You’re still not comparing like-with-like here. We’re talking about a case where a person was randomly killed in the street and there was an accusation (wrongly IMO) that the authorities, local and federal, were protecting the suspect on the basis of race. Any way you look at it, that is infinitely more significant than a petty fight outside a restaurant. And all of that is entirely independent of the race (actual or presumed) of the people involved in either.
Like I said, they weren't identical. You point to the fact that in one instance the victim ended up dead, while in the other she "only" ended up in the hospital with multiple fractures and will require months of rehabilitation. You point to the involvement of the authorities. I could do the same at this point. It appears as though the restaurant staff treated her with hostility from the beginning, with their actions motivated principally on the basis of her race. Isn't that a violation of her civil rights? Where are the calls for a Justice Department investigation?
NOWHERE! Because when it comes to enforcement of federal civil rights law, there is no such thing equal protection. It's a double standard, a fairy tale on par with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Also, I'm going to maintain my point that it wasn't the death of Martin that made it remarkable, nor was it the alleged mishandling of it. It gained prominence because of the races of the participants and their alleged motivations for the actions that they took.
Sure. The first step would be to admit that your entire nation has a fundamental issue of race, to accept you are part of the problem without an immediate “but those people are worse” exception (especially where “those people” are defined by skin colour).
Generally speaking, when someone uses a word representing an absolute such as "entire," I already know their argument is flawed, since there are very few absolutes. I'm not going to accept your "first step," admitting that I'm "part of the problem" for simply asking whether the constant vilification of whites and engendering of a victim mentality among blacks is contributing to racial animosity among a subset of the black population. I won't apologize for asking those questions, because that's what free inquiry in a free society is supposed to be about. If we're ever going to get to the kind of fair, honest, free, and open society I desire then we'll need to hit the roadblocks to that goal head on, and we won't do that by living in denial that not all of the problems and issues confronting blacks are the result of systemic white racism.
In general terms, blacks don’t hate whites any more (or less) than whites hate blacks. They look at you in the same way you look at them. The question you all need to ask yourselves is why you are treating people differently on the basis of their skin colour?
Look, I chose to leave California for good and move to a state that's 40% black. I work closely with many blacks, and I've had some frank but always civil discussions with them over the years on issues of race. We generally agree to disagree, but usually the discussions revolve around incidents that took place somewhere else and not in Mississippi--Ferguson, Missouri; Baltimore, Maryland; Chicago, Illinois; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Falcon Heights, Minnesota. The South in general has a legacy it likely will never erase, but overall I think race relations here are better now than they were decades ago. But, yes, your question is perfectly valid, and, at the risk of stating an absolute, I think its contention seems to be universal and not something confined just to the United States. So maybe its root cause is something deeper, as in
it's in the nature of men to try to justify their own misery or change of station by blaming someone else for it, whether that "someone else" is from a different country, worships a different God, or was simply born with a different skin color. Maybe some honest introspection into human nature is where we need to begin.