©Jack Cashill
AmericanThinker.com - April 2, 2015

Ah, you ask yourself. Just who is Ricky Shawatza Hall? Ricky is the driver of the SUV that NSA police killed as he drove wildly on the National Security Agency grounds at Fort Meade on Monday.

What makes Hall worthy of a riot? Well, two things, no three things, no four things. One is that he is black. The other is that he is a she or at least in the transitional stage of assuming an identity of preference. The third is that Hall, a.k.a. “Maya,” was unarmed, at least if you don’t count the stolen SUV. And the fourth is that Hall had no apparent criminal intent, if you don’t count escaping from the police.

Hall and his passenger were dressed as women at the time of the crash. According to the FBI, they did not dress this way to disguise themselves from authorities. They did not seem to have terror in mind.

As to motive, the best the FBI could offer was Hall’s mistakenly taking a restricted exit heading toward an NSA security post. Much as Michael Brown had done in Ferguson, Hall apparently ignored police commands to stop. Like Brown, Hall had things to hide, most notably the drugs in his vehicle.

All that said, put Hall on the streets of Ferguson in an identical incident and there would be hell to pay. So why no riot? Well, for one thing, the Washington Post did not see fit to mention Hall’s race in its article titled, “FBI identifies man who died in NSA incident as Ricky Shawatza Hall.” One would think that fact might be relevant in the “hand up, don’t shoot” era.

Nor did the Post see fit to show Hall’s picture. Few media bothered to do either. None of them consulted with Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson to get their take on the shooting. The media did not even bother consulting with GLAAD or other gay rights activists. Hell, they did not extend “Maya” the courtesy they extended “Chelsea” Manning after Manning’s arrest on espionage charges and use female pronouns to describe Hall’s undoing.

The media had a test run with this kind of double standard two years ago with the shooting death of Miriam Carey. Don’t remember Carey? She was the African American dental hygienist shot by the Capitol Hill Police following a bizarre driving incident around the White House and the U.S. Capitol. After firing at least eighteen shots at the unarmed and deeply confused Carey, the officers discovered that she had her one year-old daughter with her in a car seat. Miraculously, the little girl was unharmed.

In July 2014, a month before the celebrated death of Ferguson’s Michael Brown, the U.S. Attorney’s office cleared the two federal employees--one a Secret Service agent, the other Capitol Police officer—who fired the shots that killed Carey. When the Washington Post reported on the clearance of the officers the only time its reporters used the word “black” was to describe the color of Carey’s Infiniti.

Neither the reporter of a July 10, 2014, Post story nor the editorial board writer who followed up with a piece on July 13 mentioned her race. In no story I could find was the race or even the names of the two officers mentioned.

That is probably as it should be, and the exoneration of the officers on civil rights charges seems understandable as well, even if the actions of the officers are not easily understood.

What demands explanation is why the media and the Department of Justice have applied such disparate standards in the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown on one hand and Miriam Carey and Ricky Shawatza Hall on the other.

The answer is fairly obvious. “Black lives matter” or “LGBTQ lives matter” only when those deaths advance the agenda of the Democrat-media complex. With Obama in the White House, the shooting death of a black person and/or a gay person by federal officers scores no political points.

The heads of America’s major newsrooms sense this instinctively. They don’t need to be told. The minor newsrooms follow the major ones. Activists, black and gay, are reading the same tea leaves.

On March 15, 2012, just a few days before the story of Trayvon Martin’s killing in Florida became a national sensation, Jose Carranza, 32, was quietly sentenced to 155 years in prison for brutally executing three innocent black college students in a Newark, New Jersey playground.

Who is Jose Carranza? Like George Zimmerman, Carranza is of Peruvian descent. Ironically, what protected Carranza was the fact that he was “undocumented.” The headline, “Illegal Alien Kills Black Innocents,” appealed to no one in the Media-Democrat complex. Had Zimmerman been illegal, we never would have heard of him.

Twenty years before Zimmerman was arrested, almost to the day, the decision makers in America’s newsrooms had even less use for a headline that read, “Clinton Tank Attack on Religious Community Kills 26 Blacks, 13 Other Minorities.” So they fully suppressed the race angle. I doubt if even Al Sharpton knows that most of those killed at Waco were minorities.

And fifteen years prior to Waco, no major media publisher anywhere would have dared run a story with a headline, “Bodies of 250 black children dumped in Oakland mass grave: Communist killer had close ties to the Carters, Jerry Brown, Harvey Milk.”

To state the obvious: some black lives matter a whole lot more than others, and Ricky Shawatza Hall’s was one that did not matter much at all.