Diversity vs. Safety (contd.): Innocents Pay Price In Appalachia Killings

If a white law student, after flunking out of school, had shot and killed three black people, you can bet your law books we'd have a national crisis on our hands. Jesse Jackson would pop up to lead whites in repentance and threaten riots if justice were not done, and a small army of FBI agents, government officials, reporters and assorted busybodies would arrive to set us all straight about how "white racism" is still deeply imbedded in American life.

When what really happened at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia, earlier this month was the shooting of three whites by a black, however, there was no national crisis. The Rev. Jackson had more important business elsewhere; no local (let alone national) church leaders showed up to visit the families of the victims and demand justice; no FBI, no government officials, no politicians, and not much press, save the locals who quickly buried the story.

What really happened is that a man named Peter Odighizuwa, a native of Nigeria who had flunked out of Appalachian twice, blew away a white professor at the school, a white student and the white dean who had admitted him to the school a second time after he had flunked out once. There was a flutter of national news about the story before it sank into its grave, but only because the dean happened to be a former official in the Clinton Justice Department, a Harvard Law School graduate and something of a professional do-gooder. Apart from the death of a member of America's ruling class, the story had little interest.

What is really of interest in the story, however, is not just the hypocrisy of the typical reporting on "hate crimes"—that the media obsesses over them when they involve white perpetrators and non-white victims but ignores or denies them if the victim role is reversed. That is certainly present in the law school shootings, but it's not the major feature.

No sooner had the shootings occurred than the local media got hold of a gentleman named Zeke Jackson, head of the school's Black Student Association. "Race was not the cause of Odighizuwa's apparent problems, Jackson said," the Roanoke Times reported, and since blacks themselves didn't want to bring in race, no one else did either. The main interest of the story lies in what it tells us about the white mentality that allowed the murders to occur at all.

The dean who was shot was Anthony Sutin, who, after a prominent career as a Washington lawyer representing mainly liberal Democrats and working in the Justice Department under Janet Reno, took up his position at the Appalachian law school in 1999. He adopted one child from Russia and a second from China, and he accepted the Appalachian position apparently because he wanted to help what liberals like to call the "underprivileged." The law school was founded to help mainly poor white students from the region.

Everyone who knew Peter Odighizuwa knew he didn't belong there. He didn't belong intellectually and he didn't belong mentally. Everyone who knew him knew he was unbalanced. "Everybody knows this guy," said one doctor who helped clean up the slaughter Mr. Odighizuwa left behind him. "He is a walking time bomb." "He just thought everyone was conspiring against him," said a student who knew him.

So why, when he flunked out of the school the first time, did Dean Sutin let him re-enter? He let him re-enter because Dean Sutin, for all his do-good, was a sap, a liberal bubblehead who refuses to believe that a non-white immigrant flunks out of school because he lacks the smarts to get passing grades. Mr. Sutin probably thought Mr. Odighizuwa flunked out because of "institutional racism" or "lacked self-esteem" or "never had the opportunities" that others (whites) had but denied him, a black. Because he insisted on ignoring the obvious truth that Mr. Odighizuwa didn't have the brains to stay in school and didn't belong there, Dean Sutin and two others are dead.

The bloodbath at Appalachian is a microcosm of what's happening all over the United States and all over the Western world. Governed by well-meaning bubbleheads like Anthony Sutin, the white West welcomes losers and misfits like Mr. Odighizuwa into its midst, pretends they've assimilated, boasts about the "diversity" we're creating and ignores any and every indication that they don't belong here and that their presence endangers others.

If it were only the bubbleheads who had to die because of their suicidal fantasies, the problem would self-correct. Unfortunately, they usually manage to escape the consequences of their own behavior, and it's the rest of us who, like Mr. Sutin's dead colleagues, have to pay the final price.

Sam Francis webpage

January 28, 2002