Earlier this month, a video went viral on social media that showed a brutal fight between teenagers on a residential street near Hazelwood East High School in a majority-Black suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. In the video, a Black female teen can be seen repeatedly slamming the head of a white female teen into the pavement, which resulted in her being hospitalized with severe head injuries. Now, most people who saw that video would agree that, regardless of how the fight started (the video actually shows the white student striking the Black student first), the girl who caused the most severe injury should be punished accordingly. Still, there’s just something about the reaction of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey that shouldn’t sit right with people, especially Black people.
Honestly, I was suspicious when Bailey immediately insisted that the teen who slammed the other teen’s head into the ground should be charged as an adult.
Now, it’s certainly possible that Bailey’s response had nothing to do with racial bias. Perhaps it was simply the brutal nature of the attack that caused his knee-jerk reaction. Maybe I’m letting the myriad studies that show Black youth are charged as adults disproportionately compared to their white counterparts who commit the same crimes cloud my judgment. Only, here’s the thing: Every time Bailey has opened up his mouth about this case, he has caused me to increasingly suspect he’s just another racist white conservative who has gotten ahold of an incident that presents him with the opportunity to do some political grandstanding while showing clear racial bias—and I’m not the only one who thinks that.
Here’s Bailey making the rounds on conservative media to say he’s open to charging the Black girl with a hate crime, despite having no idea whether or not the fight or head slamming had anything to do with race, and insisting that the incident was the result of “racist” and…
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