Melanin Is Skin Deep, But Racism Goes Down To The Bone

Preview McIlheran has a simple philosophy in life: If it didn't happen to him, it doesn't exist.

This can be seen on subjects like waterboarding, which he claims isn't really torture. In other words, since he's never been waterboarded, he's never felt tortured, so waterboarding isn't torture.

He gives us another fine example regarding racism.

National columnist Leon Pitts, who is African American, wrote an article which was reproduced in Friday's issue of the local newspaper. This article pointed out some of the way that many people will fabricate stories to cover their own misdeeds. These fabricated stories have an overwhelming chance of involving a white person being allegedly attacked by a person of color, and go as far as being heavily laden with typical racial stereotypes.

PaddyMac, who has never been called the "n word," or labeled as nappy-haired, or have been falsely accused of a crime based on his skin color alone, believes that Mr. Pitts is making all of this up:

And, hey, while you’re at it, why did you – yes, you again – deny Pitts a job and then call him a thief? Read to the bottom of his column. That’s what he says you did. And you blew up his school and then called him ignorant. Why did you do that, huh? Why did you kill his father and then complain he was filled with rage?

What, you say you didn’t? You were born after Jim Crow died, after MLK was already regarded a martyr? You grew up thinking black people were just as good as anyone else because “Sesame Street” and every adult you’ve ever known has told you precisely that?

Hmm. Must not have been you Pitts was thinking of. He was addressing his own ginned-up boogeyman, I guess.

Perhaps PaddyMac thinks that these types of things only happen in faraway places and that is why they don't really exist in his mind. Well, let me see if I can jar his selective memory with this name: Jesse Anderson. If that was insufficient, read further:

Anderson was serving a life sentence for killing his wife, Barbara E. Anderson, whom he stabbed 23 times in August 1992. Anderson had blamed two black men for attacking him and his wife (both white) as they left a Milwaukee restaurant, T.G.I. Friday's, at the Northridge mall. Anderson presented police with a Los Angeles Clippers basketball cap he claimed to have knocked off the head of one of the assailants. When details of the crime and the cap were made public, a local teenager told police Anderson had purchased the hat from him a few days earlier. Anderson eventually confessed to the crime.

The incomparable Emily Mills has more on Paddy's perverse view of reality.