"Ubiquitous" wrote:
>
>From Austin, Texas, comes this horrific story:
>
> Police on Wednesday were pleading for witnesses to help
> them track down members of an angry mob that beat a man
> to death after the car he was riding in apparently struck
> and injured a child.
>
> Investigators were struggling to piece together what happened
> Tuesday when David Rivas Morales died defending the driver
> from members of a crowd leaving a Juneteenth celebration.
> There could have been anywhere from two to 20 attackers,
> Austin Police Commander Harold Piatt said.
>
> The car in which Morales, 40, was a passenger had entered
> an apartment complex's parking lot when it struck a 3- or
> 4-year-old child, Piatt said. The child was taken to a
> hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
>
> The driver got out of the car to check on the child and was
> confronted by several people, Piatt said. When they attacked
> the driver, Morales got out of the car to protect the driver
> and was attacked as well... The driver got away and is
> cooperating with investigators, who are not releasing his
> name.
>
>This happened on the same day that The Wall Street Journal carried an
op-ed
>piece by John Steele Gordon, in which Gordon--writing about the
Scottsboro
>Boys, a group of young black men who were falsely accused of raping a
pair of
>white women--observes that they were in danger of being lynched and that
a
>lynch mob "is almost inconceivable today." We emailed Gordon and asked
for his
>comments on the Austin killing:
>
> I don't think this is the same as a classic lynching.
>
> A lynching is planned, however quickly, with a definite object in
> mind: the meting out of immediate justice by the death of the
> perceived wrongdoer. This was unplanned, a spontaneous response
> to an event that took place before their eyes. The wrongdoer--if
> such he was; it's unclear if he could have avoided the child--was
> not even the one killed.
>
> So I think this differs from a lynching in much the same way
> as the old definitions of first- and second-degree murder differ.
> First-degree murder is planned: the husband decides to kill his
> two-timing wife and does so. Second- degree is unplanned: the
> husband finds his wife in bed with another man and kills her
> there and then in a fit of rage. Both are terrible crimes, of
> course, and severely punished, but the law drew a distinction
> (and, I think, a valid one) between them.
>
> And, of course, lynchings in Jim Crow days had social
> acceptability. People even had their photographs taken
> beside the dangling bodies sometimes and it was by no means
> unknown for the local authorities to make no attempt to prevent
> the outrage. In this case the crowd quickly melted away (I'd be
> happily surprised if anyone is brought to justice in this case)
> and the community, I am sure, is appalled at what happened.
>
>It's also unclear what role race played in the Austin incident. One may
infer
>from the victim's name and the occasion for which the crowd had gathered
>(Juneteenth, short for June 19, is a celebration of the emancipation of
Texas'
>slaves) that he was Hispanic and they are probably black. None of the
news
>re****ts we've seen, however, have spelled this out.
>
>That may be a good decision. There is something to be said for the
>journalistic practice of leaving race out of crime stories in the absence
of a
>compelling reason to include it (such as the physicial description of a
>suspect on the loose, or clear evidence that the crime racially
motivated).
>
>On the other hand, if the mob had been white and the victim black, would
the
>press have shown such restraint?
The PC left kisses up to black racist criminals.
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