THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

The absolute refusal of the government and the media to discuss any hate crimes against whites seems to have been noticed. So the authorities decided to charge a black man who set about murdering whites with "hate" crimes. They decided to charge one black person once with a hate crime, so they would look fair.

This is an old ploy. The American Civil Liberties Union defends the Klan or the Nazis from time to time, while devoting almost all of their resources to the political left.

This is called "tokenism" when whites do it in hiring minorities.

So while the government and the press concentrate entirely on "hate" crimes against favored minorities, they can always use this one case to prove they are fair.

But the timing of this one-time charging of a black with a hate crime could not have been worse. It coincided with a very unexpected development in the latest celebrated case for gun control. A six-year-old boy shot a little girl at school. Like most people, I assumed it was accidental.

It turns out that the little six-year-old black boy hated the little six-year-old white girl.

The boy's home was a crack house, and the gun was not there by chance. Nor was his ability to kill deliberately. This turned out to be another instance of the normal situation: a black-on-white hate crime.

This is NOT the lesson the press wanted.

The whole idea was that this innocent little boy had taken a strange weapon to school and a tragic accident had occurred. Instead, we have another illustration of what the token "hate" charge against the black man was supposed to hide: the fact that almost all real hate crime is black-on-white. Black on white crimes occur hundreds of times daily, and every white person in this country is afraid to venture into black areas precisely because we are all aware of this fact.