By Colin Flaherty
Nobody had to tell Corrina Mehiel about the white privilege that killed her. It was a major focus of her life as a white Social Justice Warrior disguised as an artist.
Earlier this month, that work took her to George Washington University in the nation’s capital. There she was part of a project drawing attention to one feature of white privilege or another.
This time, lead paint in old houses occupied predominantly by black people.
Just a few days after she was photographed with Nancy Pelosi grinning in approval, friends found Mehiel tied up, stabbed, tortured, and ultimately dead at the hands of El Hadji Alpha Madiou Toure, a black man arrested driving her car and using her debit card.
He said he didn’t do it.
Even the newest practitioner of Critical Race Theory learns that the expectation of safety is a white thing: Black people don’t have it. So why should white people think they deserve it?
That is what activists by the score told Tracey Halvorsen, in response to her article titled “Baltimore, You Are Breaking My Heart,” detailing the day to
day black on white harassment, threats, violence and murder in her gentrified Baltimore neighborhood. All detailed in that scintillating best seller Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry.
day black on white harassment, threats, violence and murder in her gentrified Baltimore neighborhood. All detailed in that scintillating best seller Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry.
None of that mattered to Mehiel or the reporters who praised her racial activism even as they ignored the bitter irony of her death.
Mehiel was white and down with the cause, so Mehiel thought the cause was down with her. So did her friends. A fatal mistake:
“Awful,” said Rafer Hoxsworth. “I wonder if the suspect would have spared her had he known how hard she fought for social justice during her life.”
She is hardly the first preacher of the gospel of relentless black victimization to die at the hands of black people whom they sought to protect from relentless white racist violence.
In Oakland, David Ruenzel, a white writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center who was among the first to write about that thing called White Privilege, met a similar fate in an Oakland park -- documented on these pages.
Then there was the Baltimore t-shirt vendor for Black Lives Matter, robbed, beaten, but still alive. And the old white dude who was trying to convince a group of Black Lives Protesters in Berkeley not to loot the Radio Shack. They hit him on the head with a hammer for his trouble. He lived too.
This is a long list.
Most white allies know enough to do their virtue display a safe distance from the black predators they seek to shelter and exonerate.
But not Mehiel.
Her Facebook page and blog are full of anger toward the white racism that she was convinced was causing so much violence towards innocent black people:
“This year has been exciting and terrifying. So many tragedies inflicted on the full spectrum of non-white males in my country.
I have spent many days trying to understand this moment in our history. Feeling so proud of what we have all accomplished.
Sobbing with the country at the death of the young, beautiful people in Orlando. Crying to my father after watching Philando Castile pass in real time in front of the whole world.
His strong and beautiful girlfriend having the strength to show that story to an already grieving country.
And through it all watching the women in my life spend the year in worried apprehension.
Trying to be excited for the future, and all the while listening as others rallied around chants of hate and fear toward people of color, people of other religions, people of the lesser sex, people who don’t check one gender box.
Her Facebook page is bursting with the gospel of black victimization, from the death of Biggie Smalls to the white racism of Donald Trump to the white racism destroying schools in Detroit and everything in between.
Her belief in black victimization came, she said, at an early age when her mother read to her the book that would change her life: It Takes a Village, by Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Hillary’s book may have neglected to mention that black on white murder is wildly out of proportion: And how a black person is 27 times (at least) more likely to murder a white person than vice versa.
In the few days before and after Mehiel’s murder, that trend continued around the country.
Down in Jacksonville, Florida, a white music teacher told a black man that she did not want to hire him to clean her yard. He killed her. For the music teacher and mother of four, it was her second time around the block: 23 years ago, another black intruder broke into the same house and almost killed her.
For the killer, it was his 33rd arrest.
A Jacksonville news station found her testimony at that trial and broadcast it.
In Tulsa, a 19-year-old white girl came home early for lunch and found a black person burglarizing her apartment. He killed her. Cops said the man they arrested for her murder was the chief suspect in two other murders, but they could not prove it.
That is cop talk for ‘this is his third murder, at least.’
In Milwaukee, a group of black people carjacked a white city inspector and killed him. The same mayor who has appointed himself one of the nation’s top preachers of the gospel of black victimization and white racism appeared before the TV cameras to wonder how this could have happened.
Not one reporter suggested the obvious: Violence and murder and denial is part of a pattern in Milwaukee and around the rest of the country. And he is part of the problem.
In Spring Lake, North Carolina, a white mother of two was found murdered outside her home. Her black boyfriend is under arrest.
In Cincinnati, a white man named Jamie Urton was driving through a black neighborhood when a black child darted in front of his car, striking it. The child was shaken, but okay. Urton died after three black people pulled him from the car, beat him, then shot him.
Neighbors say it happens all the time.
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