Can’t We All Just Get Along?

The Wednesday morning murders of 24-year-old Roanoke TV reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward, 27, were a racist atrocity, a hate crime. Were they not white, they would be alive today.

Their killer, Vester L. Flanagan II, said as much in his farewell screed. He ordered his murder weapon, he said, two days after the slaughter of nine congregants at the African-American AME church in Charleston, South Carolina.

“What sent me over the top was the church shooting,” said Flanagan.

To be sure, racism does not fully explain why Flanagan, fired from that same WDBJ7 station, committed this act of pure evil.

Black and homosexual, he said he was the target of anti-gay slurs from black males and racial insults from white colleagues. He had gotten himself fired from other jobs in broadcasting. He carried a grab bag of grudges and resentments.

Yet, in the last analysis, The Washington Post headline got it right: “Gunman’s letter frames attack as racial revenge.”

Other news organizations downplayed the racial aspect. But had those murdered journalists been young and black, and their killer a 40-something “angry white male,” the racial motivation would have been front and center in their stories.First, violent crime, declining since the early 1990s, is rising again. And violent crime in black communities is many times higher than in the white communities of America.

Collisions between black suspects and criminals and white cops are going to increase, and some of these collisions are going to involve shootings. And such shootings trigger fixed, deep-seated beliefs about cops, criminals and injustice, they also cause an instantaneous taking of sides.

Moreover, this is the sort of “news” that instantly goes viral through the Internet, Facebook and 24-hour cable TV.

Liberals and Democrats take sides with the black community out of solidarity and to solidify their political base, while Republicans stand with the cops, law-and-order conservatives, and the Silent Majority in Middle America.

The race issue has even begun to split the Democrats.

When former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, a card-carrying liberal, attended a conference of Netroots Nation and responded to a chant of “Black Lives Matter!” with the more inclusive, “Black Lives Matter! White Lives Matter! All Lives Matter!” he was virtually booed off the stage.

O’Malley proceeded to apologize for including the white folks.

To many Americans, even many who did not vote for him, the election of Barack Obama seemed to hold out the promise that our racial divide could be healed by a black president.

Even Obama’s supporters must concede it did not happen, though we would, again, argue angrily over why.