It looks like we can add Jake England to the “some of my best friends are” club. Aaron Parsons wants to join it too.
England is white, and has been charged in the Tulsa, Okla., shooting spree that left three black residents of the city dead.
That happened April 6. On April 5, England ranted on his Facebook page about how his father had been killed by a “f—–g n—-r.”
By April 16, England was trying to convince anyone who would listen or read of his “friend of the Negro” credentials.
“An Oklahoma man said he doesn’t hate African-Americans,” CNN reported, “and counts some of them among his best friends.”
It’s because of “friends” like England that black people can’t afford enemies.
On the other side of the coin stands Parsons, who is black. He was seen slugging a white tourist who had the misfortune to visit Baltimore the night of St. Patrick’s Day. About 2 a.m. on March 18, the inebriated tourist found himself standing in front of the Clarence Mitchell Jr. Courthouse in downtown Baltimore.
A group of blacks that had just left a nearby nightclub passed the tourist. Parsons was among them. Because the tourist was white and an easy target, some among the crowd must have thought it might be fun to harass the guy.
Now no one can PROVE that, but when a bunch of blacks start hassling the only white person in sight, it’s not a totally illogical conclusion.
Someone recorded the despicable, vile things done to the white tourist on a cellphone camera and then posted it online. The video went viral.
Parsons is seen on the video clearly reaching into the man’s pocket as if to remove something. Warren Brown, Parsons’ lawyer, contends his client removed nothing from the tourist’s pocket.
Greg Kane, no one’s lawyer, contends that Parsons shouldn’t have had his hand in the man’s pocket at all. Parsons’ act precipitated the chain of events that occurred next.
Parsons walked away, and the tourist followed him hoping to retrieve what he thought had been taken. Parsons slugged him with a right cross and knocked him cold.
The tourist was then kicked, beaten some more, robbed, stripped of his clothes and left lying nearly naked on the street. Brown contends that all his client did was hit the tourist and that he had nothing to do with what happened after that.
Simple logic tells the rest of us that if Parsons hadn’t knocked the guy out, what happened to him after that might not have happened. It is Parsons, and no one else, who was responsible for that entire chain of events.
Brown has repeatedly claimed that race had nothing to do with what happened to the tourist. Parsons, in a television interview conducted before he turned himself in to police, tried to present his “friend of white people” credentials.
His high school basketball coach is white, Parsons said, as is his grandmother.
Now what do you want to bet that Parsons’ basketball coach and his white grandmamma are walking around with bags over their heads right about now? Parsons’ black friends and relatives might well be doing the same.
Family and friends of George Zimmerman, the half-white, half-Latino man who’s been charged with second-degree murder in the killing of Trayvon Martin, tried to portray Zimmerman as a “friend of the Negro” shortly before he was charged and turned himself in.
I think Zimmerman is a sho-nuff cowboy who brought much of his misery upon himself. But I’ll believe his “some of my best friends are” claim before I believe that of either England or Parsons.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
