"'People who have money and privilege have the leisure to brunch,' Carrie Leilam Love, media liason for the group Black Brunch NYC, told The Washington Post in a phone interview. 'Other people don't.'"
Spokesperson 4 @BlackBrunchNYC said "privileged people eat brunch". Unlike the poor losers w/ twitter handles & Macbooks crashing brunchers
— Clifton Duncan (@CliftonDuncanIV) January 18, 2015
Side of hash browns, please “@AshAgony: #BlackBrunchNYC singing "Which side are you on?" #ReclaimMLK pic.twitter.com/pP8VYEwTkL”
— Clifton Duncan (@CliftonDuncanIV) January 18, 2015
I stopped paying close attention to the news a long time ago, refusing to trudge through endless stories about government corruption and incompetence, terrorism, senseless acts of violence, and, at least in my arena, marketing and publicity tools disguised as reviews. And although I already had a healthy distrust of the so-called Mainstream Media (MSM), it was the controversy known as GamerGate that really allowed me to see and experience how cultural and societal views can be manufactured by "news" outlets hurtling mightily towards obsolescence, hoping to garner views and clicks and generate ratings by selling narratives and tugging the heartstrings, whipping the masses into outrage via cries of "racism" or "misogyny" or "rape culture" and hoping to maintain at least some shred of visibility and relevance (if not integrity) in the process.
The result is that well-meaning people are stirred to action in order to enact their version of Social Justice, calling attention to what they perceive as grave miscarriages of said justice. One such campaign--which, depressingly, is still ongoing--is the BlackBrunch movement, a branch of the #BlackLivesMatter tree. While it's heartening to see people engaged and active and looking for some way to make their voices heard, it's also deeply agitating, since such passion is merely selective, and only serves the very same media outlets who now have fodder for more news coverage. Most importantly, it highlights a deep and alarming hypocrisy among those who claim to care about Black lives.
The dominant narrative is that Brown was yet another innocent Black life, cut down by a racist apparatus meant to keep African-Americans down.
In that same vein, Eric Garner, who had a prolific arrest record that made him familiar to the police that confronted him, was painted as an innocent victim of racist police brutality (despite the fact that the highest-ranking officer there was a Black woman). His law-breaking and prior arrests made no difference to the outraged masses; this was yet another instance of racism rearing its head, and yet another example of how Black people are under constant threat, and are seen as less than human, and are not valued (see also Marissa Alexander, see also Trayvon Martin--both of whom were anointed as angels by the media, despite what questions are unearthed when a little digging is done).
Mr. Jones was a 21-year-old junior at Clark Atlanta University, majoring in chemistry. He was gunned down on Monday, February 9th, by three thugs, after responding to a Craigslist ad offering an iPhone 6 for sale. Jones was unarmed, Jones was in college embarking on a major that would surely lead to a lucrative career, and Jones was, of course, Black. The problem for Jones and his family, unfortunately, is that his assailants were ALSO Black. There was no widespread media outrage, there was no marching, and there was no appearance from Al Sharpton.
Whereas Michael Brown was praised for planning to go to a glorified trade school, Jones was actually IN college, in a field requiring specialized knowledge. Where as Brown was 6'4" and nearly 300 pounds, and there is evidence that he assaulted the lone officer Darren Wilson, Jones was assaulted by three people, and was also unarmed.
Yet there are no Facebook sharings, Twitter hashtags, protests, or marches for young men like James Jones, Jr.
We're told that Black Lives Matter, and yet here are two cases of unarmed Black people, one who was merely a child, who were both senselessly murdered, and I've seen NO outrage, next to NO news coverage, NO hashtag campaigns, NO marches, NO protests, from the very same people who expressed rage over the Zimmerman verdict or Darren Wilson's non-indictment. Furthermore, it bears noting that the assailants in each of these cases were Black males, the demographic that supposedly has a target on its back, for no reason, except that they are Black and male.
Nobody is addressing what sociocultural factors, if any, led these boys to commit these heinous crimes, and nobody is addressing the damage they've done to their communities, and nobody is advocating for change on behalf of these innocent victims, because these and countless other cases don't fit the narrative of Whitey Has it Out for Us. These Black communities are cannibalizing themselves, and yet I'm told by certain Facebook friends that "Black on Black Crime is a myth". People will organize campaigns to attack those they view as privileged (all while tweeting about it via iPads), yet ignore the poor underbelly contributing to a catastrophic number of black murders.
I leave you with the impassioned words of Milwaukee police chief Edward Flynn, during a brief press conference; the whole clip is short and worth listening to, but here's a snippet:
"If some of the people here gave a good God damn about the victimization of people in this community by crime, I'd take some of their invective more seriously. The greatest racial disparity in the city of Milwaukee is getting shot and killed. Hello? 80% of my homicide victims every year are African American. 80% of our aggravated assault victims are African American. 80% of our shooting victims who survive their shooting are African American. Now they know all about the last three people that've been killed by the Milwaukee Police Department over the course of the last several years, there's not one of them that can name one of the last three homicide victims we've had in this city."This police chief sees the hypocrisy very clearly. Sadly, not many others seem to.
