With the daily trickle of news about racist incidents around the country, it was probably just a matter of time, in our gun-soaked country, before something like Monday’s nights shooting in Minneapolis happened. A Black Lives Matter protest was violently interrupted by gunfire last night, with five people hit, though thankfully all survived with non-lethal injuries. Police are looking for three white male suspects and witnesses at the scene say that white supremacist counter protesters were at the protest last night, and that the gunfire came from them after a tense confrontation.
There’s a brutal irony in all this, because these shootings come at the crescendo of months upon months of hysteria about how white people need to live in terror of black people and immigrants trying to kill us. Things kicked off over the summer, when Donald Trump started his presidential campaign on the premise that Mexican immigrants are rapists and criminals and that we need to build a big wall to keep them out.
The trend continued this week. After a CNN video, backed by multiple journalist witnesses, was released showing Trump supporters swarming a BLM protester at a Birmingham rally, the conservative-leaning Politico ran an article about the continuing problem of physical violence and ugliness at Trump rallies, framing it as a “both sides do it” problem, as if supporters of Trump’s overtly racist campaign and anti-racist protesters share the blame equally for what’s going on.
But the photo illustrating the story is an obvious attempt by Politico’s editors to put their thumb on the scale: A picture of a young white woman, enmeshed in a racially diverse crowd of anti-Trump protesters, her face crumpled in tears and her hand clutching a pink polka dotted iPad.