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Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey arrives to testify during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on January 10, 2024. | Source: Bill Clark / Getty
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 “radical racially divisive progressive policies” without citing any evidence to support it.
It’s worth noting that the only reason “racist policies” and the possibility of hate crime charges came up in the first place in this video is that the district is 95% Black. But when Bailey spoke about “racist policies,” he wasn’t necessarily talking about that (though he certainly made no effort to push back on the host’s clear racism), he was complaining about DEI.
From the Associated Press:
Bailey blamed the school district’s diversity, equity and inclusion programming as a cause for the fight, which St. Louis County police say happened after school hours in a neighborhood about two blocks from Hazelwood East High School. He said were it not for the programs, a school resource officer would have been present at the school.
“I am launching an investigation into Hazelwood School District after a student was senselessly assaulted by another student in broad daylight,” Bailey said in a statement. “The entire community deserves answers on how Hazelwood’s radical DEI programs resulted in such despicable safety failures that has resulted in a student fighting for her life.”
You might be wondering why DEI is even part of this discussion. Essentially, district officials wanted school resource officers to undergo DEI training because when Black kids are the vast majority of the kids who will be policed, everything about America’s history of policing indicates that racial bias is always present.
More from AP:
Issues with school resource officers in Hazelwood schools began in 2021, when the district tried to require police to attend 10 hours of diversity, equity and inclusion training to work at the schools.
Police chiefs from St. Louis County, Florissant and Hazelwood sent a letter to the school board in June of that year saying police “receive training that is more than adequate and addresses the critical matters of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
No deal was reached between police and the schools, prompting the district to hire 60 private security guards to replace the school resource officers.
Hazelwood police later returned to some of the district’s buildings as school resource officers. But Florissant and St. Louis County police never reached an agreement with the school district.
So, fine, fragile cops got offended by the implication that they might be racially biased when policing Black children, so they took their ball and went home, and now Bailey is reaching around the world to draw a connection between that causing a lack of school resource officers and the fight video, which took place after school hours and blocks away from school grounds, which means it wouldn’t even have been SROs who were responsible for stopping it.
“Do you honestly believe, again, without any official verification or specific knowledge, that the fight on March 8th was a result of a racial issue between the female students that was caused by the HSD belief in the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion for all?” Hazelwood School District lawyer Cindy Reeds Ormsby wrote in a letter to Bailey Tuesday, saying that his “obvious racial bias against majority-minority school districts is clear.”
“What community do you represent as the Missouri Attorney General? Do you represent all citizens of Missouri? Or only the white citizens?” the letter continued.
In response, Bailey accused Ormsby of making personal attacks but did not bother addressing her perfectly reasonable inquiry about his alleged “racial bias,” which is beyond telling.
Mind you, there’s nothing new about Bailey joining the rest of MAGA America in blindly denouncing DEI—which appears to be the new thing for barely-closeted white nationalists now that their anti-critical race theory narrative has gone stale—nor would it be the first time he’s used his status to protect whiteness.
On Monday, Bailey sued Media Matters to protect Elon Musk and X from the nonprofit watchdog group’s investigations into hate speech on the platform, calling the investigation “meritless, expensive, and harassing.” Incidentally, a federal judge recently tossed a suit by Musk and X against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a non-profit research organization that found that hate, racism and disinformation had increased substantially on X since Musk took over. It should be lost on no one that Bailey is willing to consider charging a Black teen with a hate crime despite there being zero evidence that racism motivated the attack, but when independent non-profits find and show evidence of increased white supremacist hate speech, he’s got no issue filing lawsuits in cases that have nothing to do with him or his office.
Not that Bailey needs factual evidence to get his litigation fingers foaming at the tips as long as there’s an apolitical or ideological agenda to further. Last month, Bailey filed a lawsuit against Planned Parenthood based on a staged and edited video from factless right-wing propaganda hub Project Veritas, which falsely accused PP of illegally transporting minors out of state for abortions.
So, maybe this isn’t about teen violence, justice or right and wrong. Maybe Bailey has gone full fire and brimstone on this Black teen because he’s a racist right-wing ideologue who is only looking for an excuse to abuse the powers of his office to be a racist right-wing ideologue.
I suppose it’s up to you to decide.
SEE ALSO:
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The post Missouri AG Andrew Bailey Accused Of ‘Racial Bias’ After Blaming DEI For Viral Fight Involving Black Teen appeared first on NewsOne.
Missouri AG Andrew Bailey Accused Of ‘Racial Bias’ After Blaming DEI For Viral Fight Involving Black Teen was originally published on newsone.com
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