Oppression

This occurred to me this morning, though it really should've occurred to me sooner. In the midst of all this upset over who's to blame, over talk radio, over Mein Kampf, etc. I came across this:

On NPR’s All Things Considered Wednesday, commentator Daisy Hernandez (who’s no relation to POTUS-designated American hero Daniel Hernandez) discussed her immediate fears upon hearing of the shootings in Tucson: she was keenly interested in knowing the shooting suspect’s surname.

For Hernandez, hearing the name Loughner, not “Ramirez, Gonzalez or Garcia” prompted a wave of “Brown relief”–a feeling that the Latino community had been spared a certain media firestorm that would have forced the immigration debate onto the nation’s front burner:





Now this is being touted in the liberal side of the internet media as a sign that Arizona's immigration law is bad. We're being terrible to these people. We're oppressing them. They're afraid. They hear about the gunman and instantly say, "I hope the shooter isn't Hispanic."

This is an understandable fear for any group that deals with any level of persecution. When a white man is murdered in the inner city, there's a population that says, "I hope the shooter wasn't black." When a bomb blows up near a mall, I'm sure there's a population that says, "I hope the perpetrator wasn't Muslim." They worry about the backlash if the perpetrator is found to be one of them.

When I first heard of this shooting, my first thought was not "I hope the perpetrator wasn't TEA Party." My first thought wasn't, "I hope the perpetrator wasn't conservative." My first thought was:

I hope the victim isn't a Democrat.

I knew that if the victim was a Democrat, it wouldn't matter if the perpetrator was from Mars. Groups of people fear criminals among them if they are being oppressed by people who will punish the whole for the actions of one. But what does that say about a group that fears the victim being one of the oppressors, because it will result in them being blamed no matter who the perpetrator was?

It isn't that often that a bully creates enough fear that his victims already knew that they were going to suffer if anything happened to him, regardless of the actual identity of the perpetrator. Shouldn't that be discussed, if we're going to talk about civility and hatred?