The race grievance industry is alive and well in Durham as well as the nation. At Covenant Presbyterian Church in Durham on Wednesday the Rev. William Barber, president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP and North Carolina’s answer to the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, was on hand to gin up anger and outrage over the Trayvon Martin incident in Florida. As The Herald-Sun reports:

Barber said that the memorial service was meant to shed light on the larger issues surround Martin’s death, including racial profiling and aggressive gun laws.

There’s only one problem. It’s beginning to look as if racial profiling had nothing to do with the Zimmerman-Martin incident in Florida. It was a jump to conclusions by CNN, which has now said it got it wrong, to impute a racial slur to George Zimmerman in his initial call to police.

Likewise, NBC doctored the tape of the same call to make it sound as if Zimmerman, unprompted, said of Martin, “He looks black,” when in actuality he had been asked by the 911 operator whether Martin was “white, black or Hispanic.” NBC has also admitted their journalistic crime. But, too late, as it turns out. These two journalistic Molotov cocktails had already helped push this incident into a national conflagration.

As for “aggressive gun laws” being a “larger issue” in this case, well, they’re a “larger issue” in any issue around which angry liberals congregate. They tack that on any incident in which a citizen is lawfully carrying a gun and becomes involved in a shooting. It’s in the left-wing activist rule book.

Strangely, you don’t hear much from the same people when dozens of black youths shoot dozens of other black youths each night in this country, and Durham certainly contributes to those national numbers.

While liberals have been stirring up would-be lynch mobs and instigating bounties on Zimmerman’s head from such groups as the New Black Panthers, conservatives and other responsible people have been urging that everyone wait until all the facts are in. And yet it’s those counseling caution and urging a wait-and-see attitude who are being called intemperate and insensitive.

UPDATE: Shelby Steele on the same topic:

For the Revs. Jackson and Sharpton, for the increasingly redundant civil rights establishment, for liberal blacks and the broader American left, the poetic truth that white racism is somehow the real culprit in this tragedy is redemption itself. The reason Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have become such disreputable figures on our cultural landscape is that they are such quick purveyors of poetic truth rather than literal truth.