November 26, 2014
Fabiola Santiago
The Miami Herald
3511 NW 91st street
Miami, FL 33172

RE: Will there ever be an end to troubled days? – Some comments on your column of the woes of Ferguson and how they may come here.

Sra. Santiago,

As a “white non-Hispanic” – to paraphrase the New York Times, still the proud home of Walter Duranty – I have to watch what I say lest the Word Police think ill of me.

Let us stipulate that any man’s death diminishes us. Further, a parent burying a child upsets the harmonic balance of the universe

Let me jump ahead.

“True, during the past 30 years caring people have rolled up
their sleeves and come together to work on race relations…”
Today
You

Exactly what did these “caring people”, sleeved or sleeveless, do? What was the formula that produced whatever racial progress was made here? Is it replicable?

Page 1 of the Herald tells of “unrest in Ferguson”.

Page 3 of the second section reports the arrest of Fredderick Parks for the murder of Khambrell Manning and the attempted murder of Trannard Gray at Carol city High School.

Since this was a Black on Black crime it made nary a ripple on the media’s perpetually roiling sea of race relations in America. [Even mentioning Black on Black crime will raise the dudgeon of the PC adjudicators. vide Mayor Giuliani]

Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager who was shot and killed by a policeman, is going to be dead for a very long time. Dillon Taylor, another unarmed teenager who was shot and killed by policeman, is going to be dead just as long.

Why is there not comparable outrage?

Would I be branded with “R”, the new Scarlet Letter, the one standing for Racist, if I were to point out that Michael Brown was an unarmed Black teenager who was shot and killed by a White policeman while Dillon Taylor was an unarmed White teenager who shot and Killed by a Black policeman.

For reasons incomprehensible to me the New York Times, the Keeper of the Seals of Journalistic Propriety, thought it was fit and proper to publish the home address of the White policeman who shot and killed the unarmed Black teenager. Somehow the term “community activist” belongs in there.

The home address of the Black policeman who shot and killed the unarmed White teenager is unknown and likely to stay that way.

You say that while “we are proud of our own multi-racial, multi-ethnic city, there’s still a black and white divide, a class divide, and a political divide…”

Would convening a cadre of “caring people” close those divides? Although we have a President who said last year “I am not an Emperor”, this year he acted like he was one, and not one of the good ones either, by ignoring the Law and operating under “Caesar dixit” fiat rules.

Why doesn’t the President just issue an edict, via an Executive Order, and outlaw, ban and banish the ‘’black and white divide”? If you can think of one law that would do so how could any man of good will oppose it? Besides, if it didn’t work the Boss could change it.

This I know.

I cannot be made to give something I do not possess.



Kevin Smith