Dawsey: Beating Prompts Callous, Offensive Fictions About Race

I’d heard only the barest reports: A motorist had accidentally struck a child on Detroit’s east side and had been viciously beaten when he climbed out of his vehicle to check on the kid.

The story resonated because of horrific attack. But nothing seemed particularly different from so many other beatings, shootings, stabbings and rapes that have long scarred communities like the one around Morang and Balfour. I pegged it as yet another “black-on-black” crime in a city with far too many. I didn’t figure the story would go much further.

Hours later, chatting with radio talk show host Craig Fahle, I learned how wrong I was. The story had exploded into something much bigger because the victim was white.

The racial element had roiled social media and the local papers’ comment sections like high winds on an ocean. Radio call-in lines, online replies and Facebook posts were exploding with racist invective and Detroit-bashing. Many screamed it was a hate crime. Apoplectic bigots with little sense of history and even less sense of irony slurred blacks in one sentence and then demanded that “Al and Jesse do something” the next.

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