Black Country, White Death

The media’s reaction to white South Africans seeking refuge in America reveals a far darker journalistic apartheid designed to separate and denigrate whites everywhere

By Mark Cromer

Amongst the professions, the pervasive contempt for white people—presenting on a scale that ranges from mild disgust to homicidal hatred—has emerged to an arguably unmatched level in the tradecraft of journalism. I say arguably because Hollywood’s filmmakers and television producers could certainly challenge the news media’s claim to such an odious crown.

The long-collapsing state of South Africa has highlighted the media’s rank malice toward whites once again, with the Trump Administration’s decision to allow white South Africans to seek refuge in the United States triggering a predictable chorus of histrionic disgust from the usual suspects throughout the print, digital and broadcast media.

Among what remains of the thinking class, no reasonable person of good faith and honest intellect can credibly argue any longer that a plurality of the population of professional journalists do not land somewhere on the scale of anti-white animus.

It has been a long time coming and is of no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention.

As a young reporter, I first started to be more alert about how whites were handled by the media in 1988, when I attended the national convention of the Society of Professional Journalists in Cincinnati. While the conclave will be remembered mostly for the aborted appearance of Sen. Gary Hart’s Monkey Business squeeze Donna Rice, the media’s coverage of the gruesome murder of Danny Gilmore in Cleveland earlier that summer was also a topic of discussion among the journos that buzzed about the gathering. Gilmore was a young white man murdered on the street by a pack of black assailants who drove his own truck over him as a crowd of black bystanders cheered, but the media of the day struggled mightily with what if any significance such a racial dynamic and reaction should be afforded in Reagan-era America.

Many journalists even then were suffering bizarre bouts of the vapors over the prospect of pointing out black violence directed at white victims and reporting on it in an unflinchingly candid fashion.

Another particularly notorious mile marker on American journalism’s long road to its present state of chronic credibility deficiency when it comes to race-related reporting occurred in May 2012, after it was revealed that in the Old Dominion, The Virginian-Pilot had doggedly concealed that two of its white reporters had been brutally beaten on the street by a black mob. After sitting on the story for two weeks, the paper finally fessed up and then launched an all-hands-on-deck effort to divert, deflect and deny that its editorial decisions had anything to do with black assailants targeting white victims.

If The Virginian-Pilot had set a standard for obscene journalistic malpractice in its editorial contortions surrounding that malignant event—and it did—the Los Angeles Times would set the bar even lower just three years later.

As the wave of journalistic derision has risen against the prospect of even a handful of white refugees arriving from South Africa, I was reminded of a story published a decade ago by the Los Angeles Times that focused on a white South African family that had been attacked in their home by black gunmen as its subtext was offered by the newspaper as a template for whites everywhere, a guideline of sorts for reporters to work from and whites to refer when they are brutalized by blacks.

The Los Angeles Times set the stage for the story with its headline: ‘A night of violence that shattered a South African’s view of her white privilege’ and reporter Robyn Dixon didn’t disappoint the progressive commissars overseeing the newspaper’s copy desk. As one of the reporters assigned to cover Africa and reporting from Johannesburg, Dixon delivers the tale of a white family returning to their comfortable home one evening to be confronted by armed black intruders.

“A gunshot rang out and the evening flipped. Gunmen materialized in the low light. A second shot, and Tracey Lomax saw her husband fall,” Dixon offers with a Hemingway-tight clip. “’You’re not the boss,’ one of them kept yelling furiously at him. Lomax didn’t betray her terror. Quite the opposite.”

Quite the opposite, indeed, as readers learn over the next 1,600 or so words as Dixon lays out the white South African woman quickly asserted some semblance of control over the home invasion by channeling her “white privilege.”

Described by Dixon as a “liberal white lawyer” who was known for representing poor blacks in South Africa pro bono, Lomax apparently went on autopilot and began addressing the assailants who had just shot her husband and were about to rape her with the tone of a “white madam.”

And just what is a “white madam?”

In 2015, Dixon explains: “Calm, firm, in control and used to telling black people what to do, even if they had guns.” If she were writing the story today, Dixon undoubtedly would have swapped the term ‘white madam’ out for the more economical but equally derisive ‘Karen.’

But whatever name or term one might affix to Lomax, Dixon dutifully reported that the foundational aspect rested in Lomax’s white privilege and it was from the toxic well of racism that she drew from to confront her would-be rapists and murderers.

When one of the gunmen forced Lomax into the master bedroom for what she instinctively understood was to be her violent sexual violation, Dixon describes Lomax as firmly addressing him much in the same manner a professor might a student, or perhaps more to Dixon’s point, as Scarlett O’Hara to her black house servant Pork: “We don’t behave like that. We’re not savages. I took his hand off my shoulder. I said ‘No, we are not doing this.’ And I walked back into the other room.”

Dixon explains that Lomax toggled between charming and patronizing as she negotiated with the gunmen into letting her family live and not raping her and her young daughter, and Lomax did so in a manner that revealed what Dixon considered to be the true crime, the real ugliness, the indisputable offense that the night of terror actually highlighted: white privilege.

Lomax’s tone with the black assailants was not so much as a desperate gambit to survive, but rather described by Dixon as the default setting of whites and one that is imbued with a radioactive racial hierarchy.  Lomax spoke in the manner that was a garish exhibition of: “The kind of white South African whose connections with blacks are limited to domestic staff and people behind service counters, one who keeps her car doors locked and windows resolutely up when beggars approach.”

