Posted on April 17, 2022

Why the Liberal Media Is Erasing Black Identity Extremism

Angie Speaks, Newsweek, April 14, 2022

The police arrested a suspect in a New York City subway shooting that left 23 people injured, 10 with severe gunshot wounds. The suspect, Frank James, is a 62 year old African American male who posted prolifically on social media and hosted a YouTube channel where he expressed Black Nationalist leanings and racial grievances.

But you wouldn’t know this if you got your news from corporate liberal media. Not only did they fail to cover the trail of hate James left on social media, but many hesitated to refer to him as Black at all, even while an active manhunt was underway for the would-be mass murderer.

And this despite an overall obsession with racial extremism from those same corners. The Biden Administration’s “war on domestic terror” announcement designated White Nationalism as the most ubiquitous threat to U.S. national security last year. Compare that with a headline from The Intercept last year: “The Strange Tale of the FBI‘s Fictional ‘Black Identity Extremism’ Movement,” which made the argument that Black identity extremism like Black nationalism is a racialized myth.

For the liberal establishment, extremism and terror are now a function of your skin color.

It’s no accident that the liberal establishment is willing to racialize extremism when it comes white Americans but downplays the same extremism that motivates acts of terror within minority communities. In the affluent liberal waters that New York Times and NPR consumers swim in, to be white is to be inherently guilty, while to be a person of color is to be innocent by virtue of your victimized status. {snip}

Meanwhile, liberals can only profit off of extremism on the other side, which is why it sensationalizes White Nationalism and erases racial extremism from minority groups. The Manichaeism that is so prevalent within liberal racial discourse has created a homogeneous view that centers minorities as victims and white people, no matter their background, as potential aggressors.

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Take Kristen Clarke, President of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, notoriously claiming that the “Black Identity Extremist” designation should not exist and that it somehow distracts from White Nationalist extremism.

“We’re deeply concerned about the FBI’s ‘Black Identity Extremist’ designation,” Kristen Clarke, president and chief executive of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told the House Judiciary Committee. “This is mere distraction from the very real threat of white supremacy that we face today… It is not real,” Clarke went on. “It hearkens back to the dark days of our federal government abusing its power to go after civil rights activists. There is no such thing as Black Identity Extremism.”

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But Clarke is not alone in erasing Black extremist terrorism and besmirch the legacy of the civil rights movement. Recall an ACLU tweet from 2019 that insisted that “The made-up ‘Black Identity Extremist’ label is the latest example in a history of harassing and discrediting Black activists who dare to use their voices to call out white supremacy.”

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