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| When I thought Things were Getting Better |
I know you will be surprised that I am calling out the media to this extent; after all, haven't I spent almost two decades on television doing crime commentary? And don't I still do media interviews and have friends in the media? Yes, all true, but I have also been willing to admit where we in the media are doing the wrong thing like when I took my stance against doing any interviews in which the name and face of a mass murderer was used in a breaking news story as it is my belief that media attention encourages this particular type of crime.
And now I see another pattern in the media; the fomenting of hate and racism and demonization of the president of our country, running with a story that stirs up outrage from the public by carefully selecting facts to support an agenda that they believe will excite the viewers and readers. And when it comes to political issues, since the media is heavily left-leaning, they have allowed their subjective viewpoint to color their stories, encouraged them to cherry pick the facts and misrepresent what actually happened. Many in the media do not even recognize what they are doing (some do and do so on purpose and with a vengeance) but others are caught up in the frenzy that is the life of 24/7 cable television and the 24/7 internet response. Some are just incompetent and are poor journalists following the dictates of the media higher-ups and their audience.
What has been lost is accurate, measured reporting. The media is no longer a watchdog; it is a rabid pitbull.
No sadder proof than this is to see the decline of race relations in America since the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 in Sanford, Florida.
Let me backtrack to 1979. This was the year I married Uzzeal Brown, an immigrant from Jamaica; a legal immigrant from Jamaica whose family had worked hard to bring each family member over through the long and arduous process required by US law. Uzzeal and I lived in Maryland for a year after our marriage, then moved to California for a while, and when we returned to Maryland, we brought our one-year-old baby daughter with us. We moved into a house in Berwyn Heights, Maryland, a house I fell in love with because it was a 250-year-old historic colonial. I forgot to check out the demographics of the neighborhood, but it looked nice driving through and was just one mile from the University of Maryland.
Just after we moved in, we went to Berwyn Heights Day to socialize with our new neighbors. They were all white, ALL white, white with pickup trucks, white blue collar, white guys who liked country and rock music, white guys with white wives and white children. All except my husband and one other divorced black woman who lived with her two black children near the town office. The whole town council was white. The police force was white. The fire department was white. The whole town of over 2000 people was white....except now for four blacks and one biracial baby. Our move to Berwyn Heights almost doubled the black population.
My husband rather broke into a sweat. "I hope we don't find a cross burning on our lawn," he muttered. We had already been through the interracial dating thing which was not that common back in the late 70s but we were fortunate not to have suffered too much from it. Both our families came to the wedding and were nice to each other. My parents liked him; his parents liked me. All was pretty good. Race relations were improving in America since the time I was little.
No one burned a cross on our lawn. In fact, my husband was a pretty popular guy in town and everyone liked our kids. He became the coach for the town soccer team. In fact, he ran for mayor in the town. He didn't win but it wasn't because he was black. He just lost because the other candidate was more seasoned in politics and town management. In fact, that other black adult in town, the divorced woman, DID became mayor and remained mayor for a long time.
My children grew up without encountering much racism or racial problems. All three of my children, two biracial children that I birthed and one black son whom we adopted when he was age six, grew up with many white friends from the neighborhood, sports, and homeschooling. Of course, they had friends who were also black, biracial, Hispanic, Asian and multiracial. And during those years, I saw races mixing more and more, sharing each other's music and speech and traditions (now known as cultural appropriation) and I was very happy to see the direction the country was going. For a parent of nonwhite children, this was very important to me. I wanted to see my children live happy lives in a less racially divided country.
Then Trayvon Martin happened and the Black Lives Matter movement and now Charlottesville and I wonder if we aren't heading into a disasterous future and a civil war that is dividing our country person by person, if not state by state.
