On June 19 in Chicago, during a celebration of both Juneteenth and Puerto Rican Day, 24-year-old Gyovanny Arzuaga and his 25-year-old girlfriend, Yasmin Perez, were pulled or fell out of their car and shot at point-blank range. Arzuaga, hit in the head, hip, and thigh, was pronounced dead that night. Perez was shot in the neck and died last Tuesday. Their execution was reportedly precipitated by a minor accident in which the couple rear-ended a parked car. The occupants got out and attacked them. They leave behind two children. The shooter is still at large.

This is the most detailed video of the incident, which begins at the 6:20 mark, and it clearly shows a black man shooting Arzuaga. YouTube has already pulled the video for violating community standards due to “violent or graphic content.” And in a development that should shock no one, the mainstream media quickly moved on.

It doesn’t take much of an imagination to envision what kind of reaction that same media would have had if the couple were black and the shooter was white. Much like any narrative that accrues to the interests of those intent upon dividing Americans by race, the coverage would have been unrelenting and peppered with commentary by self-purported “experts” trumpeting the “systemic” racism that precipitated it, intermixed with the broad-brushing of anyone who would challenge their premises as a supporter of white supremacy. Moreover, upon capture of the perpetrator, the cacophony demanding the incident be treated as a hate crime would be deafening.

Here, the silence is even more deafening — and far more indicative. Not just of the rank double standard with which Americans have grown wearily familiar, but something far darker. Why have the media moved on so quickly? Where are the same Democrat leaders who knelt in silence for eight minutes and 46 seconds to mark the length of time Derek Chauvin pinned his knee on the neck of George Floyd? Where is BLM? Where are the calls for hate crime charges when a black man murders a Hispanic couple?

The answers to those questions might be clearer given the broader perspective: That same weekend in Chicago, 54 people were shot and seven were killed. Even more tragic, there’s nothing particularly outstanding about that reality. Every weekend in Chicago — and other Democrat-controlled cities — shootings and murder are a routine occurrence. Just as routine, the overwhelming percentage of victims and perpetrators are black.

Thus, the most likely reason leftists and their corporate media apparatchiks have moved on is because a certain level of murder and mayhem perpetrated by mostly young black males — many of whom are affiliated with Chicago’s 55 known gangs and their 117,000 members — is to be expected.

In short, the American Left fully embraces the soft bigotry of low expectations — and high casualties — on steroids.

In 2009, former Attorney General Eric Holder accused America of being a “nation of cowards” when it comes to discussing race. Perhaps that’s because Democrats and their media enablers are “hands up, don’t shoot” revisionists who make honest conversations impossible.

Even now the Biden administration insists the “most persistent and lethal threats” to America are white supremacists and militia “extremists.” Yet according to the left-wing Anti-Defamation League (ADL), right-wing domestic extremists killed approximately 116 people from 2018 though 2020. By contrast, in Chicago alone, where police say gang members commit 75% to 80% of the city’s homicides, there were a total of 1,810 murders during the same three years. Assuming police stats are accurate, gangs — the substantial majority of which are black and Hispanic — committed between 1,350 and 1,448 of those murders.

Just as telling, the overwhelming majority of those murders are also ignored by the media. Exceptions center around the execution of children, but the media remain behind the curve there as well: Ten children aged 15 or younger have been murdered in Chicago so far this year, compared to three murdered during the same time period in 2020. “I don’t understand how we are not as a city absolutely outraged,” stated leftist activist Reverend Michael Pfleger.

What’s not to understand? The stench of progressive hypocrisy, whereby the only black lives that matter are those that are politically useful, is impossible to ignore. And who does the reverend, along with countless other leftists, think will bear the brunt of the carnage precipitated by leftist efforts to defund police, end cash bail, or allow those who perpetrated looting, arson, and rioting to avoid any consequences for their crimes?

Having a genuine conversation about race would require acknowledging that black Americans commit crime in percentages far in excess of their percentage in the nation’s population. It would require acknowledging a large part of that criminality can be attributed to the devastating percentage of fatherless households in black communities. And it would also require acknowledging that for the last 55 years, Democrats have absolved black Americans of virtually all personal responsibility in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.

Yet what could be more condescending than Democrats viewing black Americans as so ideologically monolithic that our current president insists one isn’t “genuinely” black if one doesn’t support that party? What could be more racist than insisting black Americans are incapable of taking control of their own lives, even to the point where they are unable to secure voter ID — or even to the point where a certain level of criminal behavior must be tolerated?

What is the Democrat Party’s push for “equity” all about other than the implication that black Americans are incapable of achieving success based on meritocracy? Why are any Americans tolerating the Democrat Party’s current agenda, which posits the only way to “make things right” for black Americans is to demonize white Americans — brought to us by the same Democrat Party that demonized black Americans with the KKK and Jim Crow?

The contemptible status quo whereby victims like Gyovanny Arzuaga and Yasmin Perez are memory-holed for failing to advance the leftist narrative of systemic racism is abhorrent. In less than two weeks, they have become statistics — even as George Floyd has been elevated to the status of national martyr.

Why? “The retelling of the black American journey as a narrative of victimhood rather than victory is the central strategy in painting the American experiment as a failure in need of a Marxist overhaul,” black American columnist Jason Whitlock asserts. “America’s global elites prefer China and the Communist Chinese Party.”

In short, promoting systemic racism and black victimhood is about the acquisition and maintenance of power by any means necessary.

For more than half a century, black Americans have overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, even as those same Democrats insist the nation remains systemically racist. At the very best, that would suggest Democrats are monumentally inept.

At worst? Perhaps it isn’t systemic racism black Americans should worry about. Maybe they should be more concerned with systemic dependency. Systemic dependency cultivated in their communities by Democrats and their elitist enablers — for decades.

By the time this is published, another weekend will have passed in Chicago. Barring a miracle, scores more residents — mostly black — will be shot. Some will be killed.

Systemic racism? More like business as usual — fully enabled by Democrats.