Of Forgotten and Ignored Heroes

Community activist, Andrew Holmes  (Chicago Tribune)

Black lives matter. It is quite sad that this slogan has to be even uttered, let alone become a movement. Because the implication is that to many Americans black people don’t really matter that much. It also implies that black success hardly exists. As though we must first make America realize that black lives matter first before black people have any chance at success. Which is ridiculous. 

And yet I completely understand why it is an important slogan in light of what happened to George Floyd. He was killed by Derek Chauvin, a white cop that used a restraining technique so severe that it ended up killing Floyd. He was indifferent to Floyd’s cries that he couldn’t breathe . Which he kept screaming until he ran out of air and died. Chauvin seemed to be unmoved by what happened probably feeling justified in using that technique. Black lives did not seem to matter to him.

That event turned that slogan into a movement.(Often referred to by its initials - BLM.)  Which I supported. What I do not support is where the movement has gone ...reflected by what the current administration and some members of congress are doing: 

Last week, the Senate, on an almost straight party-line vote, confirmed Kristen Clarke to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. There were many good reasons to oppose her confirmation on policy grounds — her support for investing less in the police, i.e., defunding; her organizing a conference as a law student in support of a number of cop-killers as “political prisoners”; and, most relevant to her new position, her expressed belief that the race of the applicant should be a factor in all hiring decisions, even for heart surgeons and airline pilots.

As a Harvard undergraduate, Clarke wrote an opinion piece in the Harvard Crimson, asserting that blacks have “superior physical and mental abilities,” citing the “melanin” thesis of Dr. Carol Barnes that because of their higher levels of melanin, blacks are endowed with greater mental, physical, and spiritual abilities. Clarke told the Senate Judiciary Committee that her op-ed was a satire. But the editors of the Crimson at the time found not the slightest “trace of irony” in her piece, which they retracted. She refused their request to specifically repudiate the pseudo-science she quoted.

Not only that, as head of the Black Students Association, Clarke invited as a speaker Professor Tony Martin, a proponent of many of the same black supremacy theories that Clarke had cited, and, for good measure, an outspoken anti-Semite and author of The Jewish Onslaught: Dispatches from the Wellesley Battlefront. In his speech, Martin denounced the Torah, Talmud, and Maimonides as racist texts. Subsequently, Clarke defended Martin to the Harvard Crimson as “an intelligent, well-versed Black intellectual who bases his information on indisputable fact.”

It is also quite apparent that BLM is selective in what it protests. They seem to ignore black lives that were killed in their own neighborhoods by black gangs. Many of which are innocent black children. I have yet to hear any BLM leader complain about that. I have yet to see any mass protest against that. Even a non violent one.

And yet every night the late night local news it pains me to see reports about another black child that was hit by a stray bullet meant for a rival gang member. Where is their outrage? Why focus only on police brutality?! Of course police brutality should be protested. But for BLM to ignore the far greater problem of daily gang violence by black gangs in their own neighborhood is an outrage! 

As much as I support the intent of the movement to create a just society for all people where black and white people are treated equally in all situations. I cannot support the movement itself because of the direction it is going. 

BLM wants to decimate law enforcement as a solution to police brutality. Which is at best a questionable tactic in service to that goal. What is far more likely to happen is that less law enforcement will increase gang violence. Which means more black children will be killed. I have not heard one word of protest about that. All we hear from BLM these days is about the systematic racism, white privilege,  that the country was founded on the belief in white supremacy, and reparations to descendants of slaves. Children being killed by gangs? What gangs?!   

Which is why one of my heroes is Andrew Holmes. He is a black community activist in Chicago that actually cares about black children. But not the leftist black leaders that have commandeered BLM. 

It is for that reason that I can no longer support the movement. At least until such time that they start paying attention to all black lives and not only those killed by the police. And return to the ideals of one of the most eloquent leaders in American history who said that people should be judged NOT by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Remember him? In its current state, I doubt that BLM does.