I remember, as a profiler, that my commentary on the Trayvon Martin case provoked anger. Black Lives Matter had been born and the media pushed the incident as a hate crime. White racist kills innocent black child. Then President Obama didn't help matters when he encouraged the racism dialogue with "Trayvon could have been my son." Well, Mr. Obama, since you are biracial, if you had married a white woman, George Zimmerman could have been your son as well. For that matter, if you and Michelle had been open to it, either Zimmerman or Martin could have been your son if you had adopted a child.
George Zimmerman was a psychopathic wannabe cop who escalated a situation he should have let the police handle when he thought a possibly criminal teen in the neighborhood was about to commit a crime. He shouldn't have confronted Trayvon. Trayvon shouldn't have assaulted Zimmerman. Trayvon thought he would be in a fistfight; he didn't know Zimmerman had brought a gun along. Zimmerman fought back with the stronger weapon. Zimmerman won the fight. The whole thing was bad, but the jury, rightly so, saw this as a self-defense issue regardless of what kind of character Zimmerman was or what kind of character Trayvon was. I, personally, do not find either of them people I would have invited to my house. But this doesn't make it a hate crime. What made it a hate crime was a special interest group and the media.
Fast forward to 2014 and Michael Brown and Ferguson. Violent thug attacks police officer who defends himself and Black Lives Matter and the media make it about race yet again, claim it is another hate crime; white police officers hate blacks and use the badge to murder them. Then, drug dealer and repeat offender Freddie Gray dies seemingly accidentally in a police van in Baltimore in 2015 and six police officers are claimed to be criminally responsible. Didn't matter now that three of the six cops where actually black, it was STILL a hate crime shouted Black Lives Matter and the media.
Then we had the 2016 elections and because Donald Trump won the presidency, suddenly everyone who voted for him is labeled a white male homophobic racist even if they are black, female, and gay...oh, yeah, and all folks who voted for Trump are also Russian loving, Nazi loving, fascists. This is what the media keeps pushing. The media, on a daily basis, on an hourly bases, on a minute-to-minute basis, is on a massive hate campaign to destroy the Trump presidency and to push a specific agenda - not to report facts and remain the rational voice of journalism. They have created a maelstrom of hate against the duly elected President of our country and against everyone who voted for him or doesn't speak out against him. Whether one likes President Trump or not, whether one liked Barack Obama or not, the answer is to work on changing the situation legally and honestly, not to instigate hate campaigns across the country; we are starting to look like India at the time of partition when politicians and self-interest groups turned Muslims against Hindus and Hindus against Muslims until they murdered each other on the streets and turned trains into moving cars of corpses.
Now, we have Charlottesville. I can just see this new Broadway show with that name...mark my words. Here is what should have happened. A bunch of weird looking, mostly white dudes circle around the park with some tiki torches and shields from Monty Python. No one is bussed into Charlottesville to protest against these guys. These alt-right folk had a permit and some possibly legitimate points and although some of them are scumbags, Nazi sympathizers, and very right white supremacists, their small number is hardly something to be terrified of as a huge threat to our country. And, some of them, gasp, are not any of them; they are just people with a different point of view from the MSM.
Yes, local folks could have had Happy Hour "
Roll Your Eyes" events at local bars. They could have had a special discussion session at the library and invited the press to hear the varying viewpoints on confederate statues. If they wanted to counterprotest, they could have come nicely dressed and sat quietly on the ground with politely-worded signs. We could have had a good intercourse over free speech, how we want to represent history in the present, how far we have come since the Civil War...and the media could have reported how America responded well to a particular point of view that was expressed by a small group of people that day in Charlottesville.
But, no. Many of the counterprotesters came dressed as clownishly as the protesters, wearing masks, carrying bats and other weapons of war, and they weren't peaceful; they were violent and obnoxious. Some of the original protesters also became violent and one total psychopath gunned his car down the street and someone died. And I am with the president who I believe correctly originally stated that there was bad behavior on all sides and we need to all handle ourselves better, that no hate group is acceptable. He was right. He didn't single out a specific condemnation of white supremacists or nazis because in doing so, he would have to condemn Black Lives Matter and Antifa and he would have been annihilated by the media for doing that. Didn't matter though; they went ballistic on him anyway. Then, when he made a new statement in which he did try to "follow the rules" and speak out against white hate groups, it was now "too late." Then, when he reiterated that both sides did contribute to the melee, he was excoriated again. The media, who claims to be against hate, hates on and on and on and on.