It is deep into Dixon’s reporting that the reader learns the home invasion and the desperate hours that followed had occurred five years earlier, in 2010, and that opens up the true moral of the story and the takeaway that Dixon and her editors at the Los Angeles Times were expecting readers to process and commit to not only memory but dutifully practice in their own white lives.

Lomax confessed to Dixon that the assault on her family left her with one abiding lesson: she no longer wanted to be the white South African who practiced the sin of situational awareness in the presence of blacks. “Your instinctive reaction is to lock your windows and recoil and yell,” Lomax told Dixon. “But if I’d gone that way I’d have ended up a very bitter person. I started keeping my car window open when hawkers and beggars came up. I started greeting them and asking how they were. I started reaching out to people of color in way I hadn’t before.”

The brutal home invasion came to a conclusion when Lomax’s young daughter Jaime purportedly stepped forward and explained to the gunmen that her parents were broke and did not have guns because they didn’t believe in owning firearms. This passage in Dixon’s story reads like a line right out of a Tinsel Town script, where a child actor rises to save the day with a soliloquy that seems wildly out of place for a child to deliver because it was actually the fantastical projection of an adult screenplay writer.

Nevertheless, according to Dixon, the black gunmen decided perhaps their white tormentors deserved to live after all: “In the end, they were calling Lomax ‘madam.’ They put pillows on the floor to make them comfortable, before gently tying her up with her arms around her daughter. They called Jaime ‘the little madam.’”

Ahh, how thoughtful of them!

Almost completely absent from the entire retelling of the attack is the husband, who as a heterosexual white male was diminished (or in the parlance of today’s journalists, ‘decentered from the narrative’) to a single quote in which he states he couldn’t recall a single detail about his attackers: “By the time the police arrived later that night, I couldn’t remember a single thing. It was a complete blank.”

Dixon continues to tease out the Lomax family’s own culpability in their night of terror, which led them to abandon their small farm house just days after the violent attack. Lomax told Dixon that she was angry in the aftermath of the home invasion, but added she didn’t really know why she was filled with anger.

While apparently bewildered by her rage over nearly being raped at gunpoint by a band of gunmen, Lomax confessed to Dixon that she was “tormented by the memory of how easily she had addressed her attackers from a position of reflexive white superiority.”

Throughout the editorial offices of the Los Angeles Times, which today is a skeletal remnant of the broadsheet powerhouse that Otis Chandler had built, shunted off to an El Segundo office building across the freeway from LAX and hardly recognizable from the era when I was a contributing writer to its pages in the 1990s, Dixon’s reportage was undoubtedly seen as providing a Hollywood happy ending that depicted inherently evil whites being enlightened to their own complicity in the violence waged against them.

The color photograph, taken by Dixon, that was published with her story is equally revealing: A beaming Lomax is shown embracing her grinning daughter Jaime, with both mother and daughter in bright red shirts and Jaime’s emblazoned with an image of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevera. The white husband/father was decentered all the way out of the photograph, but the family dog can be seen.

The coup de grâce is delivered by Dixon as she closes her story by reporting that the gunmen who attacked the family had been identified, caught, convicted and jailed. But instead of feeling belatedly satisfied by their fate, Lomax tells Dixon that she is thankful for what the black assailants taught her about her and her family’s whiteness.

“But at least she knows she’ll never be a white madam again,” Dixon writes, with Lomax offering her profound gratitude “For holding up a mirror to my soul and showing me the person I no longer wanted to be.”

A decade has passed since Dixon’s reporting of a white family’s violent abuse at the hands of black assailants in South Africa was fashioned as an ideological ‘how-to’ manual for reporters around the United States to emulate when covering black-on-white crimes—that is only when it is not possible to avoid reporting a racial dynamic in crimes with white victims and black assailants.

Standard journalistic operating procedure remains to ignore and/or deny any and all suggestion of a racial motive if the assailant is black and the victim is white. If audio/video of the crime or social media posts by the assailants make that untenable, then reporters are required to look for other means to affix the true cause of the crime to whites in general and, if possible, the victim specifically.

As any professional journalist working in the United States today understands, it is AP Style to lowercase ‘whites’ while uppercasing ‘Blacks’ but the editorial obligation to highlight white subjugation extends much further than that simple but effective humiliation by font case and requires a default state of deep confusion over potential motives if a criminal suspect is black and his or her victim is white.

Though it’s a decade old, the contribution of Robyn Dixon and the Los Angeles Times to the anti-white journalistic infrastructure now in full bloom in newsrooms across the United States can’t be overstated, particularly when evaluating the convulsions of vitriol that have greeted the handfuls of white South African refugees in recent days.

In the pre-George Floyd era, Dixon’s work on Lomax and her family proved prescient, heralding that the day would soon arrive where whites everywhere must be prepared to face their own violent reckoning at the hands of black thugs and, when they do, the Los Angeles Times believes it is imperative that whites are made to understand that they ultimately brought the brutality upon themselves by being white.

In America’s newsrooms today, that’s what ‘showing up for racial justice’ is really all about.

Mark Cromer was a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times from 1992 to 1998.