Ethan Liming and Double Standards
So if you're not following the news out of Ohio a group of black people who defended themselves from Ethan Liming were found not guilty of manslaughter charges.
The basic story goes like this: Ethan Liming, a white high school drug dealer, decided that his definition of prank included driving around shooting random people with frozen gel pellets from his van. Likely for a TikTok challenge. Some of those people didn't like being shot at and when confronted, Liming got out of the car and continued to shoot at people.
As it turns out, committing assault and battery on random people unprovoked is not the recipe for a long and healthy life as the people he and his dumb stoner friends were assaulting beat him to death.
And oh when the verdict came down, a lot of my fellow white people started crying on social media. They claimed, "It was just a prank bro!"
Meanwhile, a lot of black people were celebrating. And the white people started whining about that too.
"Would black people feel the same way if the situation were reversed?" they say. The thing is, the situation happens in reverse constantly. And white people defend, excuse, or even celebrate them.
Take for example the shooting of Ralph Yarl. Ralph, a black child who got lost, knocked on a door looking for help and got shot in the head by the person inside unprovoked. And there was so much celebration from the white people who are now wailing and gnashing their teeth that "It's just a prank bro!" didn't justify Ethan Liming assaulting people.
I heard so many white people saying that Yarl's mother should have been more "personally responsible" so he wouldn't have been out there alone getting lost. I heard my fellow white liberals trying to minimize the shooter's culpability by pointing to a media diet that made him more paranoid. And plenty of white people were openly saying "Yeah, I'd shoot anyone who rang my doorbell."
And keep in mind, as a white guy, I only saw a small trickle of this bullshit. Actual black people got the bullshit firehose.
So when white people spent all Spring trying to justify shooting a black kid in the head for knocking on the wrong door, of course black people are going to say, "FAFO" when a white kid gets his ass stomped in for committing assault and battery even if only on a technical level. Because let's face it, if a black kid were driving around a retirement community (which basically describes 90% of American neighborhoods at this point) shooting random people with gel pellets or BB guns, they'd probably get shot by real guns and all the white people clutching their pearls over Ethan Liming would be celebrating in between sanctimonious lectures about "personal responsibility."
So what do we as a society do about this? For starters, parents need to take great pains to define what does and doesn't constitute a prank. Secondly, we need to deal with the fact that a lot of people are actually making their real guns look like toy guns. This may have been part of the reason for the reaction Liming's "prank" got. And perhaps we need to start tightening up what qualifies as self-defense if we're that concerned about future "pranksters" getting their ass kicked under broad self-defense laws. You can't make self-defense laws as broad as humanly possible and then get mad when they're used by people you don't like.
But I think we as white people need to understand that we are the reason minorities don't have any empathy for white people when we do stupid shit and get killed for it. It didn't start with Ethan Liming or Ashli Babbitt.
It started with demanding the school transcripts of black kids who got killed by cops or other white people in an extremely transparent attempt to determine whether or not the kid "deserved" to die.
It started with demanding that minorities of all ages and intellectual capacities live by the strictest code of "personal responsibility" possible while we ourselves shout "Boys will be boys!" When our white kids do stupid if not outright criminal crap.
It started with "I don't mind the government doing things but I'm worried they will apply to someone 'undeserving'" with the clear implication that "undeserving" means "black." Blame who or whatever you want for current racial tensions. But at the end of the day, white people are at the root of racial tensions in America. We have to be the ones who take the first step in fixing it.