Leonard Pitts, the Christian/Newsom Killings, and William White

by Lewis Loflin

Self-professed neo-Nazi William A. White was convicted on four counts of threatening other people from Canada to Virginia Beach. He could serve 25 years, but it's likely to be far less. He wasn't convicted of threatening Leonard Pitts, a black syndicated columnist for the Miami Herald.

White is a raving nutcase whose small band of followers will thankfully be out of circulation, but how did Leonard Pitts became involved in this? While Pitts is not as openly vile as White and uses a liberal newspaper as cover, he is still a racist.

The conduct of William White has simply has gone too far for the thought police. White posted Pitts' home address, etc. on the web, called his wife, and dared others to kill Pitts and his family according to reports. This conduct was not only wrong in threatening and terrorizing others, it gives ammunition to left-wing racist groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center. They live for people like William White.

Note that in 2011 White's conviction was over turned. To quote, "Neo-Nazi activist William A. White, who for the past three years has waged a First Amendment battle with the federal government, has won the latest round. A U.S. District Court judge ruled Tuesday that a Chicago jury was wrong when it convicted White in January of using his website to solicit violence. The decision means that White, who has been jailed almost continuously since October 2008, will soon be released...

White posted the juror's name and contact information, but made no direct threats against him. Prosecutors argued, and the jury agreed, that the post amounted to an invitation of harm when taken in context with the campaign of intimidation and thinly veiled threats that White maintained on his now defunct website, overthrow.com.

Yet White for all of his talk White has never committed any physical act of violence. In October 2007 White was attacked in Roanoke by two blacks named Aries Brown and Lattoria Minnis. Both were convicted of assault, but no hate crime charges as usual. They were convicted February 19, 2008, Brown got a 30 day sentence with all but 10 suspended. Minnis, who has been in jail for 45 days was released for time served. But White could get 25 years for "threats" instead.

Mr. Pitts has a column in my local newspaper the Bristol Herald Courier and I intensely disagree with his views. He constantly harps on race and black victim hood as the reason why so many blacks are failures. He then holds up neo-Nazis such as White as representative of conservative whites in general. Pitts become the target of William White when he wrote an article titled The Loonies of Knoxville in relation to the controversy over the Christian/Newsom killings in Knoxville. Leonard Pitts words for people like White, "Cry me a river." To quote some excerpts:

It always amazes me when white people put on the victim hat. As in victim of racial oppression. By any measure - health, education, economics, employment - white Americans enjoy a superior standard of living. If that's racial oppression, sign me up.

But still, one occasionally hears mewling noises from that subset of my white countrymen who feel put upon by big, bad racial minorities. This is one of those times. And Knoxville, Tenn., has become the capital city of that lunatic fringe...

That has changed. A constellation of white supremacists and conservative bloggers has pushed the story into the national limelight as illustration of their argument that news media, constrained by political correctness, refuse to report black on white crime while pulling out all the stops when crime is white on black as in the Duke lacrosse debacle. Me, I would see their Duke case and raise them a Central Park jogger, but what do I know?

...For instance, there's "Off Balance: Youth, Race and Crime in the News," a 2001 report that concluded: Blacks and Latinos are underrepresented in news media as victims of crime and significantly overrepresented as perpetrators, based on crime statistics; newspaper articles about white homicide victims are longer and more frequent than those about black ones; and interracial violent crime is more likely to be reported even though it is just about the rarest kind of violent crime.

As far as health, education, economics, and employment Pitts so derides in white people, they got that way by following the white values of education, hard work, and thrift and not black ghetto values. That's not the only reason Pitts has his head up his rear-end.

The controversy was not the press doesn't report black crime because there is so much it can't be avoided, but the insane feeding-frenzy the press goes into any time they can connect the most trivial or minor incident to white racism. It's a constant gauntlet of "white racism" this and "white racism" that and evil whites ad nauseam. In other words it's an anti-white propaganda blitz from the racist left and a lot of whites have had enough of it.

If "hate crimes" are so damned rare as Pitts claims then why do those reports always seem to make headlines in particular if the crime can be attributed to whites? No doubt race hustlers like Jackson and Sharpton add to this, and the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center creates a lot of overblown propaganda, so what is the deal here? The White case itself got plenty of coverage in Southern Poverty Law Center fund drives and in Roanoke only because it can be tied into white racism in the press.

