Murder on the Long Island Rail Road

On December 7, 1993, a Jamaican immigrant named Colin Ferguson opened fire in a Long Island Rail Road commuter car, killing six and wounding nineteen. In hand-written notes carried in his pocket, Mr. Ferguson made undeniably clear his motive for murdering a bunch of white strangers: revenge for the racism he saw lurking behind every disappointment in his life.

Without missing a beat, the liberal establishment rushed in for damage control, declaring that the carefully planned massacre was simply the “incomprehensible” and “meaningless” act of a deranged man. “No more sense can be made of such a thing than of a typhoon or cyclone,” wrote Luc Sante in the New York Times. “Forget the gunman’s declared motive of racial hatred [emphasis added]. When someone with a semiautomatic weapon starts perforating citizens en masse, the question of motive evaporates.” Governor Cuomo of New York struck a similar tone of bemused detachment, saying that the massacre was “unfathomable.”

Unfortunately, nothing could be more “fathomable” than Colin Ferguson’s act of hatred. “Deranged” or not, he was only taking to its final conclusion the paranoid message that has become an article of faith for all too many blacks in this country: that all of their problems and failures are caused by white racism. If the incompetent black mayor of New York City is defeated for re-election, he and many other blacks blame white racism; if a black mayor of Washington, D.C. is arrested for cocaine use, it is said to be due to white racism; if blacks die in great numbers from AIDS or drugs or black-on-black violence, it is because of a white conspiracy to commit “black genocide” — a theory that one out of three blacks believes is at least “possible.”

White liberals and mainstream institutions, far from disabusing blacks of this poisonous suspicion of whites, have encouraged it. President Clinton came to New York City during the mayoral election and charged that white voters’ only possible reason for not supporting Mayor David Dinkins was covert racism. Earlier, Clinton had picked Johnetta Coles — the black college president who has publicly endorsed the “whites are committing genocide” theory — as his transition adviser for education. American schools are now dominated by multiculturalism, an ideology based on the premise (in the words of the New York State Education Department) that non-whites “have all been the victims of an intellectual and educational oppression that has characterized the culture and institutions of the United States and the European American world for centuries.”

Hollywood and the news media hawk the image of a pervasive, barely repressed, racism hiding behind the bland, smiling face of white America. Businesses across the country hire “diversity consultants” to indoctrinate their employees on the need to get rid of the “white male” way of doing things. Corporations such as Gillette and Bell South sponsor a conference of Afrocentric high school teachers, where Western civilization is described as “vomit” and the participants recite: “We, the African community, in the hells of North America, do pledge our minds, our selves, and our bodies to further the struggle . . .” Ironically, while white America is routinely condemned for its “institutional racism,” the real institutional racism in this country is the systematic message — put out by the schools, the mass media, and the whole liberal culture — that whites, and the civilization they have created, are essentially evil.

Should it be any surprise, then, that many blacks take this message to heart? White liberals think that constant reminders of the sins of the white man will root out racism. In fact, the endless drumbeat about black victimization only gives blacks reasons to hate whites. It is as if whites, in their guilt-ridden attempt to compensate for past injustices, were doing every thing within their power to encourage blacks to hate whites.

Having given many blacks a motive for hatred, left-liberal ideology then gives them a license to express that hatred. First, blacks are exculpated from their own racism by the bizarre notion that only whites can be racist — because only whites have “power.” Next, society legitimizes behavior by blacks that would never be permitted to whites. When Ivy League schools invite the hate-mongering Louis Farrakhan and his followers (who believe that whites are “devils” created by a mad scientist) to address their students, they send the message that it is socially acceptable to demonize whites.

We have thus arrived at a moral double standard so blatant and systematic that it amounts to a new kind of racial hierarchy. Anything a white says or does that offends militant blacks is seen as a manifestation of deeply embedded white supremacy, to be extirpated by public confession, mandatory “racism-awareness” sessions, and the loss of employment; the white editor of New Jersey’s Burlington County Times prints a routine piece criticizing a black state legislator for “double-dipping,” and he is instantly forced out of his job by the paper’s owner to appease angry blacks.

But no matter what blacks do, whether they steal entire issues of conservative college newspapers, or spew racist mythologies, or record rap songs calling for the murder of white police officers, or even burn down a city, a sizable number of white liberals and blacks will describe their behavior as an “understandable” expression of the pain blacks feel in a racist society. An appeal for “understanding” that consistently goes only one way should be recognized for what it is — an attempt to disarm whites morally while continuing to unleash black aggression.

Thus, while liberals see the massacre on the Long Island Rail Road as a further argument for gun control, they continue to ignore the real gun control problem in this country: that it is the liberals themselves who have helped place the loaded gun of racial hatred and vengeance in the hands of blacks. And when a black fires that gun, the liberals, with a philosophical shrug, call the act “unfathomable.”