It’s no surprise that the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading at The Philadelphia Inquirer don’t listen to an evil reich-wing conservative like me, but will they listen to black Philadelphians, to a black Philadelphia Protestant minister?
On Father’s Day Sunday, faith leaders struggle for answers to Philly’s gun violence
“We think we are evolving, but we are going down,” the Rev. Herb Lusk, pastor at Greater Exodus Baptist Church, said following an overnight during which eight people were shot, one fatally.
by Joseph N DiStephano | June 20, 2021
Father’s Day morning, as Philadelphia police searched to identify suspects who shot eight people, one fatally, overnight, Christian leaders struggled to respond to the record-pace city violence that has killed at least 255 people so far this year.
Some felt called to blame fathers, or the absence of them. In too many American families, “people right now are wishing mothers ‘Happy Father’s Day,’” as they try to do double duty, the Rev. Herb Lusk, the former Philadelphia Eagle running back, lamented in his sermon at Greater Exodus Baptist Church on North Broad Street.
He called missing fathers and the lack of their guidance and good example a factor in the way “we are still killing each other. Right now. Black on Black crime. We think we are evolving, but we are going down. We are killing our babies.”
Sunday’s shootings followed three on Saturday, including a triple in Overbrook in which two men were killed and a 3-year-old boy was shot three times in the right leg, which Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw denounced as “sickening”.
There’s much more at the original.
The Philadelphia Police Department only updates its Current Crime Statistics page on weekdays, so the 255 homicides shown are accurate only through the end of Thursday, June 17th. The Inquirer article above sited one murder on Sunday and three on Saturday, with who knows how many on Friday. If the total is ‘only’ those four, for a total of 259 through 171 days, that’s still 1.515 per day, a number which has been slowly creeping up, and leaves the City of Brotherly Love on pace for 553 homicides for the year.
The Rev Lusk, himself a black man, dared to say what only conservatives have been saying, that this is “black on black” crime, that it is primarily young black men killing other young black men. The Rev Lusk dared to say what conservatives have long been saying, that absent sperm donors — I will not dignify a man male who abandons his children with the title of ‘father’ — are a significant cause of this.
The Philadelphia Tribune, a publication for the city’s black community, noted that, in 2020, black victims accounted for about 86% of the city’s 499 homicide victims, and 84% of the 2,236 shootings; black Americans make up only about 44% of the city’s population.
If the Rev Lusk can say this, why can’t the editors and staffers of the Inquirer, tell the truth? We have noted previously Elizabeth Hughes, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and her determination to make her newspaper “an anti-racist news organization,” but has turned it into exactly that, a newspaper more concerned with racial identity and sorting out its news coverage that way than it has been about the “public’s right to know.” The vast majority of homicide victims in Philadelphia are black, but when one black gang banger kills another black gang banger, it isn’t really news anymore, not to the Inquirer. Instead, the paper paid more attention to the accidental killing of Jason Kutt, a white teenager shot at Nockamixon State Park, an hour outside of the city. That’s four separate stories; how many do the mostly black victims get?
For the woke, for the left, mentioning that so much of the violent crime is black criminals preying on black victims simply does not fit Teh Narrative, in which black Americans are being victimized by ‘systemic racism’, it does not fit within the worldview that, Heaven forfend! we blame the actual criminals for their crimes.
A truly “anti racist news organization” would not report the news through the filters of race and political correctness; a truly “anti racist news organization” would report the unvarnished facts, because it is only with a solid consideration of the facts that solutions can be formulated. So far, the staff and editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer have not been willing to do that.
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↑1 | From Wikipedia:
I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid. |
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