Ron Walters --- Eco-terrorism against Blacks goes unnoticed

When one Black man, James Byrd, was crushed to death by White racists in Texas, it caused an uproar; when Amadou Diallo was killed in a hail of gun bullets in New York, it was a national expose; in 1992, when Rodney King was beaten senseless by the LAPD, it caused a massive rebellion. But at 5 a.m. on Dec. 6, fires broke out in the Hunters Brook neighborhood in Charles County, a new housing development in southern Maryland, that gutted 12 homes and damaged 42 in a $10 million holocaust, and there is little reaction and no national outrage. I wonder why a hate crime that involved torching houses, the largest arson case in recent American history, has attracted so little attention? I watched with interest as the media reported the incident, but then dropped it. And I wondered when the major civil rights organizations would investigate an incident where most of those who lived in the new homes were Black. Little action has occurred raising questions about these fires; it has mostly been left to the local media, the local police and the Justice Department. Immediately, the media posited two motives for the fires: one was something that I had never heard of, called eco-terrorism,which was an attempt to align this incident to the current fear that we are still under attack. The second reason was that some disgruntled or deranged person had set them. How could one person have done this? Most importantly, how could people raised in America be so silent about the fact that this incident was squarely in the tradition of American terrorism against Blacks? Of course, no one began such speculation and all of the Black reporters were either asleep or on Christmas vacation. [more]

• FBI Affidavit Suggests Racial Motive in Arson [more]