He was 92 years old. Ninety two.* What sort of violence animal would harm a man of such advanced age? ICE thugs? Nazis? Racist cops? Surely it had to be one of them, as the narrative demands. Yet it wasn’t.
An eyewitness later told The Washington Post that Rodriguez had accidentally bumped into a young girl while walking on the sidewalk. The child’s mother — a black woman — then pushed the elderly man to the ground and repeatedly bashed him in the face with a concrete brick while yelling, “Go back to your country,” the eyewitness said.
It wasn’t merely an “incident,” where one person yelled “violent words” at another for a perceived fault. She bashed him in the face with a brick.
But that was just the beginning.
Minutes later, however, the attack continued, Borjas said. A group of young men bounded down the street, accusing Rodriguez of trying to snatch the young girl. They kicked Rodriguez, who was already crumpled on the ground, and stomped on his head.
A brick to the face wasn’t bad enough, so some head stomping was added to the mix. The police arrested a suspect, 30-year-old Laquisha Jones. for assault with a deadly weapon. No word on the young men who stomped on Rodriguez’s head. No word on any “hate crime” for telling this old man, a permanent resident who came from Mexico, to go back to his own country.
To be clear, Jones isn’t representative of black people. Jones isn’t representative of women. Jones is responsible for Jones. As we are all responsible for ourselves, and as we all defy the identitarian narrative in our own way.
The narrative is as much a lie as any other stereotype, that if only we put People of Color and women in control of the world, Utopia would be achieved. This precludes us from recognizing that there are ugly stereotypes lurking below the surface of the false narrative. African blacks are looked down upon by Caribbean blacks. Blacks don’t like Hispanics much, and Hispanics aren’t all that fond of blacks in return. And when you get into the intra-Latino rivalries, Puerto Ricans versus Dominicans, Colombians versus Mexicans, they’re not all the best of friends, even though they’re presented as a united front, a homogeneous group of people oppressed.
Sure, there is a commonality in their view of racism by white America, but Tom Lehrer sang about it decades ago, and the only real change is that we now choose to be blind to reality because we’ve chosen to believe in lies.
There is the pervasive theme of white police officers being racist against blacks, and it’s a valid stereotype, yet not a complete stereotype. The same can be said for black police officers, for female police officers. The problem isn’t race or gender, but police officers. By ignoring that their favorite color is blue, and instead relying on the lie that it’s the officers’ race or gender, the solution we keep coming up with, more black and female officers, will fail.
What happened to a 92-year-old man was outrageous. Who would do such a thing? The only meaningful answer is the person who did it, the person who took a brick to his face and bashed him repeatedly. This no more proves black women are violent than it proves they aren’t. What it proves is that no one, no race, no gender, no intersection of identities, is above outrageous conduct, above rebuke for what they do.
Does the narrative allow for the acknowledgement that a woman of color bashed a legal immigrant’s face? Sure, we can separate Jones from all other black people, all other women, and say she’s an outlier, the exception to the rule, that black people are more wonderful than white people, women and more wonderful than men, and black women are more wonderful than white men. But what does this do to help Rodolfo Rodriguez?
People do bad things and good things. They come in all colors and genders. Ascribing victimhood by stereotype is easy and certainly popular, but in any particular instance, it provides nothing of use to resolve problems because no matter how much some want to believe the lie, it’s still a lie. We’re each who we are, and neither our race nor gender makes bashing a brick into 92-year-old Rodolfo Rodriguez’s face any less outrageous.
*Sources differ as to whether he’s 91 or 92.
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