Ralph Yarl and the poison of identity politics

It’s a miracle he’s still alive. Sixteen-year-old Ralph Yarl, a schoolboy from Kansas City, Missouri, was shot in the head and arm last Thursday night. He had gone to the wrong address, pulling up outside a house on Northeast 115th Street, instead of Northeast 115th Terrace, which is just a block away. Yarl knocked on the door, expecting his two younger siblings to come running out (he’d been asked by his mother to collect them early from a sleepover). Instead, he was shot at twice by 84-year-old Andrew Lester from the other side of the threshold. Lester claims he feared for his life – and that Yarl was pulling at the door handle (a claim Yarl denies). Incredibly, mercifully, Yarl is not only still with us, but is also expected to make a close-to-full recovery. Lester, meanwhile, has been charged with first-degree assault and armed criminal action. If convicted, he will likely spend the rest of his life in prison.

But with the remarkable, welcome news of Yarl’s survival came the dreadfully predictable, politicised response to the attack. In the days following it, before the full facts had even begun to be established, the shooting was reflexively labelled a racist crime. ‘This boy was shot because he was existing while black’, said Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas. ‘Ralph Yarl was shot because he was armed with nothing other than his black skin’, said Lee Merritt, an attorney for the Yarl family. When asked on CBS to specify the ‘racial components’ in the case, Merritt responded, glibly: ‘There’s some obvious racial elements, there’s a white shooter, it’s a black boy. The white shooter perceives the black boy as a threat, and we hear that a lot, right?’ Famed Black Lives Matter attorney Benjamin Crump, who is also representing the Yarls, said ‘we can only imagine [what would happen] if the roles were reversed’. The Atlantic published a bewildering piece, likening the threat of white violence against black Americans today to the darkest days of segregation, even coyly suggesting things may have been safer back then: ‘At least in Jim Crow-era sundown towns’, wrote Imani Perry, referring to the white towns that would demand blacks leave at sundown or else, ‘there were ostensibly safe hours to be black on the street’. President Joe Biden has invited Yarl and his family to the White House, when he’s feeling better.

[All I have to see – besides the news coverage trumpeting what color the person with the firearm was – is the name “Ben Crmp” and that tells me all I need to know. ~ Beege]