We Still Can’t Talk Honestly About Race In America, Iryna Zarutska’s Murder Proves It: Bobby Burack

The brutal murder of Iryna Zarutska should have sparked an honest national conversation about race in America. Instead, it proved we’re still not ready to have one.

On August 22, a man stabbed the 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee to death on a Charlotte, North Carolina, light rail. The Charlotte Area Transit System released the surveillance video on September 5, showing a hooded man rise from his seat, approach a terrified Zarutska, and slit her throat in plain sight. Blood poured from her neck.

Videos of murders naturally generate stronger, more visceral reactions than headlines alone. The immediacy of watching a killing unfold sears into public consciousness. And yet, only a handful of outlets even mentioned this story after the video was released. Without X and Fox News, most Americans wouldn’t even know her name. CNN, NBC News, AP, and ABC didn’t touch the story until Monday evening.

That isn’t an oversight. It’s deliberate. The killer is black. The suspect has 14 prior arrests. Zarutska was a white woman. Those facts alone made the press reluctant—if not hostile—toward covering it.

The corporate media, aligned with the Democrat Party, has spent the past decade pushing the central thesis that America is systemically racist, and white people are an inherent threat to black Americans. Most major newsrooms now work backward to prove that assumption. That’s why George Floyd, Jordan Neely, and Michael Brown became cultural flashpoints. Notably, Floyd’s death sparked nationwide demonstrations led by the Marxist political organization Black Lives Matter.

And yet—years later—what has never been proved is that these deaths were racially motivated. No one at the New York Times ever asked what evidence showed Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck because of racial spite. But in Zarutska’s case, that was the first question commentators posed. 

Here’s CNN’s Van Jones:

And here’s his colleague Brian Stelter, defending the lack of coverage while accusing anyone who did report on it of racism:

"I have to say, some of the replies to Musk, some of the comments around this story are baldly racist, stoking fear of African Americans because this man attacked a white woman."

Others followed the same script. Axios and the New York Times dismissed Zarutska’s death as nothing more than political fodder for the right.

"A Gruesome Murder in North Carolina Ignites a Firestorm on the Right," declared the Times.
"Stabbing Video Fuels MAGA’s Crime Message," said Axios.

However, this isn’t about MAGA. This is about a career criminal, repeatedly set free by judges in Democrat strongholds, murdering an innocent woman in cold blood because of her race. The man can be heard shouting, "I got that white girl," after the killing.

Anyone who watches the terrified woman’s final moments should be as shaken as those so-called "right-wing influencers."

A healthy society would ask whether there’s a pattern. And there is. Black-on-white violent crime occurs three times more often than the inverse, despite black Americans comprising just 13 percent of the population. Fox News’ Will Cain reported those numbers on Monday:

This isn’t about "gotcha" racial politics. Violent crime in America is an epidemic. Reforms must be made to protect all Americans, regardless of race. But the disparity in black-on-white crime is glaring and it deserves examination.

Perhaps we begin with the effort by Democrats and the media to radicalize black Americans, an effort to convince them that white people are their mortal enemies and existential threats. Just as branding Donald Trump "Hitler" for years made an assassination attempt inevitable, portraying "white supremacy" as the greatest threat to the homeland—which Joe Biden literally told an HBCU audience in 2023—was always going to fuel an increase in violent crime toward white people. Unsurprisingly, black-on-white murder rates spiked dramatically in 2020, following the so-called "racial reckoning."

Specifically, inciting racial hatred toward white people has become an entire industry. Its beneficiaries include the founders of BLM, civil rights attorney Ben Crump, activist Al Sharpton, commentator Joy Reid, and Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett. For nearly a decade, politicians, activists, reporters, athletes, and celebrities have profited from feeding black Americans false narratives about their white neighbors.

That’s not only wrong—it’s dangerous. And it needs to end immediately.

But there are no signs it will. Too few Americans, especially those with cultural megaphones, are willing to have a real conversation about race. Instead, cowardice and bad-faith actors have hijacked the discussion.

Rather than ask why black men—who are 6 percent of the population—commit 55 percent of homicides, the press cherry-picks which murders deserve airtime. A 2021 Free Beacon study found America’s top newspapers were seven times more likely to cover a homicide if the suspect was white and the victim black than the other way around.

What kind of society sits back while its leaders openly gaslight them this way? A society paralyzed by fear—fear of speaking hard truths, fear of being called names, fear of saying what’s obvious to anyone paying attention.

The press and the Democrat Party have spent years selling the lie that white Americans and cops are existential threats to black people. That lie has consequences: more hate crimes, more racial animosity, more bloodshed.

US Representative Jasmine Crockett, is among those who have incited hatred toward white people. (Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

The slogan "black lives matter" was always unnecessary because most decent Americans understand that "all lives matter." However, perhaps Democrats and TV pundits are the ones who need to be reminded that all lives truly do matter.

And what makes this all especially grotesque is that the very people pushing racial propaganda are doing it for profit and power. Since the end of the civil rights movement, Democrats have desperately searched for a new racist boogeyman to justify their social engineering. It’s why they defended affirmative action. It’s why they promote the concepts as flawed as DEI. It’s why they amplify certain murders while burying others.

One day, when America is ready for an honest conversation about race, we must finally have it. We must find a way to make America safer for all Americans—even white ones.