“It was a simple bump on the street,” she said. “They apologized, but the female did not accept the apology.” —Katia Toussaint, mother of Anthony Nazaire, who was stabbed to death at Cornell University following a brawl early Sunday morning.

While the talkingheads obsess over the antics of second-string NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick — a man so committed to fighting black “oppression” that he wore a Fidel Castro t-shirt at his post-game press conference and pigs-as-police socks during practice — the primary engine of black oppression remains unaddressed.

That engine? A thuggish element in the black community that has been glorified for years, and has turned inner cities into de facto war zones. War zones such as Chicago, where an astounding 400 people were shot and 78 killed in August alone, making it the deadliest month since October 1997.

Chicago is not alone. Baltimore just “celebrated” its 200th homicide of the year, making it the fifth consecutive year it has reached that dubious milestone. Yet as the Baltimore Sun notes, this represents an 11% decline in homicides compared to last year. That’s because 344 people were killed in Baltimore in 2015, making it the city’s highest-per capita rate ever.

One suspects the lack of another record-setting pace is scant comfort to those innocents caught in the maelstrom — a maelstrom overwhelmingly generated by inner city gangs.

“Their street or thug culture is real, with a configuration of norms, values and habits that are, disturbingly, rooted in a ghetto brand of core American mainstream values: hypermasculinity, the aggressive assertion and defense of respect, extreme individualism, materialism and a reverence for the gun, all inflected with a threatening vision of blackness openly embraced as the thug life,” writes Harvard sociology professor Orlando Patterson.

One suspects those toxic values — that have now bled beyond gangs into the greater minority culture — cost Anthony Nazaire his life.

Yet Patterson, like many of his fellow apologists, attributes this dysfunction to America’s track record of racism, dating back to the days of slavery. But as black conservatives such as Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams have argued for years, black Americans were making steady progress in times that were far more challenging than today.

What changed? Prior to the “Great Society” project initiated by President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program was reserved for widows to fund once-married women who had lost the primary male supporter of the family. Johnson and Congress, however, changed the qualifications: any household where there was no male family head present became eligible for taxpayer subsidies.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the truth-telling Democrat who was branded a racist for doing so, accurately warned America — in 1966 — where the resultant decimation of the nuclear family would ultimately lead. He explained that any community “that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future … asks for and gets chaos.”

And today, the efforts of an ungrateful and misguided NFL quarterback and his fellow apologists are attempting to shift the blame for that chaos onto the police, who they paint as trigger-happy oppressors.

Not exactly. As the leftist Washington Post reveals, “only a small number of the shootings — roughly 5 percent — occurred under the kind of circumstances that raise doubt and draw public outcry.” The paper further notes that in 74% of fatal police shootings, “individuals had already fired shots, brandished a gun or attacked a person with a weapon or their bare hands,” and another 16% “came after incidents that did not involve firearms or active attacks but featured other potentially dangerous threats … most commonly of individuals who brandished knives and refused to drop them.”

What are the apologists trying to obscure? Inconvenient reality: 258 black Americans were killed by police gunfire in 2015. By contrast, nearly 6,000 black Americans were killed by their fellow black Americans.

Sadly, this is not a new phenomenon. “Between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the United States,” Jason Riley reveals. “The black arrest rate for most offenses — including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes — is still typically two to three times their representation in the population.”

Other pathologies abound as well. “Police say it was just one sucker punch to the head that killed Sincal Jochola,” reports CBS Philly. “He stumbled, hit the ground and the group, not even waiting a moment, runs away. Detectives are now looking into if this brutal attack could be part of that knockout game.”

That game is one “in which a young man — all the perps appear to be male people of color, mostly blacks — tries to literally knock out an innocent bystander with one blow,” explained black columnist Larry Elder in 2013. A game whose mention the mainstream media characterizes as overblown, despite author Colin Flaherty documenting its “coincidental” occurrence in more than 21 other cities.

The media have also attempted to cover up the existence of disproportionately black flash mobs that have participated in numerous robberies and attacks, some of which are race-based. And then there are just out-and-out black mobs, like the one that attacked white people during the most recent riot in Milwaukee. The same riot our “post-racial” president golfed his way through and maintained a steady silence about, even as his spokesman, Josh Earnest, defended Kaepernick’s anthem protest.

The same president who pals around with music moguls like Jay Z and Beyoncé, both of whom have made careers out of glorifying thug culture and ginning up anti-police sentiment.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder once castigated America as a “nation of cowards” when it comes to discussing racial matters. Yet there’s nothing more revealing than the firestorm directed at Donald Trump by Democrats and their media partners, all for having had the temerity to point out that the overwhelming majority of inner city dystopias have been run by Democrats for decades. What really set them off, however, was when Trump asked black Americans for their votes by posing a simple question: “What have you got to lose?”

That firestorm revealed that the real cowardice resides among progressives who will discuss race only within the parameters they themselves define. The truth “is condemned as hate speech simply because it exposes those who have done genocidal and horrific actions,” writes former congressman Allen West. “We must continue to challenge them at every turn.”

The alternative? “One big difference is that now, on the street, there is no fear,” stated retired Chicago Police Detective Ted O'Connor to Chicago Tribune reporter John Kass. “Even in the ‘90s, with all the killing, the gangs feared the police. When we’d show up, they’d run. But now? Now they don’t run. Now, there is no fear.”

Yes, there is, for the millions of inner city black Americans who continue to endure an unendurable status quo engendered by Democrat policies.