The Other Side

There was a column written in the Chicago Sun-Times by a woman named Mary Mitchell on Tuesday evening.

She wrote about the Darrell Williams case. The premise of her writing is founded on the implication that Oklahoma contains racist people and that Darrell was unjustly convicted for a crime he did not commit.

The unjust conviction may or may not be true, I don’t know and Mary Mitchell sure doesn’t know.

She cites the low percentage of black people in Tulsa county as one fact supporting her theory.

Now…I have no problem with mistakes in newspaper columns, I screw up on my blog all the time (misspellings etc.), but when you’re using a statistic as as the foundation for what you claim to be a racist conviction of a rapist, I would…I dunno…I would probably make sure I got that correct.

The injustice here is not whether or not Darrell is innocent or guilty. That is not for Mary to decide and since Mary was not in the basement where the crime allegedly took place, Mary should not be deciding that.

The injustice (if there is one) is in how the trial was conducted.

Why did Jarred Shaw not show up in court even though he was summoned by a subpoena?
Why were the lie detector tests Darrell passed not taken into account?
Why was a case with (to my knowledge) no evidence, even allowed to go to court?

But no, Mary. No, don’t trivialize my intellect my throwing up a bunch of racial buzz words in a column and expecting me to buy in even though the column itself follows no rational narrative and makes absolutely no sense.

Don’t retard the real conversation we could be having about how to solve the social justice problems in American society by writing a cheap column that piles up the pageviews. Here’s the column you should have written.

I’m offended that you treat your position in journalism so lightly.

I’m offended that you have so little respect for your readers that you play the race card over and over and over again without taking the time to Google what county Oklahoma State University is in.

I’m offended that you take treat with such ambivalence a job that people like me would do irrational things for: getting paid to write about the world, to write about our culture.

And I’m really offended that the implication of your column is that them backwoodsies in Okieland are still livin’ in the dad-gum 50s.

You’re better than that, or at least I hope you are.

And people wonder why newspapers are going out of business.