The White Hispanic

By Mr. Curmudgeon

“There’s never a cop around when you need one,” goes the old saying. That’s why an armed George Zimmerman was patrolling his neighborhood in Sanford, Florida, on a rainy night last February. In a little more than a year, the gated community where Zimmerman lives experienced eight break-ins. When Zimmerman saw 17-year-old Trayvon Martin walking in his community, he thought the young stranger was planning break-in number 9.

Zimmerman dialed 911 and called for assistance. Sometime between the dispatcher’s assurances that the cops where on their way and when they eventually arrived, Martin lay dead on the ground – a bullet lodged in his chest.

Details of the fatal shooting were sparse, but that didn’t save little Sanford from becoming the latest classroom in American race relations – a “teachable moment” as the race hucksters call it.

But the press ran into problems when it was discovered the shooter, Zimmerman, was Hispanic. That forced the New York Times to concoct a new racial sub-category – “white Hispanic.” No one bothered asking, “Why not Hispanic white?” The Times never explained its racial formula … whether it applied old South African Aparthied classifications to determine degrees of racial purity.

This got Erik Wemple at the Washington Post rummaging through dusty back issues of the Times, and this is what he found: a February story on the federal government’s management of American education. “… Reclassifying large numbers of white Hispanic students as simply Hispanic has the potential to mask the difference between minority and white students’ test scores, grades and graduation rates – the so-called achievement gap, a target of federal reform efforts that has plagued schools for decades,” said the Times.

In other words, America’s much-improved racial attitudes are leading to more interracial marriages that create offspring who blur the ethnic distinctions so crucial to federal bureaucrats, the Rev. Al Sharpton and the New Black Panther Party. Love, it seems, is threatening to upend the comfortable racial stereotypes of the grievance mongers.

Speaking of the New Black Panther Party, the Orlando Sentinel reported that members of the militant organization protested outside the Sanford Police Department last Saturday. Panther leader Mikhail Muhammad announced that his group was offering a $10,000 reward for the “capture” of George Zimmerman and that “if the government won’t do the job, we’ll do it.” Muhammad said the Panthers will initiate a manhunt to capture Zimmerman.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the New Black Panther Party is “a virulently racist and anti-Semitic organization whose leaders have encouraged violence against whites, Jews and law enforcement officers.” Ironically, it further states that “the original Black Panther Party of the 1960s and 1970s – a militant, but non-racist, left-wing organization – have rejected the new Panthers as a ‘black racist hate group’ and contested their hijacking of the Panther name and symbol.”

That begs the question: what separates the good Panthers from the bad Panthers? It’s certainly not skin color. It must have something to do, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, with “… the content of their character.”

And character manifests itself in our world through actions. In matters concerning crime, determining the motives behind actions requires eyewitnesses, physical evidence and a jury to divine the truth before rendering its verdict.

The New York Times, the Rev. Al Sharpton and the New (not to be confused with the old) Black Panther Party believe this system is terribly inconvenient. The problem for these dinosaurs is that America’s ethnic melting pot is making it increasingly difficult to find a racially pure object upon which to focus their red-hot hate.

Enter the freshly minted, right off the showroom floor … white Hispanic.