[Posted Jan. 2, 2008]

Where Is The Outrage Over John White's Verdict?

By Gregory Kane
BlackAmericaWeb.com
 
    A bunch of white guys show up at your house after 11 p.m., cursing, calling your 20-year-old son the N-word and threatening to kill him. You take your .32 Beretta, go outside and order the mob off your property.
Instead of leaving, one of the white guys slaps the gun in defiance. What do you do?
    John H. White, a resident of Riverhead, N.Y., said he knew what he had to do. On Aug. 9, 2006, White found himself and his son Aaron faced with precisely the scenario described above. Daniel Cicciaro, 17-years-old, was the white kid who slapped the gun in White’s hand. White shot Cicciaro in the face, fatally wounding him.
    Three days before Christmas, a jury of 11 whites and one black in Suffolk County, N.Y., found White guilty of second-degree manslaughter. A year in which black Americans over hyped and overreacted to the plight of the Jena Six ended with most of us hardly murmuring a whimper of protest about what happened to White.
    For months we heard about the injustice done to the Jena Six, how they faced outrageous charges of attempted first-degree murder for beating a white kid at Jena High School. We got ourselves into such a frenzy that we were running around wearing black, marching down to Jena, La., and ranting about how racism is alive and well in America.
    Is there any reason why the Jena Six got so much attention and John H. White received virtually none from black America?

   Our “leaders” have no use for White. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton couldn’t wait to rush to Jena and cry racism. But as hacks for the Democratic Party who tow the party’s anti-gun line, black men like White must scare guys like Jackson and Sharpton—and the Congressional Black Caucus, and the NAACP—out of their wits.
    A black man who not only owns guns to protect his family and home, but who actually uses them?
    All of us—black, white, brown, yellow and red—are only one idiot away from committing the crime that will lead to us facing serious prison time. For White, that idiot was Cicciaro, who confronted White’s son because he believed Aaron White had sent a message from his My Space page threatening to rape a female friend of Cicciaro’s.
    Aaron White never sent such a message. One of his friends did, as a prank.

    John White was chided during the trial by prosecutors and Cicciaro’s parents for not calling the police, but that’s precisely what Cicciaro should have done.
Had John White called the police, what, exactly, could they have done? Very little. Chances are they would have sent Cicciaro and his friends on their way and admonished them to behave. Then they would have returned later, to perhaps hurl a Molotov cocktail through a window of the White home.
    I’m sure Cicciaro’s family and friends insist no such thing would have happened. But anybody who would come to someone’s house, threaten the residents with harm, use racial or ethnic epithets and then slap a gun in defiance after being ordered to leave the property at gunpoint is crazy enough to do just about anything.
    That may have been what John White was thinking. Or it may not. His defense was that the gun went off accidentally after Cicciaro slapped it and that he didn’t intend to shoot the boy. Those prosecutors say John White acted criminally and irrationally. I say it depends on what side of the threatening mob you’re on.

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