George Leroy Baker III

By Nicholas Stix

You will not find any entries in Wikipedia for George Leroy Baker III. If you start an entry on him, the Wikicensors who seek to have it deleted will say something like, ‘Being the victim of a crime alone is not justification for having an article about someone.’ But what they’ll really mean is, ‘Being the victim of a crime alone is not justification for having an article about someone … white.’

Wikipedia, or as I call it, The Pretend Encyclopedia, has articles about people who are known only because they were the victim of a crime: James Byrd Jr., Kitty Genovese, Matthew Shepard, et al. It even has articles about people like Paula Cooper, whose only claim to fame is having murdered someone. It doesn’t have an article about Cooper’s victim, Ruth Pelke, because Mrs. Pelke was white, while Cooper is a racist black, who targeted Mrs. Pelke based on the color of her skin.

Likewise, George Leroy Baker III was a white, heterosexual male who was targeted based on the color of his skin, and stomped to death by three black teenagers in Lynchburg, Virginia, on September 5, 2010. That not only made his death “unnotable” to the Wikicensors, but indeed made it important to them not to record the death of this devoted father and grandfather.

George Baker’s only chance at meriting “notability” at TPE will be if Wikipedians take up the cause of one or more of his killers—i.e., to help them escape punishment—in which case they may mention the victim, within entries on his killers.

See my previous reports:

“In Lynchburg, Virginia, Still Another ‘Random’ Act”;

“George Leroy Baker III, Another of the Legion of Whites Who ‘Have No Memorial; Who are Perished, as Though They Had Never been; and are Become as Though They Had Never been Born’”; and

“Raceless, Nameless, 13-Year-Old Convicted of First-Degree Murder, in Racially Motivated Stomping Slaying of White 81-Year-Old, George Leroy Baker III.”