I am saddened and exhausted. After living many years in the very white Berwyn Heights, I now live in the heavily black Bowie, Maryland, one of the largest and richest black communities in the US. I love it here and yet I wonder if our disintegrating race relations will change that. Where I used to worry about whites being racist against blacks, my worry has now turned around to a fear of blacks being racist against whites Even sadder, I now have to worry about whites become more racist against blacks because blacks are getting more racist against whites. And, sadder still, I have to worry about whites being racist against whites because they don't belong to the same political party or support certain hashtags or because they might not want to agree to change the name of my town of Bowie because it is named after a slave owner or that they don't agree to change the name of the capital because Washington was also a slave owner. And I even have to worry about blacks getting more racist against blacks who don't support certain ideologies because, heaven forbid, they actually voted for Trump or are police officers or are married to one of those white "racists."
Oh, and worst of all, now, not only do I have to worry about my not-white children, but I have to worry about my not-black enough 3/4 white granddaughter as well. When will it end?
We are tearing our country apart with stupidity, stupidity born of hatred for anyone who doesn't agree with us 100%. We are no longer able to even have a fruitful conversation where we bring our experiences, feelings, and ideas to the table to discuss and come up with answers and compromises. For example, I happen to think Milo Yiannopuloulos is a hoot and loved a lot of what he had to say in his book
Dangerous (I disagreed with some things, but, guess what? I didn't feel the need to call him names and prevent him from speaking in public venues) and when I had lunch with my son in a popular restaurant and went to give the book to my son to read, I had to hand it over to him in a paper bag because that's how scary this country has become. If I had brought him a copy of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's
Americanah, which, but the way, I loved, I would have had a bunch of people give me the thumbs up sign and I would have been thought to be the "right kind of person" to be acceptable in this world. If they saw me or my son reading
Dangerous, we would be labeled deplorable. What happened to a country which allows for people to have shades of gray with political thinking? All that is gone. You are either one side or the other. What happens to us folks who refuse to pick sides? What happens to folks who understand a variety of cultures and political viewpoints and don't think it is our job to bow down to any of them? What happens to relatively conservative people who support racial integration, gay marriage, and legal immigration? What happens to liberal folks who support the right to enjoy the company of one's own culture (even if it is white) or to enjoy another's culture that one was not born into, free speech even if it is the alt-right, police who are doing their jobs to protect our communities, and a concern over unregulated immigration from countries who do not wish to accept the so-called Western Culture after they become residents of America? What has happened to the rational middle ground?
The media is largely responsible for this horrible state of affairs because they have become hitmen for a rising dangerous mob. I can't even read the news stories today or watch television news channels without being horrified by the hate. And, yet, if you actually ignored the agenda of the media and focused on the true issues and not what all these hate groups are saying - left, right, and the media - the country is doing reasonably well under Trump and there is no big crisis. In other words, if people retained a sense of logic and reason, the citizens could see that our years under the Trump administration might end up being good ones for our country or at least not as bad as the media would have us believe. And if they think that the country would be better served by someone else in the future, they could work on finding an excellent candidate for the next presidential election and work to get that person voted in.
If we believe in our constitution (even if a bunch of imperfect white men created it) and we believe in free speech (even for Milo and Al Sharpton and everyone in our country - for if we kill free speech for one, we kill free speech for all), then, for God's sake and for our own sake, we need to stop the nonsense and start acting like people who have evolved past caveman status.
But with the media acting as the most dangerous hate group in America, we may not have a chance.
Criminal Profiler Pat Brown
August 18, 2017
