It was the photo accompanying the column by The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch that really caught my eye. Mr Bunch, very much a leftist who has “some strong opinions about what’s happening in America around social injustice, income inequality and the government,” according to his own Inquirer biography blurb, lamented that so many of the #BlackLivesMatter demonstrators of 2020 were well-off white people:

Black Lives Matter marches of 2020 were surprisingly white and educated. Is that why results have been so mediocre?

We’ve never seen anything like the George Floyd protests that gained momentum 16 months ago — but that could be exactly why progress has stalled.

By Will Bunch | Thursday, October 14, 2021

Megan McNamara (right), 19, of Wayne, walks up Lancaster Avenue during The Main Line for Black Lives protest in Wayne, Pa. on June 4, 2020. David Maialetti, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer. Click to enlarge.

George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020. Over the next weeks, as the world watched the video of his death, the reaction was stunning and without precedent. Literally millions who saw the images of Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck felt it was impossible to remain silent.

But what was most remarkable about the June 2020 marches was how far they spread beyond Minneapolis and other big cities with histories of police brutality. In Norfolk, Nebraska, a small overwhelmingly white town of 24,000, some 300 people gathered on a street corner to voice their outrage. A march in a city with similar demographics — Sioux City, Iowa — triggered a confrontation with pepper-spraying police. In the Philadelphia suburbs, thousands of mostly white people — some pushing babies in strollers — marched down Lancaster Avenue through affluent Main Line suburbs, carrying signs like “White Silence is Violence.”

“I was shocked to see so many white kids out here,” Walter Wiggins — a 67-year-old Black man who’d been attending protest marches in his native D.C. since his parents took him to hear the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington — told the New York Times, at a protest that researchers confirmed was majority white. “Back then, it was just Black folks.”

That remarkable spring, the same phrase was on many people’s lips: The world had never seen anything quite like this. And yet, more than 16 months later, the world also hasn’t seen dramatic changes from a global protest movement in which it is estimated some 15 to 26 million Americans took part by marching in solidarity.

Emphases in the original, and there’s much more if you follow the embedded link.

Normally, I don’t include photos from the Inquirer, due to copyright concerns, but this one, I believe, is an exception under Fair Use standards. It is just wildly amusing that Mr Bunch, or, more probably, an editor, selected a photo not just of white marchers, but of a red-headed, extremely fair white woman, showing off plenty of skin on that warm June day, to illustrate Mr Bunch’s point about so many BLM marchers being white. 🙂

Mr Bunch is disappointed that few of the radical police reform measures were passed, and that while some police department budgets were cut, most departments not only had their budgets restored, but “budgets for traditional policing are actually increasing.”

Why? Well, one reason might be that the homicide rate in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia continues to skyrocket. As of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, October 14^th, the Philadelphia Police Department reported that there had been 435 murders in the City of Brotherly Love, tied for the eighth highest year on record, with 2½ months, 78 days, left in the year. The city is seeing an average of 1.5157 homicides per day, which, if that average holds, works out to 553 dead bodies littering Philly’s mean streets in 2021.

While the Police Department’s figures do not break down the victims by race, The Philadelphia Tribune, a publication for the city’s black community, reported that, in 2020, black victims accounted for about 86% of the city’s 499 homicide victims, and 84% of the 2,236 shootings. If there has been a serious uptick in the number of white victims this year, the Inquirer hasn’t reported on it.

The visceral, extreme reactions to the Floyd video, which inspired the rallying cry of “Defund the Police” amplified by a news media that prefers shorthand over nuance, ran into more complicated views on crime and law enforcement in the neighborhoods where — unlike for many of the marchers — policing is a day-to-day issue. Ground Zero has been Minneapolis itself, where in the immediate aftermath a supposedly veto-proof majority of city councilors pledged to end policing as we know it, to be replaced by a new department of public safety.

That hasn’t happened, in part because of pushback from middle-class Black homeowners concerned about rising crime. Last month, the Minnesota Poll of city residents found that while police reform is generally popular, a whopping 75% of Black Minneapolis voters do not want to see fewer police officers (the comparable number for white voters is 51%).