The term neo-Nazi gets headlines, common black street thugs like Brown and Mannis rarely do. The reporting in the Roanoke Times with blaring headlines (February 20, 2008) like Supremacist acquitted of assault is indicative of press bias and hostility towards anything they can claim white racism on, but almost apologetic or neutral on black criminals. One would never see a headline like "Two blacks convicted of assaulting a white man" which is what really happened here. They dragged every unrelated negative thing on race they could on White into the story, but didn't state the criminal records of Brown or Mannis. Ref. http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/151433

If this case had nothing to do with race, then why did the Roanoke Times drag in the race issue?

Pitts equates (white) conservatives with racists, so where is his criticism of Rev. Wright an anti-Semite and black racist? This is the typical racist double-standard on the Left. In The messenger who killed the message (May 4, 2008) he did address Wright after hearing him speak. A relative told him all about "the wonderfulness of Wright, the innovative ministries he has started, the liberation theology he preaches."

He was critical of Wright mostly because he was an embarrassment to his racist' message, not the racist message itself. He did acknowledge the large amount of irrational paranoia in the black community:

Not to deny Wright's affinity for the racially-charged soundbite. His refusal to disavow the old AIDS-was-created-by-the-government-to- kill-black-people canard was disappointing, to say the least, playing as it does into an unfortunate streak of paranoia and conspiracy theorizing that runs deep in the African-American community.

Similarly, his defense of Louis Farrakhan against charges of anti-Semitism -- that it's unfair to hold the Nation of Islam leader accountable for things he said 20 years ago -- is singularly weak...

More to the point, he did not come across like a reverend. Or even a Christian. The heck of it is, he had insightful things to say about culture, about difference, about reconciliation. But the messenger killed the message...

The fact is Wright is an anti-Semite and racist that Pitts refused to condemn. Even worse is that Wright's "message" Pitts seems to sympathize with is black liberation theology or racial Marxism. Let's look at some more of Pitts' racial victimization views. In Polls reflect U.S. racial divide by Leonard Pitts Jr. - Miami Herald December 3, 2009:

Hence, when you parse the Gallup numbers more closely, you discover a not-so-startling divide. It turns out that among non-white voters (meaning in this case, African-Americans and Hispanics), Obama's approval rating remains stratospheric.

A staggering 91 percent of blacks and a healthy 70 percent of Hispanics approve of the job he's doing. Among non-Hispanic whites, on the other hand, Obama is cratering. Just 39 percent give the president a passing grade.

Richard Prince, a black journalist who writes an online column for journalists, headlined a piece on the poll findings as follows: "White Defections Drag Down Obama Rating." Which is a fair reading, I suppose. But you could just as fairly headline it: "Non-white Support Inflates Obama Rating."

...it assumes added urgency when you consider that this perceptual gap isn't measuring the impact of race on how we view this year's trial of the century, but, rather, an actual president of the United States and, by extension, the state of the Union.

So one wishes, for our own sake, we could learn to see past our well-worn racial narratives. But racial narratives aren't so easily put aside. Not that this is the first time polling has quantified a racial divide. Far from it. This one, however, seems especially stark and consequential.

As usual Pitts blames white racism for Obama's falling numbers, not his racial Marxism, his extremist czars, or his "redistributive change" agenda. Oppose socialized healthcare? Must be racism because the main beneficiaries (by racial/Marxist design) are non-white, while those footing most of the bill are white. Yet to quote the man Mr. Pitts referred to in White Defections Drag Down Obama Rating by Richard Prince Nov. 23, 2009 quote:

According to Election Day exit polls, whites preferred McCain to Obama 55 percent to 43 percent. In exit polls dating to 1972, Democrats have never carried a majority of the white vote.

Because they started running on a the racial Marxist theme, they lost the working-class white vote even when the candidate is white. The fact is the Democratic Party is controlled and funded by a wealthy white leftist' elite that accounts for the solid 20% that still support Obama.

Whatever they call themselves, it still comes down to some form of socialism that has today morphed into racist liberation theology or racial Marxism. And these rich Progressives are immune from the disastrous economic outcomes of their actions.

