Charles Blow, a black, left-wing New York Times columnist, took to Twitter and the pages of the Times to excoriate Yale and a campus police officer over his son being detained at gunpoint. Apparently, Blow’s son met the description of a campus burglar. After learning of the incident, an incensed Blow published a series of racially-charged Tweets followed by a racially-charged Times column.
According to the Washington Examiner, Blow tweeted, “This is exactly why I have no patience for people trying to convince me that the fear these young black men feel isn’t real.” Blow also tweeted out slogans associated with protests involving race and the police: “I can’t breathe” and “Black lives matter.”
In his column, Blow detailed what would have been a terrifying police encounter for any innocent young man and his father, but again turned it into a racial issue [emphasis added]:
I am reminded of what I have always known, but what some would choose to deny: that there is no way to work your way out — earn your way out — of this sort of crisis. In these moments, what you’ve done matters less than how you look.
There is no amount of respectability that can bend a gun’s barrel. All of our boys are bound together.
What Blow’s readers and Twitter followers weren’t told, though, was the race of the police officer in question.
As it turns out, the officer is black. Yale’s police chief is also black.
After firing off this series of racially-charged tweets and a racially-charged column in no less than The New York Times, Blow now claims his outrage had nothing to do with race. Blow also attempted to defend himself with the argument that a column he once wrote about Eric Garner also didn’t mention race.
That defense is absurd. Everyone knew Garner was black and the arresting officers were white. Blow was commenting on a story that was already a sensation. As far as his son, Blow was, for all intents and purposes, the reporter breaking the story. Immediately toxifying the story with race before knowing the race of the officer in question is the height of irresponsibility and an assumption on Blow’s part that smacks of, well, profiling.
If Blow did know the cop was black and intentionally wrote around that fact in the hopes of generating a race hoax, it would be generous to describe such a thing as a lie of omission.
Either way, what we have here is yet another disturbing example in a growing list — Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Oprah’s Swiss Purse Adventure — of prominent Leftists caught red-handed hurling false accusations of racism.
Facts be damned and waiting for facts be damned.
As a parent and as an America, Blow has every right to question a decision by any police officer to pull a gun on his son, and that matter is now being reviewed. Blow injecting race into this story by either covering up the facts or before knowing all the facts is irresponsible and unconscionable.
John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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