As street violence spikes in big cities across America run by Democrats, as parents grieve the loss of their children in the street gang wars, two things become terribly clear:
The first is that Black Lives Matter isn't promoting much, if any, public outrage at city halls run by Democratic Party mayors over urban street violence that is out of control.
BLM isn't a movement as much as it is a political and fundraising arm, founded by neo-Marxists and currently aligned with the Democratic Party. Its outrage is select and reserved for white police officers who kill unarmed Black men.
But it's the second thing that hardly gets attention from media that skews left, and from Democratic Party politicians:
Those young, white and woke BLM supporters who filled the streets, masked, chanting and angry, in legitimate protests over the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd by a white police officer aren't venting much public, organized outrage over Black children being slaughtered.
They shouted so loudly and passionately about defunding or abolishing the police, but aren't they also concerned about the lives of Black children being taken in street gang wars across the country?
They might need a safe space, even though the children being shot to death don't have a safe space.
Or, could it just be that the protesters, so silent now, see no political advantage for the November elections in drawing attention to the Black children, some as young as 1, who are killed?
I'll take a leap of faith and guess that the white and woke live in wealthy and working-class neighborhoods. They don't live in neighborhoods where car doors open and guns come out and children are killed almost every day. And so from them, we hear nothing but summer crickets.
Then the bullets start flying again, in cities across America, in Chicago, Atlanta, New York and Milwaukee and elsewhere, and babies are cut down.
"They say Black lives matter," said Secoriya Williamson, whose 8-year-old daughter was shot to death in Atlanta the other day. "You killed your own. You killed your own this time. ... You killed a child. She didn't do nothing to nobody."
In Chicago, there were some 90 people shot over the Fourth of July weekend, including 7-year-old Natalia Wallace, who was killed when armed hitters jumped from a car and began spraying gunfire into a crowd.
According to Tribune reporting, Chicago homicides as of Sunday have risen sharply, by 39% this year so far, with 353 homicides reported, compared with 254 during the same period last year.
I called Rafael A. Mangual, a legal policy analyst for the conservative Manhattan Institute and a writer for City Journal.
He's studied the left's new favorite social justice warrior toys, including "decarceration" and liberal criminal bond policy that allows for the release of the violent from jails, even if they'd been arrested previously on gun charges.
And I asked him why white protesters aren't pressuring big-city Democratic Party mayors to do more about the wave of spiking urban violence, including in Chicago, where Mekhi James, 3, was killed in the gang wars just weeks ago.
"As cynical as it may sound, it's hard not to conclude that the lack of political pressure being brought to bear on Chicago leaders to get tough on crime is at least partly a function of the fact that the gang violence claiming so many innocent lives - like that of 3-year-old Mekhi James - is a problem from which the donor class lives several degrees removed," Mangual said.
That's not cynicism. That's reality.
"As bad as things are on the city's South and West sides, its high-end neighborhoods and upper-middle-class suburbs remain very safe," he said. "As a result, the political class doesn't bear any of the downside risk that attends the misguided 'decarceration' and de-policing efforts so popular among 'progressives' desperate to establish their social justice bona fides."
When it comes to the lives of Black children taken in street violence, what's clear is that the white woke world has no skin in the game.
The Chicago Tribune