When hate crime is not a black and white issue,Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — What happened to Channon Christian and
Christopher Newsom, a young Knoxville couple out on an ordinary
Saturday night date, was undeniably brutal. The pair were
carjacked, kidnapped, raped and finally murdered during an
ordeal of unimaginable terror last January.

But whether the attack was a racial hate crime worthy of
national media attention is another question, one that has now
ignited a fierce dispute over the definition of hate crimes and
how the mainstream media choose to cover interracial attacks.

That’s because the murders of Christian and Newsom didn’t fit
the familiar contours of a traditional Old South attack, in
which whites target blacks and reporters quickly assume the
motivation must have been racial.

Instead, the races were reversed: Christian and Newsom were
white; the three men and one woman charged with their murders
are black. And the consequent failure of the story to gain much
media attention outside of the Knoxville area has galvanized
conservative commentators across the country, who insist the
case offers clear evidence of liberal bias in the major media.

They have launched a broad Internet campaign, waged via blogs, e-
mails and YouTube videos, to counter what they regard as
suppression of a story about an anti-white hate crime.

“There is a discomfort level [in the national media] with
stories that have black assailants and white victims,” said
Michelle Malkin, a prominent conservative newspaper columnist
and TV commentator who has featured the Knoxville case on her
Web site. “If it doesn’t fit some sort of predetermined
narrative of how we view taboo subjects like race and crime,
there’s a disinclination to cover it.”

Country-music star Charlie Daniels, who lives 150 miles from
Knoxville, contrasted scant coverage of the Christian-Newsom
murders with the national media frenzy that erupted last year
when a black woman accused three white members of the Duke
University lacrosse team of raping her at a party. The white
players were cleared in April after the accuser changed her
story several times and no evidence corroborated a crime.

“If this [Knoxville case] had been white on black crime, Al
Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and their ilk would have descended on
Knoxville like a swarm of angry bees,” Daniels wrote on his Web
site.

Neo-Nazis and other white supremacists have jumped on the case
as well, drawn to the state where the Ku Klux Klan was founded
in 1865. Hate groups have organized rallies in Knoxville and set
up Web sites under the victims’ names to spew racial invective.


But it’s not just conservative whites and extremists who have
criticized the national silence over the Knoxville case.

“Black leaders are not eager to take this on because it’s one
more thing that would cast a negative light on African
Americans,” said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, an author and nationally
syndicated black columnist who has written frequently about the
reluctance of black leaders to denounce crimes committed by
blacks against whites. “There’s already an ancient stereotype
that blacks are more violent and crime-prone anyway.”

The Rev. Ezra Maize, president of the Knoxville chapter of the
NAACP, has been one of the few black leaders to address the case.

“It doesn’t make me uncomfortable speaking out against this
crime because it was African Americans [allegedly] committing a
crime against Caucasians,” Maize said. “It’s not a black and
white issue. It’s a right and wrong issue. Those who committed
this crime were unjust in doing so and they should pay the
penalty.”

The murders of Newsom and Christian have proved so resonant
because they play into some of the deepest fears of urban crime
harbored by many Americans. By all the accounts of authorities,
the couple — Newsom, 23, was a talented carpenter and former
high-school baseball star; Christian, 21, was a senior at the
University of Tennessee — fell victim to a random carjacking
last Jan. 6 in the parking lot of an apartment complex where
they had gone to visit friends.

Authorities say the couple’s assailants, some of them ex-
convicts, forced their victims to drive at gunpoint to a
clapboard house in one of Knoxville’s roughest neighborhoods,
where both victims were first raped and then killed. Newsom’s
body, shot and burned, was found dumped beside nearby railroad
tracks, while Christian, who was strangled, was found bundled in
plastic garbage bags inside the house.


State prosecutors have lodged murder, rape and other charges
against brothers Lemaricus Davidson, 25, and Letalvis Cobbins,
24; Cobbins’ girlfriend, Vanessa Coleman, 18; and George Thomas,
24. Their trials are set for next year, and officials have not
yet said whether they will seek the death penalty. A fifth
suspect was charged in federal court as an accessory.

Yet as brutal as the crime was, Knoxville authorities have
strongly denied that it was racially motivated. And they have
sought to correct rumors, eagerly spread by white supremacist
Web sites, that the couple had been sexually mutilated before
they were killed and their bodies dismembered afterward.

“There is absolutely no proof of a hate crime,” said John Gill,
special counsel to Knox County District Attorney Randy Nichols.
“It was a terrible crime, a horrendous crime, but race was not a
motive. We know from our investigation that the people charged
in this case were friends with white people, socialized with
white people, dated white people. So not only is there no
evidence of any racial animus, there’s evidence to the contrary.”

Official hate crime or not, most conservative critics say the
Knoxville case illustrates what they call the general reluctance
of the mainstream media to report black-on-white crimes. As
examples, many cite a 1999 incident in North Charleston, S.C.,
in which seven black youths attacked two white bicyclists riding
through their neighborhood, leaving one permanently disabled; a
2000 mass-murder case in Wichita, Kan., in which two black
brothers kidnapped and killed four white victims; and an attack
last year in Long Beach, Calif., in which 11 black teenagers
attacked and severely beat three young white women.

Only the Long Beach case was charged by local authorities as a
hate crime, and none of the stories drew sustained national
attention.

“You’ve seen a lot of people with impeccable credentials making
the point that the press does play up white-on-black crime and
play down black-on-white crime,” said Glenn Reynolds, a
University of Tennessee law professor who publishes political
and media commentaries on his widely read Instapundit blog. “I
think it’s a fair criticism. And it just empowers the crazies
when the mainstream media soft-pedals this stuff.”


In reality, statistics from the FBI and the Justice Department
offer a decidedly mixed picture of crime and race in America.

On the one hand, African Americans bear the brunt of violent
crime in the U.S.: In 2005, the most recent year for which
statistics are available, blacks were more than twice as likely
as whites to fall victim to serious violent crime, most often at
the hands of other blacks.

Blacks are also the overwhelming majority of victims of attacks
officially recorded by the FBI as hate crimes. In 2005, blacks
were the victims in 68 percent of nearly 5,000 hate-crime
incidents nationwide, while whites were the victims in 20
percent of the cases. Whites accounted for 60 percent of known
hate-crime offenders, while blacks accounted for 20 percent.

But on the other hand, when overall cross-racial violent crimes
are tabulated — including incidents not formally classified as
racially motivated hate crimes — Justice Department statistics
show that blacks attack whites far more often than whites attack
blacks.

In 2005, there were more than 645,000 victims of cross-racial
violent crimes between blacks and whites in the U.S. In 90
percent of those crimes, black offenders attacked white victims.

“In the old days,” said Hutchinson, contemplating that
statistic, “when you said ‘hate crimes,’ it was automatic —
whites victimizing blacks. Today you have to pause for a minute
and not make automatic assumptions.”

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-...-crime-is-not-
a-black-and-white-issue/
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