by the German magazine Stern. The magazine ran a photo display s comparing various parts of American life (Democrat vs. Republican, Left vs. Right, Cynical vs. Romantic); for Black vs. White, the white is a Florida retiree and the black is Charles Ezeb, a felon serving a life sentence.
The display, as Medienkritik points out, seems aimed at showing Americans generally, or perhaps American conservatives, in a bad light. (These sorts of quote-picking exercises tell you more about the biases of the authors, and which quotes they wanted to pick, than about what the public actually thinks.) But the black vs. white item is just a shocker quite independently of that.
Oh, and check out Ezeb’s quote:
“The USA is a pretty rotten country viewed from in here.”
— Charles Ezeb, serving life in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola, Louisiana.
I’m quite happy to believe that the Angola pen is a pretty rotten place, and even more rotten than it should be. But, say, Ezeb, what did you do to get that life sentence? Might you have been helping make the U.S. a worse country for the people around you (most likely especially for the black people around you, given that most U.S. homicide is intraracial, as is most other violent crime)?
Makes one even more curious why Stern would choose this particular man for their black vs. white comparison, no?
(Incidentally, I did google, newspaper, and caselaw searches to see if I could find more about Ezeb’s conviction; I found no information but also no evidence of any controversy about whether Ezeb may have been wrongfully convicted. As best I can tell, he’s likely a pretty serious criminal who’s rightly been locked up for his crimes.)
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