By George Curry
-Guest Columnist-

When news broke that a prisoner awaiting trial on rape charges in Atlanta had overpowered a sheriff’s deputy, taken her gun, and entered a courtroom where he fatally shot the judge presiding over his case, the court stenographer and, later, two others, many Black people thought: I hope it’s not a Brother.

 

It’s untenable to accept the flawed notion that the D.C. snipers or Brian Nichols in Atlanta reflect poorly on Black people unless you’re willing to say the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Charles Manson and Timothy McVeigh reflect negatively on all White people.

 

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That was the same reaction when it was learned in 2002 that two suspects–John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo–had been captured after a Washington, D.C.-area killing spree that left 10 people dead and three wounded. And it was the reaction when a convicted man recently shot the husband and mother of a federal judge in Chicago.

This time, rather than just examining what propels certain people to go on violent rages, we should ask ourselves another question: Why do we think it is a collective fault when some confused Black person goes berserk? Why and how does that reflect on all of us?

Telephone lines and the Internet were overheated during the weekend. And everyone was asking the question: Why did it have to be a Brother?

In many ways, it is an unfair question. Why should the Black community feel shame because a person of the same race did something heinous?

At the root of that question is concern over how others, especially Whites, perceive Black people. Historically, there are many reasons for that concern. However, we should be at the point in our growth that we should care more about how we perceive ourselves than how others look at us.

Let’s flip the script. When Ken Chenault became CEO of American Express, I didn’t hear any Whites say, “Those Black people sure know how to run major credit card companies.” Similarly, when Stan O’Neil was elevated to CEO of Merrill Lynch & Co., I didn’t hear Whites saying that if a Black person can run an investment firm, they can do so many other tasks previously denied them.

If Whites don’t look at successful Blacks and generalize from that, then we shouldn’t allow them to look at some of the worst elements in our community and somehow extrapolate that they typify Blacks.

It’s untenable to accept the flawed notion that the D.C. snipers or Brian Nichols in Atlanta reflect poorly on Black people unless you’re willing to say the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Charles Manson and Timothy McVeigh reflect negatively on all White people.

This is a tricky game, a game that we should not play. Yet, we play it.

I participated in the Region 7 conference of the National Association of Black Journalists over the weekend in New Orleans and my colleagues said they are still fielding questions about Jayson Blair, the serial liar who was once at the New York Times. Yet, White journalists aren’t getting questioned about the ethical transgression of Jack Kelley, the USA Today‘s White version of Jayson Blair.

Rather than being even-handed, these idiotic generalizations pop up every time something bad happens, such as the murders in Atlanta. When the acts of Jeffrey Dahmer reflect poorly on all Whites, then and only then should the antics of Brian Nichols in Atlanta reflect negatively on all Black people.

(George Curry is editor-in-chief of the NNPA News Service and BlackPressUSA.com. His weekly radio commentary is syndicated by Capitol Radio News Service. He can be reached through his website, www.georgecurry.com.)