The Black Lives Matter defense of Jussie Smollett is a good encapsulation of why parents are so upset about critical race theory and BLM ideology creeping into our schools.
You would think that Smollett faking a hate crime against himself for publicity would be an embarrassment, a farce that undermines the real victims of racism.
You’d be wrong. In a statement released Wednesday night, Dr. Melina Abdullah, director of BLM Grassroots and co-founder of BLM Los Angeles, called Smollett’s trial a “white supremacist charade” that is “forcing” Smollett to face “judges and juries operating in a system that is designed to oppress us, while continuing to face a corrupt and violent police department, which has proven time and again to have no respect for our lives.”
In the sneering confines of MSNBC and school board meetings, to question BLM or CRT is de facto racist. How can you oppose black lives? How can you disagree with teaching slavery in schools?
But progressive proponents have proved time and again this is not about those things.
BLMers don’t want to make the police department or justice system more fair; they want to tear it down. “Policing at-large is an irredeemable institution,” Abdullah writes. “Black Lives Matter will continue to work towards the abolition of police and every unjust system.”
What would replace it? A utopia of community workers, they say. But we already see what the real result is: record numbers of murder victims — many of whom are young black men — in Democrat-run cities across the nation. Chicago, whose police Adbullah holds in particular vitriol, has seen 777 homicides this year — and 81 percent of the victims were black.
In the minds of BLM, and of writers such as Ibram X. Kendi and 1619’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, America has not improved, and can’t. Abdullah refers to BLM as “abolitionists,” as if slavery never ended and the civil rights movement never happened.
Is the United States perfect? Of course not. But these activists go beyond saying racism persists and we must work for a better nation. They say fundamental institutions cannot be fixed and therefore must be destroyed.
Hannah-Jones argues that our nation was born out of slavery rather than the Continental Congress, that the Declaration of Independence was written, and a Revolution fought, primarily in defense of slavery. Neither is true, nor is the idea that modern policing has its roots in slave patrols, or that capitalism is inherently racist.
But as with the defense of Smollett, the facts don’t matter. He’s a black man, so he must be innocent. The system cannot be trusted.
This is what these activists want to tell schoolkids. It’s not “teaching slavery,” it’s teaching Marxism. The police, the government, the economy, it all must go. BLM just said out loud what is hiding behind the slogans. Who is listening?