Do Some Black Lives Matter More Than Others?
A recent dust-up sheds bright light on a misguided movement.
If you want to trigger the leftist legions, just mention black-on-black crime. To these mostly white, mostly middle-class social-justice vampires, the mere mention of the topic is a garlic-dipped cross.
CNN talkinghead Don Lemon is neither white nor middle class, of course, but he practically took to the fainting couch when actor and “America’s Got Talent” host Terry Crews raised the issue in a simple but powerful tweet: “#ALLBLACKLIVESMATTER 9 black CHILDREN killed by violence in Chicago since June 20, 2020.”
Those of you who’ve visited our Facebook page of late have probably noticed that we’ve also taken up this issue. It’s hard to ignore when one considers this cold, hard fact: There were some 7,300 black homicide victims in the U.S. last year, and of those, more than 90% were killed by other blacks. And yet the Black Lives Matter movement has been burning up cities and yanking down statues over two-tenths of one percent of that number — the 14 unarmed black men who were shot and killed by supposedly racist police in 2019.
The unwillingness of the Left to even discuss this issue is worse than cowardly — it’s deadly.
But back to the dust-up between Lemon and Crews. As columnist Ben Shapiro put it, “Lemon specifically objected to Crews’ hashtag. After Lemon humbly informed Crews that he has skin ‘as tough as an armadillo,’ he then lectured: ‘The Black Lives Matter movement was started because it was talking about police brutality. … But that’s not what Black Lives Matter is about. It’s not … all-encompassing … The Black Lives Matter movement is about police brutality and injustice in that matter, not about what’s happening in black neighborhoods.’”
But, as Shapiro rightly notes, the CNN anchor is mostly wrong. “The Black Lives Matter movement did indeed begin with protests about police brutality,” he writes, “but quickly morphed into broader debates over the validity of looting and rioting, tearing down historic statues, slavery reparations and defunding the police. And Black Lives Matter [also focuses on] police brutality, transgender rights, gay rights, disrupting the nuclear family and freeing Palestine, among other diverse topics.”
Terry Crews, then, is guilty of telling an inconvenient truth — a truth that the misguided Black Lives Matter movement would rather not contemplate.
Fortunately, Crews isn’t afraid to butt heads with the BLM movement. Last week, he tweeted out a message of both faith and colorblindness. “If you are a child of God, you are my brother and sister. I have family of every race, creed and ideology,” he wrote. “We must ensure #blacklivesmatter doesn’t morph into #blacklivesbetter.”
As you might imagine, the responses he got from the woke crowd aren’t worth reprinting.
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