Posted by Dan Ewert : 12/04/2003 09:25:00 PM (Archive Link)
A few days ago in Cincinnati, a 350 pound black man who had various weight-related ailments and who was high on cocaine and PCP at the time died after a brief but violent struggle with police. During the altercation, Nathaniel Jones attempted to grab the nightsticks and pistols of the six officers (five of whom were white, one black) wrestling with him. After pummeling the drug-strength-enhanced Jones (who, keep in mind, possessed one third the weight of the other six men combined) with their nightsticks, the police were finally able to subdue him. The combination of his enlarged heart, the drugs, and the exertion, however, soon caused cardiac failure and he died. This is all on videotape.

Predictably, the civil rights community is all a twitter about how an African-American died in police custody and how the police attacked him with nightsticks, etc., etc. Here are the facts: Jones was severely obese and weighed almost as much as two normal men combined; his weight problems led to health issues such as his enlarged heart; he was high on illegal narcotics at the time, one of which was PCP which gives the user unusual strength—my wife once witnessed an incident where a scrawny 150 lbs PCP using perp had to be wrestled to the ground by seven officers; he attacked the first two officers at the scene and the next four that arrived and attempted to grab the officers’ weapons; the officers acted in self-defense and the coroner’s report specifically indicated that no blows landed around Jones’s head and no force was transferred to his internal organs; he died because the exertion exacerbated his health problems.

Now this man is not Martin Luther King, he is not Medgar Evers, he is not Emmett Till. However, you certainly wouldn’t know it by listening to some folks. There was a community meeting about it, the family is demanding an independent investigation, community leaders are calling for the Cincinnati police chief to resign, the FBI and Justice Department are looking into it, and you can be sure that it’s only a matter of time before Jesse Jackson and/or Al Sharpton make their obligatory photo op appearance. This is a running irritation. The civil rights community has a very bad habit of choosing very bad people as their poster boys of racial injustice. Instead of maybe using a worthwhile case, if there is one, they pick up on a drug-addled fat man whose heart gave out after the police used justified and judicious self-defense. It was a year or two ago that they rallied around a man killed in a police shootout after carjacking a vehicle, leading police on a high-speed chase and shooting at them. Before that, Jesse Jackson championed the cause of black youths up north who were expelled from school after getting in a fight and a variety of other offenses. It’s a case of learning to pick your battles and these ain’t them. These examples attract the support only of those who perceive racism all around them and who buy into the self-destructive and self-defeating ideology Jackson’s ilk has been peddling for years. Everybody else looks at the incidents and shrugs. The tend to sympathize more with the fellow , not the criminals who prey on them.

The problem, though, is that truly worthy instances of such injustice with truly worthy victims are hard to come by nowadays. You don’t have many Rodney Kings or Emmett Tills or James Byrds, so the civil rights leaders must grab at whatever they can find in order to keep up the perpetual image of society holding down and punishing the black man. And so they come to support men like Nathaniel Jones. And every time they do so, though they may succeed in blackmailing government concessions, they only weaken their moral cause in the public eye and look all the more foolish for it. Shame on them, woe to those who follow them, and pity those who don’t but are involuntarily spoken for by them anyway.