By Howard Portnoy
The frankly ridiculous story in LU’s Web Crawler of a Black Lives Matter protest march that was aborted when protesters learned that the police shooting victim was not black provides an abrupt reminder that former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s future will be determined in part by a fallacy.
That fallacy — that all or most police are racist against blacks, including police who are themselves black — has come to be accepted as gospel by the Left. Chauvin, who faces charges of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter — was never charged with a hate crime. The race of the victim was never alluded to once in the prosecution’s closing argument or the defense’s closing argument, nor was the race of the suspect. About the closest the media have come to openly calling Chauvin a racist is an interview the Los Angeles Times conducted last year with a woman pulled over by Chauvin in a 2007 traffic stop who said, “I’m not a black person, but on a very minuscule level, I get that you can’t trust police.”
Yet, there was been an intense undercurrent of race throughout the trial.