Opie Done Burnt California

Last month the Santa Ana winds blew the wildfires in Southern California into residential areas. The fires have been burning for nearly two weeks now. A number of million dollar homes have been destroyed and over three thousand good people, the vast majority of them are white, are now homeless. With more than fourteen thousand insurance claims on file so far, the Insurance Information Institute estimates the insurance industry is looking to pay one point six billion dollars in files for homes, farms, businesses, and vehicles. There have been a minimum of twelve deaths and as many as seventy eight injuries attributed to the fires. Five hundred thousand acres have been affected. About nine thousand fire fighters were called into service. More than five hundred thousand people had to evacuate their homes. FEMA sent a thousand people to help manage the disaster.

Supposedly, the majority of the fires were started by downed power lines. However, it’s been alleged that a young boy is responsible for starting a portion of the blaze that continues to burn half of California. The source of this particular blaze appears to be Agua Dulce. Police said that a boy playing with matches has confessed to starting one of the fires north of Los Angeles that burned sixty three buildings and charred thirty eight thousand acres on its lonesome. A quarter of a million dollars reward has been offered for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone guilty of starting the fires. Yet, prosecutors in California are now deciding whether or not to charge the boy who is thought to be a preteen. Because of his age, the boy enjoys anonymity and no one not involved with the investigation knows his name or his age or the details of his crime.

The race of the boy has not been revealed. However, there are some extenuating circumstances that we can use to deduce the race of the kid. North Los Angeles is predominantly a white area with lots of wealthy residents. Some minorities can afford to be in the area, but I’m going to go with the numbers. Secondly, the fact that everything about the kid’s identity is being so well protected after contributing to one of the worst major disasters in America is indicative of the kid’s ethnicity. When a black person is alleged to have committed a crime you will hear that it is a black kid. Black people do not enjoy such obscurity. If we did, we wouldn’t have the stigma associated with black criminality. And finally, I suspect the kid is white because he hasn’t been charged. If the kid was black not only would charges be filed, his latent sickle cell trait would have already been activated and California would be burying his ass in order to help hide the coroner’s incompetence. While white people may want to pretend that we know nothing about our little arsonist, what they don’t say speaks volumes.

When black kids are accused of a crime there’s video of the kid being taken into juvenile custody but the child’s face is pixilated to be unrecognizable, but there would be little doubt that the child is black. Kind of like the black under aged boy who was one of the Jena Six. They may have blurred out his face but the rest of his skin was plain to see.

The dominant corporate American mentality simply can’t pass up the opportunity to reinforce the image that black people are bad to the core. Media’s overwhelmingly single minded focus to portray black people as hell bent, criminally insane animals is obvious when people take the time and open their eyes to the propaganda. Listen to the words news organizations choose to employ during a story and you can get a sense of what type of image is trying to be implanted into people’s minds regarding the people who are the subjects of the story. Words of understanding like troubled, distressed, and disturbed will accompany white kids in order to invoke a sense of sympathy. However, words like delinquent, offenders, lawbreaker, and reckless will accompany the article when the subject is a black teenager.

After years of this type of social programming, we have been conditioned to automatically assume that our black kids are troublesome and criminally oriented while white kids are just mischievous and accident prone. That way we will condone police officers punching a fifteen year old black curfew violator in the face (Shelwanda Riley), school security guards breaking the arms of a black girl who drops cake on the floor (Pleajhai Mervin), seven guards and a nurse from a boot camp killing an exhausted black teenager for not being able to run any more(Martin Lee Anderson), a court sentencing a black fourteen year old to seven years for shoving a hall monitor (Shequanda Contton), a district attorney prosecuting black kids for manslaughter when they have a school fight with white kids (Jena Six), a prosecutor working so diligently to keep a seventeen year old black young man in jail on a rape charge for receiving oral sex from a fifteen year old (Genarlow Wilson), and on and on and on. This form of black subjugation based on racial stereotypes is a situation that will repeat itself as long as the propaganda reinforcing those stereotypes goes on without being challenged.