Last week's column focused on the ways liberals use blacks in pursuit of their leftist agenda, plus their demeaning attitudes toward black people. Most demeaning are their double standards. It was recently reported that Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., the House majority whip, spoke at a 2002 gathering hosted by white supremacist leaders when he was a Louisiana state representative. Some are calling on Scalise to step down or for House Speaker John Boehner to fire him. There's no claim that Scalise made racist statements.

Hardly anyone blinks an eye at the Rev. Al Sharpton's racist statements, such as: "White folks was in the caves while we (blacks) was building empires. ... We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was. ... We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it."

Sharpton again: "So (if) some cracker come and tell you 'Well, my mother and father blood go back to the Mayflower,' you better hold your pocket. That ain't nothing to be proud of. That means their forefathers was crooks." Sharpton also offered, "If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house."

Despite such racism, President Barack Obama has made Sharpton his go-to guy on matters of race. But not to worry. Obama himself spent 20 years listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's anti-Semitic and racist sermons. The news media and intellectual elite don't condemn Sharpton or Obama, because they have two standards of behavior: one for whites and a lower one for blacks.

The news media's narrative about the police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, is that a white cop shot and killed an unarmed black man who was holding his hands up. Their New York City narrative is that a white cop used a chokehold that killed a black man. The news media people and their liberal allies know the facts, but they need to promote the appearance of injustice to keep black people in a state of grievance.

During grand jury testimony about the Ferguson incident, seven black witnesses testified that Michael Brown was charging the policeman when he was shot. The autopsies, performed by three sets of forensic experts, including one representing Brown's family, confirmed Officer Darren Wilson's version of the event. The news media's narrative of Eric Garner's death in New York is that he died because a chokehold had stopped his breathing. He actually died later, in an ambulance, where his heart stopped while being taken to a hospital. The chokehold was instrumental in triggering Garner's pre-existing health problems of acute and chronic bronchial asthma, obesity and heart disease, but he was not choked to death as claimed by the media. Both Brown and Garner would be alive today if they had not resisted arrest. But pointing that out would not serve the purpose of keeping blacks in a perpetual state of grievance.

I'm old enough to remember the racist lynching mentality of yesteryear. Regardless of the evidence, if a white woman merely accused a black man of raping her, the man was all but dead. Emmett Till, a Chicago teenager visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, during the summer of 1955, was accused of flirting with a white woman. Klansmen took him to a barn. They beat him and gouged out one of his eyes. Then they shot him in the head and tossed his body in the Tallahatchie River.

The New York Times published the street name on which Officer Wilson lived. Had the frenzied mob caught up with him, regardless of evidence, he might have suffered the same fate as Till.

Multiethnic societies are inherently unstable, and how we handle matters of race is contributing to that instability. Decent Americans should see the dangers posed by America's race hustlers, who are stacking up piles of combustible racial kindling, ready for a racial arsonist to set it ablaze.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.