eco-terrorism against Blacks goes unnoticed
/When one Black man, James Byrd, was
crushed to death by White racists in Texas, it caused an uproar; when
Amadou Diallo was killed in a hail of gun bullets in New York, it was a
national expose; in 1992, when Rodney King was beaten senseless by the
LAPD, it caused a massive rebellion. But at 5 a.m. on Dec. 6, fires
broke out in the Hunters Brook neighborhood in Charles County, a new
housing development in southern Maryland, that gutted 12 homes and
damaged 42 in a $10 million holocaust, and there is little reaction and
no national outrage. I wonder why a hate crime that involved torching
houses, the largest arson case in recent American history, has
attracted so little attention? I watched with interest as the media
reported the incident, but then dropped it. And I wondered when the
major civil rights organizations would investigate an incident where
most of those who lived in the new homes were Black. Little action has
occurred raising questions about these fires; it has mostly been left
to the local media, the local police and the Justice Department.
Immediately, the media posited two motives for the fires: one was
something that I had never heard of, called eco-terrorism,which was
an attempt to align this incident to the current fear that we are still
under attack. The second reason was that some disgruntled or deranged
person had set them. How could one person have done this? Most
importantly, how could people raised in America be so silent about the
fact that this incident was squarely in the tradition of American
terrorism against Blacks? Of course, no one began such speculation and
all of the Black reporters were either asleep or on Christmas vacation.
[more]
- FBI Affidavit Suggests Racial Motive in Arson [more]
