Baltimore Sun

No ‘woke’ outrage for gang violence

- By John Kass

As street violence spikes in big cities across America run by Democrats, as parents grieve the loss of their children in the street gang wars, two things become terribly clear.

The first is that Black Lives Matter isn’t promoting much, if any, public outrage at city halls run by Democratic Party mayors over urban street violence that is out of control.

Black Lives Matters isn’t a movement as much as it is a political and fundraisin­g arm, founded by neo-Marxists and currently aligned with the Democratic Party. Black Lives Matters sees no percentage in pressuring bigcity mayors to stop street violence. Its outrage is select and reserved for white police officers who kill unarmed Black men.

But it’s the second thing that hardly gets attention from media that skews left, and from Democratic Party politician­s: Those young, white and woke Black Lives Matters supporters who filled the city streets, masked, chanting and angry, in legitimate protests over the Minneapoli­s police killing of George Floyd by a white police officer aren’t venting much public, organized outrage over Black children being slaughtere­d.

They shouted so loudly and passionate­ly about defunding or abolishing the police, but aren’t they also concerned about the lives of Black children being taken in street gang wars across the country?

It’s possible they’re just terrified and sad and don’t know what to do without leaders to herd them. They might need a safe space, even though the children being shot to death don’t have a safe space.

Or, could it just be that the protesters, so silent now, see no political advantage for the November elections in drawing attention to the Black children, some as young as 1, who are killed?

This is July. And what’s on their mind is November, November, November.

Nationally, the white protesters who joined BLMand filled the streets during the George Floyd protests are almost sure to vote Democrat in November.

I’ll take a leap of faith and guess that the white and woke live in wealthy and working-class neighborho­ods.

Many no doubt are from white suburbs, and their parents are Democratic Party donors.

They don’t live in neighborho­ods where car doors open and guns come out and children are killed almost every day.

And so from them, we hear nothing but summer crickets.

Then the bullets start flying again, in cities across America, in Baltimore, Chicago, Atlanta, New York and Milwaukee and elsewhere, and babies are cut down.

“They say Black lives matter,” said Secoriya Williamson, whose 8-year-old daughter was shot to death in Atlanta the other day.

“You killed your own. You killed your own this time. … You killed a child. She didn’t do nothing to nobody.”

In Chicago, there were some 90 people shot over the Fourth of July weekend, including 7-year-old Natalia Wallace, who was killed when armed hitters jumped from a car and began spraying gunfire into a crowd.

And on Monday there were some 19 shot.

On Tuesday, there were 11 shot. I called Rafael A. Mangual, a legal policy analyst for the conservati­ve Manhattan Institute and a writer for City Journal.

He’s studied the left’s new favorite social justice warrior toys, including “decarcerat­ion” and liberal criminal bond policy that allows for the release of the violent from jails, even if they’d been arrested previously on gun charges.

And I asked him why white protesters aren’t pressuring big-city Democratic Party mayors to do more about the wave of spiking urban violence, including in Chicago, where Mekhi James, 3, was killed in the gang wars just weeks ago.

“As bad as things are on the city’s South and West sides, its high-end neighborho­ods and upper-middle-class suburbs remain very safe,” the policy analyst Mangual said. “As a result, the political class doesn’t bear any of the downside risk that attends the misguided ‘decarcerat­ion’ and de-policing efforts so popular among ‘progressiv­es’ desperate to establish their social justice bona fides.”

When it comes to the lives of Black children taken in street violence, what’s clear is that the white woke world has no skin in the game.

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