Bill Boyl: Without consideration of race, is this even a story? - The Union of Grass Valley
A recent Facebook thank you went out from a grateful mother to a Virginia policeman who rendered roadside assistance to her son, when the boy had car trouble in the middle of the night while driving home from college. Tire fixed, the lad went on his way, the policeman back to patrolling. You don’t have to be Marshall McLuhan to realize that this electronic bouquet would be totally forgettable except for what they call in the news biz the “angle”: the young man is black, the officer white (Whoa. Had this been white-on-white assistance, or a white parent thanking a policeman, white or black, it is safe to assume that there would be a whole lot less hullabaloo attached to the Facebook shout out. But make the cop white and the young man black, and stand back for lift off. The kid’s mom thanked him on social media. As readers, we are supposed to take careful note of the fact that the young man didn’t bull rush the officer or try and sell him drugs, and the cop, bless his heart, didn’t pull out a gun and shoot the kid dead as the first order of business. com tale of a white police officer assisting a young black man in the middle of the night is the least bit noteworthy is a commentary not on race relations in the U. S. , or on the politics of policing, but rather on the sorry state of... As it happens, cops, white and black, assist young men, white and black, somewhere across America literally every hour of every day. Source: www.theunion.com
