H8ers Gotta H8

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First, the backstory:

The Houston father who police say fatally shot a 17-year-old boy who was inside his daughter’s bedroom early Thursday morning will likely not be charged, an area prosecutor told MyFoxHouston.com.

Although a grand jury will review the case, prosecutor Warren Diepraam said it is unlikely that the father will be charged.

“What was going on in the person’s mind at the time of the shooting, [not] what they found out after the fact” is key, Diepraam said. “They’re looking at what he was thinking when he made the decision to shoot.”

The investigation into the shooting is ongoing, and a grand jury will ultimately decide if charges are appropriate. But so far it appears the father, who was only identified as a 55-year-old in reports, was awaken by one of his other children at about 2:20 a.m. He was told someone was in his 16-year-old daughter’s bedroom and he grabbed his gun.

He reportedly found the teen in bed with his daughter and confronted him. His daughter apparently told him she did not know the boy.

The father said he told the teen not to move, but reportedly saw the teen reach for something, at which point police say the father opened fire. The teen did not have a gun. His daughter later confessed that she snuck her boyfriend, 17, into the house, the report said.

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I want you all to pause for a moment and think about that story. I don’t know about you but I think it was a tragic accident, but without some other evidence of wrongful intent I see no reason to charge the father with anything.

Have the rest of you formed an initial reaction to the story? Good, now check out the sick spin put on it:

I first saw this story at Fox Nation yesterday. It was on the front page at a time when not much was being reported about the shooter, his daughter, and the dead teenager. Now we know that all three are black. The story’s no longer on the Fox Nation front page.

Still, for a while, it clearly embodied the right-wing perspective on the proper conduct of society — if you find a boy in bed with your daughter, of course you should be able to take your gun and kill him.

The race of the people involved makes the story, for the Fox audience, a lot less relatable — but I’m not surprised that the authorities are going to let the shooter walk in this case, even if he is black.

The salient point here is that the shooter still outranks the victim — he’s a black man, but his victim is a black teenage boy, which makes him the lowest form of life as far as most of America is concerned. We know that George Zimmerman walked because, as an adult male Hispanic with fairly light skin and a European surname (and an avid interest in “law and order”), he vastly outranked the black teenage boy he shot. By contrast, we know that it’s considered justice to sentence Marissa Alexander to twenty years, and perhaps resentence her to sixty years, because she’s a black female, and the abusive husband at whom she fired a warning shot is a black male — yes, black men are very low in the hierarchy, but they still outrank black women, because males outrank females when we’re talking about sex and violence.

The principle that murder is justified if a father finds his daughter in bed with her boyfriend would not, obviously, have been extended in the Houston case if the boyfriend were white. But since that wasn’t the case, the principle still applies. These are just simple, commonsense values we’re talking about, right? Even if an unarmed boy who was just doing what teenagers do is now dead?

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So Fox runs the story on Friday, but by Saturday it had fallen off their front page as new stories were published, and that’s evidence of racism? I’ll skip over the gratuitous cheap shots at right-wing morality and George Zimmerman and focus on the real issue:

What the fuck does race have to do with this story?

Seriously, what kind of sick, perverted mind finds a racial grievance angle in a tragedy like this one?

Would racial justice be done if the father was charged with murder?

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

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“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. – Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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