Black Privilege? (Number-two)

Dear Black Lives Matter,

I want to stand with you. March with you. And wear your t-shirts. But I just can't. It is because you so frequently act as wantonly and as recklessly as the white power structures you deride.

Last Sunday afternoon, yet-another police shooting occurred on the south side of Chicago. Typically, before a single element of the event had been proven or disproven, social media was ablaze with rumors and threats.

That evening, a caravan of cars, trucks and vans converged on Michigan Avenue, which if you're not familiar with Chicago, is our version of New York City's Park Avenue. It is awash with high-end retailers of clothing, jewelry and anything else people with unbridled amounts of money and time need to fill the hollowness they feel after chasing—and getting—it all.

At any rate, the mob smashed windows and emptied those boutiques and shops of every piece of merchandise within.

Judging by your tone-deaf and anonymous press release the morning after, the looting was an entirely-justified response to what Black Lives Matter assumes is another racist and unwarranted police shooting.

Furthermore, since when do “protesters” (as you refer to them) come to a protest with glass cutters and hammers and rental trucks? Sunday night's looting was as spontaneous as sunrise—an entitlement its participants felt was justified because the Chicago Police Department—wrongly or rightly—shot a Black man.

Do I dare call it Black Privilege?

As with our current president, facts don't matter. Just your knee-jerk indignation does.

And while I'm questioning you, may I ask another?

I confess to not keeping tabs on every event you stage, but I am unaware of Black Lives Matter ever mounting a protest at the corner of say, Lake and Cicero, and calling out the scores and scores of Black gang-members who indiscriminately kill their own in service of the drug trade.

Don't those black lives matter? Or is it because there is no established (i.e. white) authority you can threaten/berate/criticize? You'll have to excuse me, but from my vantage point Black lives matter only when taken by white hands.

If I am uninformed as to the depth and breadth of your efforts, please set me straight. In all seriousness, I would be delighted to be wrong.

A French philosopher once observed that we become what we hate. And in the case of too many of Black Lives Matter's responses to serious events crying out for fact-based clarity, you are as assumptive and presumptuous as the police you loathe.

Again, like the police you say need to be defunded, re-organized, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, you are better at escalating conflict than you are at de-escalating it. And if that is your goal, congratulations.

But if you seek to educate and reform public and law enforcement perceptions, you are cutting off your nose to spite your face. Take it from a long-time viewer of Botched: nasal reconstructive surgery sucks.

Best of luck to you.

Signed,

An Old White Guy