What have Progressives done for black people? Given them dysfunctional, crime-ridden schools where half the kids drop out? Gave them violent crime-ridden neighborhoods where they refuse to fund the police to get the crime off the streets.

Then join in a partnership with big business and flood the economy with millions of illegal aliens that devastate the low-end job market for poor whites and in particular for poor blacks. Why are those whites that are opposing this economic devastation called racists?

Because that shuts down any rational discussion of the issue. Yet blacks vote 90% for their masters running the welfare and affirmative action plantation year after year.

Go to any meat packing plant in Virginia and North Carolina and one will see few black faces, but plenty of illegal aliens working at half the pay.

White rural America has become as poor as any black inner city, but without the level of crime. This is because whites resist crime directly, blacks wait around for someone else to do it. That's OK because to the political Left Hispanics will be the new welfare plantation class and they won't need blacks in a few years.

Now let's look into Mr. Pitts claims as it relates to Knoxville. He cites Off Balance: Youth, Race and Crime in the News and I a have a copy of the study. It's put out by a left-wing advocacy group called The Building Blocks For YouthInitiative www.buildingblocksforyouth.org and their issue is to quote,

In response to current research on the over representation in almost every state of African-American, Latino, and Native American youth in the juvenile justice system and recent trends in more than 40 states to increase prosecution of youths in adult court - the impact of which falls disproportionately on youth of color - the Building Blocks for Youth initiative's goals are to: 1) Reduce over representation and disparate treatment of youth of color in the justice system; and 2) Promote fair, rational and effective juvenile justice policies.

I would suggest they find a way for non-white criminals to stop committing so much crime to begin with. Watch television programs such as COPS! and indeed 90% of the arrests are black or Hispanic.

Because these programs are filmed in cities such as Nashville and Memphis, that is who commits the street crimes. According to the Virginia State Police for 2008, blacks make up 20 percent of the Virginia population, black males say 10 percent.

In the sections where crime was reported by race (Hispanics are counted as white) black males committed 37.3 percent of the sexual offences. Black males commit 80 percent of the robberies. Blacks commit 53 percent of the assaults and 54 percent of the car thefts.

Black males alone commit 56 percent of the violent crime, with black females 63 percent. Blacks are the primary victims of crime committed by blacks and are rarely victimized by whites.

Kingsport drug bust
The above picture from a local drug bust published in the press shows a
disproportionate number of blacks relative to the population.

In other words because so many minorities end up in news more than whites it must somehow be racism. Yet according to the Bristol Herald Courier when I confronted them on this issue they claim they never report the race of criminals unless it's related to a racial issue. That is in fact true of them and the press in general. Without a picture in the story the race is often unknown, but pictures don't lie.

Cracking down on all crime including the drug users themselves will protect the mostly minority victims, but that will fill jails with a disproportionate number of minorities because they simply commit more of the crime. That will bring screams of racism from wealthy white leftists and black racial Marxists like Pitts.

Changing how the press reports minority crime doesn't change the problem of massive crime rates within minority communities any more than over blowing white racism will. Yes they do underplay the fact minorities are per-capita by far the victims of violent crime, but to do otherwise they will be forced to reveal the color of the perpetrators.

Is there white prejudice? You bet there is. To quote Burt Prelutsky, January 27, 2007 in Black Racism:

There is such a thing as white prejudice. No doubt about it. But it has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with character, culture and values. What blacks refuse to acknowledge is that whites are intolerant of crime and the creeps who commit it, be they black thugs or white trash.

The latter are those lowlifes who form Aryan gangs; tattoo themselves with skulls and swastikas; and produce, distribute and use methamphetamines. I don't know a single white person who isn't ashamed to be of the same race as these vicious cretins...

Actually, what most whites are is cowardly...When we finally stop patronizing loafers, louts and criminals, stop encouraging people who were born 120 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, 20 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, to pretend that their sloth and ignorance are the fault of whites, only then will blacks come one step closer to having that colorblind society they claim they want.

In other words Pitt's racial claims are nonsense. I say yes let's more strongly report minority victims of crime. Let's make sure we mention the race of the perpetrators without attributing it to white racism and demands for more redistribution of wealth.

The problem can't be fixed unless we state the problem as coming from within the minority community itself for whatever reason. We owe it the vast majority of black people that in fact are not criminals.