Let's be honest: As far as the media are concerned, most black lives don't matter. Only in the tiny, infinitesimally small percentage of cases when a black person is killed by a white guy do the media sit up and take notice.
Thus, while there was blanket coverage of a white racist 21-year-old (mentally ill, it hardly needs mentioning) who killed three black people in Jacksonville, Florida, on Saturday, the families of Khaaliq Williams, 16, Hamza Ali Omar, 18, Allan Howard, 34, Ashuntice Wilburn, 17, RayJohn Harshaw, 14, and Brandon Hatcher Jr., 24, mourned alone.
Those are just some of the black Chicagoans murdered two weekends ago in one single city in an area comprising about 14 square miles.
Am I cherry-picking by going back two weeks? No, I just wanted to wait for more information on some of the murdered black people whose deaths the media weren't interested in covering.
The wildly atypical killing in Jacksonville has already generated hundreds of thousands of stories on Google. The New York Times alone has run about dozen stories on those three black victims -- with more to come!
If anything, it ought to be the reverse. To paraphrase Jesus, the mentally ill you have with you always; the criminals, you can lock up.
But media coverage that reflected reality wouldn't keep the nation in a panic over the imaginary scourge of white supremacy. Bashing whites is more soul-satisfying than treating black people like adults. Also, ginning up black hatred of whites helps create more exciting crime stories for journalists to report!
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White supremacists are responsible for .001% of all murders each year. According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting statistics for 2021, black people are responsible for 60% of all murders in the U.S., and the majority of their victims are other blacks. Those are the many, many black lives that absolutely do not matter to the media.
Nor to Democrats. Predictably, President Joe Biden immediately issued a statement on the Jacksonville shooting decrying "white supremacy." There will be no denunciations of black criminality, no photos of their victims' grieving families, no black pastors saying, "We're burying our future." It's doubtful that more than 10 people could name any of the eight black Chicagoans killed between Friday night, Aug. 18, and Sunday, Aug. 21.
Imagine if tomorrow, instead of one white person being killed in Chicago every week, whites suddenly started being killed once a day, Monday through Thursday -- and twice on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. It would be a national crisis. But that's what's happening to blacks. And the media and Democratic Party don't care. If black people have a disagreement with one another, who are we to interfere?
Here, specifically, are some of the black lives that don't matter.
On Friday, Aug. 18, at 7:50 p.m., 16-year-old Khaaliq Williams was riddled with bullets as he stood on a sidewalk. There are three brief mentions of Williams on Google, plus one bare-bones Instagram post -- by a criminal defense law firm looking for business.
The shooter wasn't white, so no biggie.
Two hours later, someone fired into a car on West Maypole Avenue, hitting 18-year-old Hamza Ali Omar in the head, cheek and abdomen, killing him. According to his GoFundMe page, Omar was born and raised in Minneapolis, loved basketball and enjoyed traveling.
That's about it for news on Omar. His friends and family surely took great comfort in the knowledge that at least he wasn't killed by a white man.
Four hours after Omar's murder, 34-year-old Allan Howard was killed in a drive-by shooting in the Washington Heights neighborhood of the South Side. That's the sum total of what we know about Howard.
To give the press the benefit of the doubt, maybe they assumed these three were criminals themselves, involved in retaliatory gang violence.
But being "justice-involved" (copyright: Barack Obama) didn't tarnish the sainthood of the BLM heroes. All were engaged in criminal behavior -- Mike Brown, George Floyd, Daunte Wright and Breonna Taylor. That's why the police were arresting them.
Luckily, they were part of the 2% of all black homicide victims who were killed by police. That's the only reason their lives mattered.
What about teenagers Ashuntice Wilburn and RayJohn Harshaw? They were also killed that weekend in Chicago, and they appear to have been as innocent as the Jacksonville victims.
Wilburn was a volunteer an anti-violence program at Greater St. John Bible Church, along with her grandmother. She planned to be a dental hygienist.
If only -- like Breonna Taylor -- Wilburn had been the bag woman for a major crack dealer, whose boyfriend was shooting at the police when she was killed, her life might have "mattered."
Fourteen-year-old Harshaw's life didn't "matter" because he wasn't facing criminal charges for trying to choke a woman to death while robbing her at gunpoint and getting shot trying to flee from the police -- like Daunte Wright.
Instead, Harshaw was a "top student" who "was going to be somebody," as his aunt put it.
Don't those black lives matter, media? Nope! They weren't killed by a white person! No harm, no foul.
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