That’s hardly a surprise:

Surge in Minneapolis violence includes over 900 rounds fired from automatic weapons in 2021

by Jay Kolls | September 30, 2021 | 8:39 PM CDT | Updated: 10:21 PM CDT

The Minneapolis Police Department updated the Minneapolis City Council with new violent crime statistics Thursday, and the numbers show violent crime — including gun crimes — has continued to rise throughout the first three quarters of 2021.

Scott Wolfert, an MPD crime analyst, told city council members that 503 people have been injured by gunfire so far this year, which is an increase of 26% over last year. Homicides are up 16%, robberies are up 5% and aggravated assaults are up 2.6%, but the biggest surge has been the number of rounds fired by automatic weapons.

“So far, in 2021, there have been 78 ShotSpotter activations of automatic weapons with 935 rounds detected,” Wolfert said. “Compared to this same time in 2020, there were just five activations for automatic weapons and only 42 rounds fired through the end of September.”

Wolfert said the total number of detected gunshots fired so far this year is 20,611 — which is a 28% increase from 2020. And, Wolfert said, there have been 355 carjackings, up 35% from this time last year.

There have been 75 homicides in Minneapolis through October 15^th, a city of 429,954, and puts the city on pace for 95 murders for the year. At the current pace, the city would see a homicide rate of 22.10 per 100,000 population . . . a rate which makes Philadelphia laugh, and say, “Hold my beer!”

Philly’s homicide rate stands at 34.49 per 100,000!

This is North Water Street, near East Clearfield Street in North Philadelphia, and if you click on the image to enlarge it, you’ll see how some Philadelphians have to live, with their rowhouses barred in, to protect themselves from intruders and thieves. Mr Bunch noted how the BLM protesters were overwhelmingly white, and overwhelmingly college-educated. The simple fact is that the BLM protesters mostly did not live where the crime problems are most serious, and it’s easy to be for fewer police when your contact with the police is almost exclusively in getting a speeding ticket rather than reporting a robbery, a break-in, or a shooting.

Mr Bunch concluded:

But the crisis that inspired the George Floyd protests — U.S. killings by police officers — has hardly abated. The Washington Post tracker of such deaths shows 654 so far in 2021, at a pace only slightly lower than previous years. After 16 months, it seems reasonable to ask: If the largest protest in American history only barely moved the needle, what on earth would?

Really, 654? As of October 15^th, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, there have been 639 homicides in the Windy City alone, and Chicago’s homicide rate of 29.93 per 100,000 population is lower than Philadelphia’s.

Mr Bunch, who to judge by his Inquirer photograph, is very much a white man himself, laments that so many of the BLM protesters of 2020 were white, and wonders if that has contributed to the lack of movement toward their professed goals. But it also points out that Mr Bunch is himself quite probably very insulated from the way most black Philadelphians live their lives. A 1981 graduate of Ivy League Brown University, he’s lived the elitist’s urban dream, ten years a reporter for New York Newsday, and, for the past 26 years, with the Inquirer/Philadelphia Daily News. I don’t know his address, and wouldn’t publish it if I did, but it seems unlikely that he lives in Kensington or Strawberry Mansion or any of the other combat zones of the City of Brotherly Love.

We have noted it so many times: black lives really don’t matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer, given that the newspaper barely reports on them when a black person is killed. We have previously noted what I called the racism of the Inquirer, and have noted, many times, that unless a murder victim is an ‘innocent‘, someone already of note, or a cute little white girl, the editors of the Inquirer don’t care, because, to be bluntly honest about it, the murder of a young black man in Philadelphia is not news.

It’s easy to be a liberal when, to paraphrase the words of Robert E Howard, your life isn’t nailed to your spine, and, unless he has chosen to live near 52^nd Street in West Philadelphia, Mr Bunch’s life clearly is not. If he did, he would be gobsmacked by the reality that working-class Philadelphians, white and Hispanic and black and Asian live with, every day. He just might have a different perspective if he lived and moved among the people he claims to champion.