A Racist Dimension

Three men are dead and two wounded, gunned down on a street in the northern part of Tulsa, Oklahoma by two strangers in a pickup truck.

We can only guess the reasons and/or motives for the attack, but one thing stands out: All the victims of this murderous journey are black.

This fact — coupled with the hate-filled rant one of the suspects posted on his Facebook page — leaves little doubt that racism was a factor in the Tulsa shootings; it may even have been the main reason for them.

Because of that racist dimension, this murderous tour through north Tulsa is reminiscent of other deadly shootings last month in other American locations. Sanford, Florida, for example, where a security guard shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin to death as he was making his way home from a trip to a convenience store to buy candy.

Or White Plains, New York, where in the early morning hours last November, a police squad shot 68-year-old retiree Kenneth Chamberlain to death after he mistakenly set off an alarm.

As in the Tulsa case, Trayvon Martin and Kenneth Chamberlain were both African-American. Also as in the Tulsa case, both were unarmed when they were gunned down.

But despite the similarities in these cases, there is also a significant difference: In Tulsa, the police and the judicial system reacted quickly and efficiently and the suspects were arrested.

In contrast, the private security guard in Florida who killed Trayvon Martin is still permitted to carry a weapon, enjoy the comfort of his own living room and send out Internet appeals asking for sympathy and financial support.

In New York, the police officers who were complicit in the shooting of a retiree in his boxer shorts remain on the job. In Tulsa, there have been no protests since the shootings, just sadness over a series of senseless killings — that, and the knowledge that justice is being served.

In comparison, the unbearable nonchalance and complicity shown toward the shooters in Florida and New York — and they are only two of many similar cases — made things far worse.

They give millions of people across a supposedly “post-racial” U.S. the feeling that racial violence in America is measured using two different yardsticks and that other laws apply whenever the violence originates with the police or their private accomplices.