The first time I read it, the quotation was so mind-blowing I thought my eyes were playing tricks. So I read it again and was astonished again.
Sunday’s Post reported that Florida Rep. Val Demings was on Joe Biden’s list of possible vice presidential nominees. Before she was elected to Congress in 2016, Demings, who is black, had been a police officer and became the first woman to head the Orlando Police Department.
Reasonable people would think the chance Demings could be on the Democratic national ticket is interesting and especially significant for women and nonwhite American. Assuming she became the running mate, she might help Biden win Florida, a key swing state with 29 electoral votes.
But according to the new rules of the revolution, people who think that way are stupid and far out of step with the radicalism upending our nation.
Here is the quotation about Demings that threw me for a loop.
“Joe Biden would be an idiot to put her on the ticket,” said Hawk Newsome, chairman of Black Lives Matter New York. “People are already on the fence about him.”
That seemed a mighty strange response, but Newsome was about to get a whole lot stranger. He then told The Post: “When black people become police officers, they are no longer black. They are blue.”
Whoa, Nellie.
The significance of his words is almost impossible to overstate because of the way Black Lives Matter is being embraced by scores of politicians, nearly all from the left. In addition, swaths of corporate America are donating millions of dollars to the group, which was universally regarded as fringe until Barack Obama invited its leaders to the White House late in his second term.
And Newsome’s words are especially important when the death of a black man at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis sparked worldwide protests, some of which became violent and turned into arson and looting.
So let’s unpack the sense and mostly nonsense in what Newsome is saying.
The first thing to notice is that, in an instant, he torches 70 years of civil rights efforts and accomplishments. Forget about integration, equality and everything Martin Luther King Jr. said about his dream that all people would one day be judged by the quality of their character and not the color of their skin. Those are, we are now informed, old and tired ideals and no longer something to reach for.
Instead, Black Lives Matter has a new message, one that puts race above all else and in opposition to the moral and legal foundations of our modern society. Newsome, and presumably his group, are advocating something that sounds suspiciously like separatism and resegregation.
He also seems to be suggesting there are “authentic” ways of being black, a contentious point for many African Americans who believe it stereotypes them and limits individual choice. Recall that Biden himself stepped on that grenade when he told a radio host that “you ain’t black” if you couldn’t decide between him and President Trump.
Now it’s black police officers who are not authentically black, according to Newsome, because they are supposedly more loyal to the police than to their race.
It is doubly odd to cite Demings’ police background as a reason why Black Lives Matter opposes her as a potential vice president. After all, the group was born primarily out of cases like the George Floyd homicide in Minneapolis.
The main demand initially was that the frequency and perceived injustice of those cases showed that to society at large, black lives did not matter and that the time had come for larger, more comprehensive reforms. That’s ostensibly why Obama had group leaders to the White House, where they met with police officials and governors after a spate of such incidents.
Many Americans already had reached similar conclusions about the need for reform. In most cities, violent confrontations between white officers and black civilians fueled a demand for more nonwhite officers. The hope was that greater racial and ethnic balance would help heal the breach between the police and the public without sacrificing legitimate law enforcement.
New York City, for example, has been in the forefront of the effort to create a department that is more representative of the population mix, and the NYPD now boasts a “majority minority” mix of cops.
But apparently, that doesn’t matter now, either.
Of course, if Newsome were just a random individual, it would be easy to pass him off as an aberration. But his position in Black Lives Matter puts him at the center of the nation’s tumult.
Listen to those pulling down statues and engaging in other “cancel culture” actions and it’s clear that race is the crucial, animating factor, even though most of the activists are young whites.
In Seattle, a hip-hop artist named Raz Simone, another leader in Black Lives Matter, claims to be in charge of an enclosed area that has called itself a separate nation. On Twitter and Facebook, Simone showed himself carrying an AK-47. Videos of the crowds in the Seattle Autonomous Zone show most of those involved are white also.
In 1970, Tom Wolfe published “Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” a takedown of the alliance between militant blacks and wealthy whites who wanted to expiate their guilt. The focus of the “radical chic” essay was a party that composer Leonard Bernstein gave for the Black Panthers at his Park Avenue apartment.
Fifty years later, white guilt is called white privilege, but there are real major changes afoot. With a “defund the police” movement gaining steam on the left and Black Lives Matter becoming a powerful player, much of the nation is abandoning reform in favor of a mindless revolution that threatens to turn back the clock on equality and racial progress.
If they succeed, that would be a true American tragedy.
Listen up, Mr. Prez
Reader Bill Keegan offers a thought about President Trump’s poll predicament, writing: “In her 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton said one very true thing about Trump — how easy it is to get under his skin. I really like him as president as he has tackled so many long standing problems. If he loses, he can only blame himself because he seems to listen to no one.”
Tragic shame of our govs
It is the unhappiest milestone. The Wall Street Journal reports that the number of known coronavirus deaths in nursing homes now surpasses 50,000.
The final number will be far higher because states have different reporting and counting rules. New York, to minimize criticism, changed its rule to count only patients who died in long-term-care facilities, exempting those who got sick in one and died in a hospital.
However the dead are counted, there is no escaping the conclusion that the policies of some governors, including Gov. Andrew Cuomo, doomed vulnerable and helpless people. Shame on them.
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