More Misinformation from the Media:
“[Jamiel] Shaw [Sr.] is the father of Jamiel Shaw Jr., a 17-year-old football star who was killed in 2008 in Los Angeles by Pedro Espinoza, a 19-year-old undocumented gang member who, as the popular story went, mistook the unaffiliated Shaw for a rival gang member and shot him to death. (The actual case may have been more complex.) Anti-immigration advocates seized on the story in 2008 to bolster their anti-immigration arguments, and Trump has revived the story for a 2016 audience.
“Shaw’s blackness gives him cover from accusations of anti-immigrant racism that follow Trump and his white supporters, and his awful grief laid bare chastises would be critics into silence. . . . The response from pro-immigrant forces has never been able to meet the emotional urgency of Shaw’s arguments. Such is the power of tokenism.” – Trump’s Racial and Ethnic Hierarchy Blacks v. Mexicans and Muslims, The Nation, Julianne Hing, 6/16/16
Fact Check: In this article Hing tries to marginalize the American victims of illegal immigration, by discrediting Jamiel Shaw, a murder victim of an illegal alien (not undocumented) gang member. The reference the case being “more complex” is an ugly and unjustified aspersion against Shaw. Hing links to a 2008 article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times which quoted the claim of Espinoza’s lawyer that Shaw was himself a gang member.
An excellent reply to this charge came from Ira Mehlman of the Federation of American Immigration Reform, “The accusation was nothing more than a sleazy tactic of a lawyer trying to get his client off. No evidence was ever produced to substantiate the posthumous character assault against the murder victim.”
Another ugly insinuation is that Shaw Sr. is just a black “token” being used by Trump and his supporters to hide their racial agenda. It suggests that his grief isn’t significant because he’s just a pawn, too stupid to realize that he is being used. Could the writer concede that he might just be an American citizen, irrespective of his race, who is tired of his country being abused by illegal aliens—a man with compelling experience about this abuse?
Evidently not. The only perspective Hing seems to allow is the racial narrative of P.C. (political correctness). Trump is white and opposed to illegal immigration, so therefore in the fantasyland of P.C. he is a “racist.” As evidence she cited his “bashing a Latino judge.” That alleged bashing, consisted of Trump suggesting that this judge, Gonzalo Curiel, might not be impartial toward him because he advocates border control.
That was not an unreasonable suspicion, given that the judge is affiliated with organizations bearing the name “La Raza (the Race),” which advocate on behalf of illegal aliens. A founder of the state “La Raza” legal group he belongs to was a man named Mario Obledo, who once stated that if white Californians didn’t like the demographic changes illegal immigration was bringing, they could “go back to Europe.”
If journalists like Hing are truly concerned about “racism,” they might take notice of people like Obledo and La Raza groups when they write about immigration. But that’s not likely to happen as long as P.C. blinds them to any other point of view.