Diversity vs. Freedom in Idaho: Paul Craig Roberts Answers An Over-Scrupulous “Very Conservative” Reader

A self-described “very conservative” gentleman, [name withheld by request], takes exception to my column, posted on VDARE, about the white husband in Idaho being arrested for coming to the defense of his wife, who was assaulted by a black man. This gentleman says that his anger at the prosecutor turned into anger at me after checking the links supplied by my column and determining that the woman was not assaulted.

Perhaps he comes from an earlier time when “assault and battery” actually meant that someone had been beaten up. Today, to be guilty of assault requires no physical contact. A verbal threat is assault. Battery is a more serious offense, but even battery doesn’t require what my generation would have considered violence. To be guilty of battery, all you have to do is to push someone, grab their arm while you speak to someone, or make physical contact in any way.

In the technical legal sense, the black man committed battery, not assault. The black man, according to reports , grabbed the woman’s camera and jerked. The camera strap was around her neck and she suffered a burn from the friction of the force.

Her husband committed no hitherto known crime. He made no threat. He simply said, “get that nigger out of here,” or something to that effect.

In my column I used the word “assault” not in the technical legal sense but to indicate that the black man actually committed an act, whereas the white man committed no act. My purpose was not to report on the episode in detail but to point out a dangerous new development in the second-class legal standing of European-Americans. My column gave only one paragraph to the incident and went on to discuss the serious issues of prosecutorial abuse and loss of equal protection.

What disturbs me about this gentleman is that he seems not to see the wider issue: the emergence of second-class legal standing for native-born European-Americans in their own country. This is what everyone should be angry about.

The incident in Idaho was of little consequence in itself. The black man had been a referee in a highly contested football playoff. About half of the stands felt, rightly or wrongly, that this referee had won the game for one team by many dubious penalty calls against the other team. People were hot-tempered because of the calls. They would have felt the same way if the referee had been white or green .

The battered woman was a reporter/photographer. She had the wits to realize that photos of the referee would add to her story. Doing her job angered the referee. He lost his self-control and caused a minor injury to the woman by attempting to jerk her camera out of her hands. Her husband let off his anger at the rough treatment of his wife by calling the referee a name.

The incident was nothing but hot tempers, and should have been left at that. But the white police and white prosecutor saw an opportunity in political correctness to elevate a “hate crime” above battery. In so doing, they created more privilege in law for “preferred minorities.”

Americans have become different people under different laws.

[VDARE note: Paul Craig Roberts is the author, with Lawrence M. Stratton, of The New Color Line: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy. His latest book with Stratton, The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice, was the subject of a FORBES article by VDARE’s Peter Brimelow. Both books relate directly to the Rae case.]

August 28, 2001