The tragic death of Tyre Nichols after a beating by five Memphis police officers was destined to become part of the Left’s “systemic racism” narrative because the victim was black. The fact that the five officers are also black is only a minor inconvenience to the folks peddling that agenda. Nevertheless, watching the Leftmedia contort into knots to prove it has been something to behold.

There’s the CNN op-ed by Van Jones, a former Barack Obama lackey. Its title says it all: “The police who killed Tyre Nichols were Black. But they might still have been driven by racism.”

That’s because, he explained, “Black cops are often socialized in police departments that view certain neighborhoods as war zones.”

On MSNBC, “Black Lives Matter” activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham insisted that racism is “deeply systemic.” Why? “Very frankly, this idea of American policing serving and protecting is actually true because they serve white wealthy people and they protect property from the rest of us.”

As for The Washington Post, the real story is how “right-wing media ecosystems” treated Nichols’s death as “fodder” so they could continue to “routinely blame Black America’s maladies on Black America.” Among more enlightened Americans, by contrast, it “spawned nuanced conversations among Black activists about how systemic racism can manifest in the actions of non-White people.” In other words, routinely blame black America’s maladies on white America.

This is all astounding if at the same time not surprising. So we’ll make a few points.

Police are trained to keep law and order. Just because they don’t do it perfectly does not mean their focus is wrong. Cops spend more time in certain neighborhoods because those neighborhoods are like war zones.

Police protect wealthy white people — and any other kind of people — from theft and violence. The fact that a person is wealthy and white does not give a minority person a right to some of their property. Property rights are colorblind.

All of us supposedly crazy right-wingers blame maladies on the people who cause them. A killer of any race is guilty of his own crime. Someone else is not guilty for him.

Furthermore, the irony of this leftist buck-passing is that black people are somehow not responsible for their own actions, which is the soft bigotry of low expectations if we’ve ever heard it. (The same is true of any other victim class celebrated by the Left.) Why is it that white people are responsible for the wrongdoing of every other race?

The Post was hardly done fomenting racial discord.

“The Memphis Police Department, which has nearly 2,000 officers, is 58 percent Black, the result of a decades-long effort to field a police force that resembles the city’s 64 percent Black population,” the Post reported before mildly applauding the swift action “in firing, arresting and charging” the officers. (The MPD even disbanded the entire unit the five cops were part of.) The article then proceeds, however, to find and quote numerous activists disguised as experts.

“Diversifying law enforcement is certainly not going to solve this problem,” said Samuel Sinyangwe, president of Mapping Police Violence. That’s essentially because of Van Jones’s point that police have a “disproportionate response” in minority neighborhoods.

According to Jeanelle Austin, who runs the George Floyd Global Memorial in Minnesota, the worst thing is when we address individuals instead of the system. The Post paraphrases Austin: “Focus on the individual officers in the aftermath of police killing and not the institution the officer belongs to perpetuates the belief that policing’s problems are the result of a few bad apples — a narrative embraced by police.”

Austin said the same thing happened with Derek Chauvin and George Floyd: “The narrative turned from an issue of the police department to an individual issue. That was a PR strategy.” She also complained, “What we’ve been screaming from our lungs for years is that the system and the culture of policing trains people’s minds regardless of the color of their skin to behave a certain way.”

That last bit was unintentionally enlightening. We’d argue that black people have been trained “to behave a certain way” when it comes to police. Surely, white people aren’t the only race that can be trained.

The Post quotes Bakari Sellers, another activist who sheds more unintentional light on the subject: “For many Black folks, the race of a cop is cop.”

Indeed, this is about indoctrinating the residents of America’s cities — especially blacks — to hate cops. Hate breeds resentment, anger, and belligerent behavior among people who are already ailing from the Left’s destruction of the family and culture. The only irony there is that the wealthy white leftists who run the Democrat Party are definitely responsible for that.

Finally, and ironically, racism might be a factor if the officers involved got their jobs as the result of an “affirmative action” hiring program.

As a footnote, fortunately, the weekend riots the Leftmedia longed for did remain actually mostly peaceful protests, if raucous and disruptive. The saddest part, however, is that Nichols is still dead, no matter the color of anyone’s skin.