Last week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo released a statement about the recent increase in hate-crimes committed against Jewish people in New York City stating, I “unequivocally condemn these brutal attacks on visibly Jewish New Yorkers, and we will not tolerate anti-Semitic violent gang harassment and intimidation.”
So, does he not condemn brutal attacks against Jewish people who don’t look visibly Jewish? And does he not condemn brutal attacks against non-Jewish New Yorkers? When you single out one group, you exclude all other groups. This has been the main problem with the statement and the organization, Black Lives Matter. It implies that all other lives don’t matter.
Governor Cuomo’s statement should have read, “I unequivocally condemn brutal attacks on any person, and we will not tolerate violent gang harassment and intimidation against anyone.” You can’t be inclusive when your words are exclusive.
Maybe if the messaging over the last year had been All Lives Matter instead of Black Lives Matter, and we began to see each other as equally valuable regardless of race, there would not have been a dramatic increase in violent crimes against Jewish people, or a surge in anti-Asian hate crimes. Maybe if we stopped looking at each other as a group identity, and started looking at each other as fellow human beings, there would not have been a 50% increase in murder in our major cities over the past 12 month. Maybe if we focused on what unites us, and not what divides us, we would begin to see the tragedy in all violence, in every killing of our fellow human beings, and we would not have the need to find out the race of the victim and the assailant of a violence act before we condemn it.
But group identity has infected our society, our politics, and academia to a dangerously counter-productive level. We are being trained to look at and judge each other based on the color of our skin. Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot has banned white journalists from interviewing her, and will only conduct interviews with black and brown journalists. It is racism, pure and simple. It is saying certain people matter, and others do not. And the criteria she is using to determine who matters is the color of their skin.
She is siding with every restaurant owner who denied Black people from eating in their establishment, and every hotel owner who hung a sign “Whites Only”. She is on the side of the Jim Crow south. She is validating the act of judging people solely by the color of their skin which was the foundation of every Jim Crow law. She is affirming the basis of the racial segregation and discrimination that plagued the history of America.
The way people look at the world reveals more about the person looking than the world they are looking at. Lori Lightfoot is more concerned with excluding white journalists from doing their jobs than about the 48 people shot, and the 10 killed in her city this past weekend. She is emblematic of the woke culture that has infected our society. The call for “equity”, is a call for judging each other based on skin color. Critical Race Theory which has infiltrated our schools and colleges slices and dices people into their group identities, and apportions their value accordingly.
All human life is inherently valuable. When we reduce people to their group identities, we deny their individuality, we diminish their humanity, we rob them of their intrinsic value as human beings, and make it that much easier to harm or destroy them. What we are doing to each other, we are doing to ourselves. When we diminish, devalue or destroy our fellow Americans, we are diminishing, devaluing, and ultimately destroying America, the country we live in, depend on, derive pride from.
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Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He is a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.