The Other Brooks Brothers and Their Sister, Too. — “Suddenly-relevant”

“You’d better run, n____r, cuz I’m fixin’ to kill you,” says the South Carolina Highway Patrol Trooper wearing the “M2″ microphone for the dashboard camera.

We hear the trooper in foot pursuit with the time stamp of 20:46:30 (It’s 3:19 in to the 6:38 video clip distributed by WLTX in Columbia).

This was December 12, 2004. Anyone without a significant auditory deficiency can hear it plainly.

Only now is it coming out, and as a result, DPS Director James Schweitzer will not be renominated for his post, and Highway Patrol Colonel Russell Roark will retire on May 1.

Aside from a racial rant that evokes images of white hoods, tall trees, ropes, and burning crosses, by bringing this incident to light now, the South Carolina Legislative Black Caucus showed how out of balance our collective sense of priorities really is.

Think about it for a minute. Don Imus lost his job almost immediately after apologizing for making a joking, yet unfunny, comment about the hairstyle of some female college basketball players and attaching that to a colloquialism used in urban communities as a pejorative description of women.

Golf commentator Kelly Tilghman almost lost her job for a poor choice of words discussing golfers’ possible options since they can’t beat Tiger Woods — the best and most competitive golfer in the history of history. It’s important to note that as the subject of the controversy Mr. Woods went on record saying he was not offended and knew that Ms. Tilghman didn’t literally mean what she said.

Then there was David Shuster on MSNBC who almost lost his job as a “network” (I use that very loosely when talking about MSNBC) talking head for saying that he felt like Chelsea Clinton was “being pimped out” by her mother’s presidential campaign – even though any rational individual knows that he meant she was being exploited, not being rented for sexual favors (Of course self-absorbed blowhard Keith Olbermann took the greatest offence and apologized to the Clintons on behalf of the human race which was completely contradictory to his referring to President Bush pimping General David Petraeus in September 2007 — only months prior to the Shuster comment — 5:11 in to that clip).

Now after all of that, the South Carolina Highway Patrol brings us, “You’d better run, n____r, cuz I’m fixin’ to kill you.”

To put this in perspective, people lost or nearly lost their jobs over humor, political satire, or simply poor word choices almost immediately after uttering their thoughts — all of which happened in spite of supposed speech protection.

Now we face a comment by a sworn law enforcement officer in which he not only crossed the lines of professionalism by hurling racial charges toward a suspect, he more importantly threatened that suspect’s life and tied it to racism. That incident took more than three years to see the light of day.

This is in no way an indictment on the South Carolina Highway Patrol or the law enforcement community. I am thankful for every man and woman who puts on a uniform for my protection and for the sacrifices they make doing their jobs each day. In this case, they unfortunately happen to share their profession with an individual who gave it a very public black eye.

Ultimately, I guess my point is simply that we need to pay attention to real crimes and real threats instead of worrying about our feelings getting hurt just so someone like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson can take their places as de facto racial spokesman and get more TV time.

– Wilson Charles

Related Link: Jerome Collins Reports for WLTX

UPDATE: On the current Gressette Building meeting schedule, there is a notation from Friday that reads:

“These changes were made on Friday, February 29, 2008 at 4:01 P.M.:

An agenda was linked to the Wednesday meeting of the K-12 Education Subcommittee on S.145, S.641, S.596, and S.1045
An agendas was linked to the Wednesday meeting of the Fish, Game and Forestry Committee.
The Thursday meeting of the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Reappointment of James Schweitzer was canceled.“