I want to thank pdxWoman for exposing the falsehoods of Blair, who commented on my recent post on Megan Williams as well as on one of pdxWoman's. pdxWoman was writing about underreporting of the Megan Williams case and of other cases of violence against and abductions of Black women; I was writing about the history white violence against Black women in domestic settings and why whites sometimes go ape shit and show blood lust for Blacks.
To pdxWoman, Blair wrote:
Now that interracial dating and marraige [sic] is not uncommon, more and more spousal abuse cases involve interracial couples. It appears that the Megan Williams case is turning out to be a case of domestic violence rather than a hate crime.
Bobby R. Brewster, one of six arrested in the case, had a relationship with the victin, He was charged in July with domestic battery and assault after a dispute between them. It appears that this is the motivation for the subsequent attack on Williams. All too often, husbands and boyfriends arrested for battering their spouses or girl friends often retaliate with the victims call the police.
Blair wrote a very similar passage on my blog, using many of the same phrases and formulations as above. As supporting evidence, on both pdxWoman and Hungry Blues, Blair made a lengthy, detailed description of Black violence against whites in the murders of Chanon Christian and Chris Newsom. I also heard from Yobachi that Blair made a similar comment on one of his Megan Williams posts.
Problem is that Blair's version of what happened to Christian and Newsom rehearses white supremacist distortions of the case, to suggest it was an example of racially motivated, Black-on-white crime. pdxWoman found an SPLC article that explains:
On the night of Jan. 6, Knoxville, Tenn., couple Christopher Newsom, 23, and Channon Christian, 21, drove to a friend's house to watch a movie after a dinner date. When they reached the friend's apartment complex, they were carjacked at gunpoint by three men and a woman who forced them to drive to an abandoned house where the assailants raped and murdered the young couple. The next day, police discovered Newsom's body shot and burned along city train tracks. Three days after that, officers discovered the body of Christian in an unoccupied house. She had been strangled and crammed into a garbage can.
Knoxville-area television stations and newspapers have covered the story heavily since the bodies were found. On the national media level, The Associated Press and MSNBC reported on the murders shortly after they occurred. But starting in April, a loud and growing throng of white supremacists began protesting what they call a conspiratorial media blackout, owing, they claim, to the fact that Newsom and Christian were white and their alleged killers black....
Attempting to capitalize on the propaganda value of a gruesome crime, white supremacists have flooded the Internet and radio waves with false details concerning the purported sexual mutilation of the victims and held a rally in Knoxville to protest "black crime." Their lies - that the murders were a race-based attack and that the victims were horribly mutilated -are gaining traction. Without acknowledging the source, some mainstream conservative commentators in recent months have been parroting the key white supremacist talking point, characterizing the Christian-Newsom murders as a black-on-white "hate crime."
It's an old pattern with the Klan and these other extremist types. The get themselves and others all into a frenzy with their fantasies about dangerous Blacks, when in fact there are whites really doing the stuff they imagine Blacks might be doing.
Think back to the Klan's 1964 torture and murder of Henry Dee and Charles Moore, two Black teens from Franklin County, MS. James Ford Seale, who in June was convicted for his involvement in the murders, and the other Klansmen involved, tortured Dee and Moore to extract information about supposed Black Muslim gun runners who, some feared, were bringing weapons into Franklin County. Though there were Blacks who defended themselves with guns and other means, Dee and Moore do not seem to have been involved, and there has yet to be any evidence of Blacks moving weapons into the county.
But the right wing rumor mill had been long at work. Since at least 1961 white supremacist government officials from throughout the South and beyond had been spreading rumors of a Black Muslim threat to the Southern way of life.
On June 4, 1961 Garland Lyell, Assistant Attorney General of Mississippi; Gwin Cole, Assistant Director of the Bureau of Identification, Mississippi Highway Patrol; Investigator DB Crockett, Identification Bureau, Mississippi Highway Patrol; and AL Hopkins, Investigator, MS Sovereignty Commission went to Atlanta, GA "for the purposes of attending a confidential meeting of state officials from several southern and western states."
The purpose of this meeting was to establish better communications between the various states and to familiarize those present with past and current activities of Communistic, Socialistic, Subversive and Agitative individuals.
According to AL Hopkins, 11 states were represented at this meeting.
The delegates from Mississippi and the other states were welcomed by Major Harold Burson of the Georgia Dept of Public Safety and Lt. Col. Lowell Conner of the same dept.; Major Delmar Jones, Director of the Georgia Bureau of Identification; Captain BG Ragsdale, Asst. Dir. of GBI; and Special Agent Arthur L. Hutchins, GBI.
Presiding over the meeting was Lt. HA Poole, Security Division, GBI.
Lt. Poole stated that the purpose of the meeting was not to discuss the racial issue alone but to work out the best method of combatting any subversive acts and especially to discuss "The Muslim Cult," "Communism," and the "Freedom Riders."
The documents from the meeting include about a page and a half on the "Muslim Cult" (i.e. Nation of Islam/Elijah Muhammad), with passages such as this one:
This is undoubtedly the most vicious organization in existence today and a real threat to the sovereignty of all states. They advocate violence and it is well known that they will unhesitatingly kill a suspected informant and that a great number of the members of have criminal records.
I can't say whether Blair is like the government propagandists or like the Klansmen whose anxieties they cultivated---whether s/he is playing or being played. But either way, trading in these kinds of racist fantasies is trading in methods of inciting violence against Blacks and others. Blair, consider yourself banned from this site.
For more analysis on how these right wing distortions of Black-on-white violence confuse discussions of hate crimes, see David Neiwert's post, Hate crimes: Muddying the waters.
For all interested parties Blair's IP info; it appears s/he is a Netscape employee:
OrgName: Netscape Communications Corp. OrgID: NSCP Address: 501 E. Middlefield City: Mountain View StateProv: CA PostalCode: 94043 Country: USNetRange: 207.200.64.0 - 207.200.127.255 CIDR: 207.200.64.0/18 NetName: NETSCAPE-CIDR NetHandle: NET-207-200-64-0-1 Parent: NET-207-0-0-0-0 NetType: Direct Allocation NameServer: NS.NETSCAPE.COM NameServer: NS2.NETSCAPE.COM Comment: ADDRESSES WITHIN THIS BLOCK ARE NON-PORTABLE RegDate: 1996-09-06 Updated: 2001-03-28RTechHandle: AOL-NOC-ARIN RTechName: America Online, Inc. RTechPhone: +1-703-265-4670 RTechEmail: domains@aol.net
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