The Optics of Victimhood Entitlement: A Study in Reverse Justice

Let’s stop pretending for a goddamn second. Let’s stop dancing around what we know would be fucking front-page news for months if the skin tones were reversed.

A black teenager walks uninvited into another team’s tent—enters a space that is not his, a space deliberately occupied by others. He takes a seat that isn’t his, forcing a confrontation. And when that confrontation arrives, as anyone could reasonably expect it would, he pulls a knife. A knife he intentionally carried with him into a sporting vebue. He doesn’t defend himself from imminent mortal danger. He stabs and kills a white teenager. On camera. In cold blood. No chasing. No ambush. No pile-on. Just a moment of willful, entitled aggression that ends in a blade piercing flesh. CCTV documented.

And then? The machinery of inversion kicks into gear.

He becomes the victim.

The systemic casualty.

The cause célèbre.

Money floods in. “Community leaders” rally. Digital fundraisers pop up like mushrooms after the rain. A chorus of professional grievance merchants sanctifies the killer and buries the dead boy under the weight of his own unspoken privilege. It’s not justice—it’s a vicarious execution. The killer is paraded not as someone who took a life, but as someone whose life was made heavy enough to excuse the taking of another.

This isn’t justice. It’s inversion. A moral parallax in which violence becomes virtuous—so long as it points in the right direction.

And don’t insult anyone’s intelligence by pretending we don’t know what would happen if the races were reversed. 

If a white teen had walked into a black team’s tent, refused to leave, picked a fight, and then fatally stabbed a black youth? 

The news cycle would be on fire. 

National coverage? Shit, try global moral theater. Presidential soundbites read off teleprompters like eulogies written by polling firms. Civil rights attorneys redeye in like bounty hunters, smelling blood and billable hours. The marches kick off on schedule, complete with pre-printed signs and livestream deals. Hashtags metastasize before the body’s cold. Corporations fall over themselves issuing condolences so generic they might as well be AI-generated—except they’re real, and somehow worse. And the legacy media? They cue the panels, drag out the experts, and start the cycle: “What does this say about white rage?” “Is systemic whiteness to blame?” “Is your unconscious bias a murder weapon?” All delivered with that hushed, sanctimonious tone usually reserved for royal funerals and ESG fund announcements.

But because this isn’t that—because the optics are inverted, because the victim profile doesn’t match the pre-approved outrage template—the silence isn’t just deafening, it’s fucking choreographed. Worse, it’s enforced. Try raising the point and suddenly you’re the problem. “DIVISIVE,” they’ll hiss, like merely describing the crime is somehow more indecent than the act of plunging a blade into another kid’s chest.

Really?

Getting this draft past the AI review system was its own absurdist comedy—like trying to sneak a truth grenade past a TSA agent with a diversity badge and a word cloud. Every flagged word, every cautious rephrasing, a little seminar in techno-gaslighting. “Would you like to reconsider your tone?” No, I’d like to reconsider civilization.

We’ve entered an era where context is erased and consequence is optional—so long as you’re the right kind of victim, with the right kind of allies. The value of life is measured not in blood spilled but in hashtags generated, donations raised, and narratives affirmed.

And this isn’t an isolated moment. This is the culmination of a thousand buried stories, a hundred distorted trials, and dozens of canonical lies.

Take Michael Brown. “Hands up, don’t shoot”—a lie, confirmed by multiple investigations. But the myth outlived the facts.

Take George Floyd. Yes, it is TRULY sad—see my weepy face?—that a man who pointed a gun at the belly of a pregnant woman is dead death—but not without some capable self-assistance via fentanyl and adrenalized resistance.

Take Rayshard Brooks. A man who stole a taser, fired it at police, and got shot. Then painted as a martyr.

Take Tony Timpa. A white man begging for help, mocked by officers, dead in minutes. No riots. No outcry. No murals.

The media doesn’t just shape narratives. It sanctifies some victims and buries others. The goal isn’t truth—it’s leverage. And when truth gets in the way, it’s either buried, delayed, or derided.

And for anyone still nursing the fantasy that this selective outrage is a modern glitch, let me offer a memory from the late ’90s—back when I was still in the field, still watching bodies fall, still naïvely assuming that truth mattered.

We had a racial problem in Industry Station’s area. Not the kind that cable news conjures up, but the kind that gets people killed. Hispanics and Blacks were going at it, with the former enjoying a five to one ratio in kills. No viral clips, no protest hashtags. Just a slow, lopsided war of attrition. 

And when I suggested internally that maybe, just maybe, we ought to be generating press releases—warning the community, informing parents—I was shut down. Not just by a captain I otherwise respected, but by the Information Bureau, by Homicide, by the entire damn chain of command.

“We don’t want to stir the pot,” they said. As if the pot wasn’t already boiling over. As if the real problem wasn’t the murder, but the optics of acknowledging it.

Let me tell you what stirred me. I had just rolled on a call. Sixteen-year-old kid, shot in the heart on a basketball court. No criminal record. No weapon. Just a body cooling under floodlights while I tried to find the pulse that wasn’t there. And I thought: if I were a Black father, I’d want to know. I’d want every warning. Every detail. I’d want my kid alive. The same goddamn thoughts I would have had if it were a Hispanic kid in a predominantly Black area. 

But the department’s calculus was simple: better to bury the truth than…what? Acknowledge reality? Fuck. To this day I don’t know the ill-defined reasoning.

So we let the rot fester. We let the bodies stack. And we patted ourselves on the back for our restraint, for our sensitivity, for our commitment to not making things worse—as if silence ever stopped a bullet.

Don’t shake things up? In a system that was already epileptically spasming? Perish the thought!

This is what happens when a society replaces facts with feelings, and justice with performative theater.

This is what happens when we dismantle the structures of order and due process in favor of vibe, grievance, and curated rage.

(And of course, let’s not gloss over the simple calculus: fomenting interracial hostilities plays straight into the hands of those who benefit from destabilization. Does it not align quite comfortably with the conspiracist view of a globalist agenda—one aimed at engineered division, systemic erosion, and, ultimately, depopulation? But I digress conspiratorially.)

This is what happens when you ignore the facts, bury the fucking footage, erase the tox screens, and elevate the spectacle over the substance.

And while the mob plays moral dress-up, the rot spreads. And it will reach them eventually, but by then, they’ll have long forgotten how to distinguish between fairness and fashion, between truth and template.

By then, the scaffolding will have rotted through.

And all that will remain is a graveyard of narratives—each marked with the names of the truth we were told not to say.