BLACK RAGE

"CRIMES committed by Black people must be understood and excused in the context of Black Rage."

You may think this proposition unworthy of serious consideration but it is soon to be tried out as a legaI defence for mass murder in a New York court.

We should not be too quick to laugh at the inane carryings-on in American court rooms, because the 'Politically Correct' ideology which gave birth to concepts such as "Black Rage" is starting to affect the judgement of those charged with the management-of the criminal justice system in Britain.

The best demolition-job on "Black Rage" we have seen was carried out by ]ANET DALEY in The Times on 12th May 1994. Here are some extracts:

"Colin Ferguson walked onto a New York commuter train last December and shot 25 strangers, six of whom died. Witnesses said he was calm and acted with apparent self-control as he reloaded his gun for a second round.

His lawyers are preparing a 'not guilty' plea on grounds of diminished responsibility: a defence usually applied to the permanently or temporarily insane. They claim that Ferguson was acting on an over-powering compulsion to commit violence.

This violence was caused by 'Black Rage', which the lawyers, along with a number of American Black activists, would like to see recognised as a distinct phenomenon. And not only distinct, but understandable as a provocation to criminal or violent behaviour.

Ferguson is said to have filled diaries and notebooks with his hatred and frustration. His obsessive resentment not only of Whites but of affluent Blacks and of more economically successful racial groups, such as Asians, is said to be set out in pages of vitriolic abuse.

You may think, given the ethnic catholicity of Ferguson's anger, that 'Black Rage' is a misnomer. If there is any any case at all for his psychological condition to be regarded as a specific syndrome, it must surely be 'Poor Black Rage' or 'Inner City Underclass Rage'. But there is a great deal more wrong with this legal gambit than its nom-enclature.

What Ferguson's lawyers are doing is making use of the word 'Black' as a generic moral excuse: a magical incantation which is intended to place their client's crime on sacred political ground, to be judged on different criteria from similar ones committed by other Americans.

Simply by drawing attention to Ferguson's race they are politicising his crime, making it not just cold-blooded murder of the most whimsical kind, but an act of retribution which must be interpreted in the light of lifelong victimisation.

You will have noticed the obvious flaw in this argument. To be found not guilty on grounds of diminished responsibility implied that the defendant is not rational. If, as Ferguson's lawyers have stated, society treated him 'like an animal', then the claim should not be that his hatred is a form of madness.

The defence would clearly like to have it boths ways: Ferguson is right about being a racial victim, but he is also irrational. There is a real dilemma here. If racism drives people insane, how can we ever know it, since by definition the insane are not sound judges of the reasons for their actions?

The 'Black Rage' lobby must argue that this is a disabling condition which affects only those of the negroid race (not poor Whites or unemployed Hispanics), and that, it seems to me, is a patently insulting and self-defeating claim, with which no Black Political spokesman should associate himself.

It is consistent, in all its illogicality and sociological mystification, with a political fashion for turning would-be explanations of people's behaviour into excuses. Recently in Britain we have seen an assiduous campaign waged on behalf of women who murder their male partners after years of being battered by them... feminist lobby groups have claimed that women have a right to extend the law on provocation to include their own premeditated acts of violence ...

Following the Ferguson model, you might call this 'Female Rage'. But of course, the long-festering vengeful anger of a weaker victim is not exclusive to women. It is familiar to many men, just as Ferguson's so-called 'Black Rage' is a feature of the chronic have-nots of all colours . . .

If we define out of existence any crime that has a comprehensible motive, we are on the road to moral chaos."