Last week, Christopher Darnell Jones Jr., a former University of Virginia football player, walked on to a bus filled with University of Virginia students returning from a school trip, and began firing a gun at the students, wounding 2, and killing 3 others. Football players, D'Sean Perry, Lavel Davis Jr. and Devin Chandler were the 3 students who were killed. It was an utter, senseless tragedy. Three young men in the prime of their lives killed for absolutely no reason.
The unusual thing about this tragedy is that very few politicians have tried to politicize it. Maybe because the election just ended, and a new one will not occur for another two years, so no politician wants to put in the effort to politicize something that will not help them politically. But if you look further into this tragedy, it becomes very obvious why it was not politicized the way most shootings are – both the victims and the assailant happen to be black.
If a white person had committed this heinous crime, the usual suspects would all have stood up in unison declaring that this one act was definitive proof of white supremacy and systemic racism in America. If a police officer had shot and killed one black UVA student, our cities would be burning to the ground right now. There have not even been the usual anti-Second Amendment gun grabbers exploiting this tragedy as an excuse to take the guns out of law-abiding citizens hands. It is almost as if the left doesn’t want anyone to notice these killings even happened.
Surprisingly, the coverage of this tragedy and the reaction to it by the media and the political class has been extremely sober, the way it should be. Those who have spoken out about this senseless loss of life, expressed great sympathy and sadness for the victims. No politician has tried to leverage the deaths of these three young men to gain political power the way they so often do with many other tragedies. Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats, used the violent attack on Paul Pelosi to blame Republicans in the run up to the midterm elections to gain more votes in close races. Beto O’Rourke crashed the press conference after the Uvalde shooting last spring to make political statements and draw much attention to himself and his campaign for Texas governor.
But it seems as if a very few people want to draw much attention to this tragedy. Many of the elements lead to the usual exploitation of it as we have seen time and again. The use of a gun; the use of a gun at a school; the use of a gun at a school to kill students; the use of a gun at a school to kill black students. Every element of that screams for the exploitation and politicization of the tragedy, except for the fact that the assailant happened to be black. And black-on-black murder with a handgun is the one crime that we are not allowed to talk about or even notice. And if we do talk about it, then we will be cast as racists.
It is almost as if our political and cultural leaders are not only okay with black-on-black murder, they want it to happen. Almost 90% of black people who are killed are killed by other black people. And blacks kill blacks at a rate 4 times greater than any other race. The lives of black people would be infinitely more improved if we were able to lower the black-on-black murder rate down to what it is for every other race. It is one of the most serious problems confronting black people in America today, and not only is no one talking about it, if you happen to speak out about it, you are automatically labeled a racist. In reality, the exact opposite is the case. The people who bring it up are actually trying to shine a light on this issue so our political class may finally decide to actually address the problem which would save hundreds if not thousands of black people’s lives.
The problem lies in the fact that there are a lot of political leaders, like Barack Obama, and cultural leaders, like Al Sharpton, who have made their careers out of the victimhood of black people. Every time a black person is victimized, people like Obama and Sharpton are first at the scene to exploit it, benefit from it, without doing anything to address the problem or fix it. The reason why they never talk about black-on-black murder, which is destroying black communities, is because when you address that issue, you have to address the fact that the assailant was also black. And it becomes very difficult to paint black people as the perpetual victims when the people who are victimizing black people the most are also black. And the narrative of black people being the victim of systemic racism is lost when you consider that 90% of the black people who are victims are victimized by other black people. So, nobody on the left talks about black-on-black crime because the ability to exploit the victimhood of black people in our country is much more important to them than actually preventing black people from being victims.
We are continually told how difficult it is for black people to live and succeed in the United States of America – how much harder it is for a black person in America than a white person. That is what is meant when they make the charge of “white privilege”. And they are right. By and large, it is much harder for a black person to live in America than a white person; it is much easier for a white person to live in America than a black person. No question about that. But the reason for that disparity is not systemic racism, but the level of violence that black people must deal with on a day-to-day basis in their own communities. The black person is four times more likely to be killed by another black person than a white person is to be killed by another white person, and what was the Democrats solution to the problems of violence in black communities? Defund the police. And the result of defunding the police was that violent crimes in black communities increased by 40%. Many more black people were killed by other black people as a result of defunding the police.
Why do the Democrats want this level of violence in black communities? The same reason why they wanted over 500 BLM riots in the summer and fall of 2020, they benefit from chaos, they know how to exploit violence for their own political gain. They don’t care about the people living in these communities. Those people are mere pawns in their political chess game, and if they have to sacrifice a few pawns in order to capture the king, they will do it.
Democrats know that violence and chaos put black people at an extreme disadvantage to succeed in life, and the Democrats use the disparity of outcomes between white people and black people to support their claim that the United States is systemically racist, and then they can blame that alleged systemic racism on Republicans so black people will vote almost unanimously for the Democrats and they will win more elections. All these predominantly black communities that are being destroyed by crime and violence are run by Democrats, and yet the black people who make up most of those communities continually reelect Democrat after Democrat after Democrat when not only do the Democrats not do anything to improve their communities, the Democrats want the communities to remain exactly as they are because that helps them win more elections.
Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.