BLACK LIVES MATTER, EXCEPT IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS: William McGurn observes in the Wall Street Journal:
When Bill de Blasio was elected mayor of New York in 2013, he came in riding two progressive narratives.
The grand narrative was his “Tale of Two Cities,” a New York where elites grow rich while millions of others are left struggling for basics. Running through this tale was the subtheme of race, especially of young African-Americans being unfairly deprived of their rights. So when the #BlackLivesMatter movement exploded in New York last year, Mr. de Blasio naturally embraced it. . . .
Today, however, the mayor is finding that his progressive measures are being turned against him. For nowhere in New York is the divide between haves and have-nots—or between black and white—as stark as it is on equal access to a decent education. It is this divide the pro-charter Families for Excellent Schools will highlight on Wednesday as mothers and fathers march across the Brooklyn Bridge to demand “school equality,” i.e., great schools for all children.
In the run up to this march, the group has released a powerful new TV ad designed to drive home the human costs of the existing inequality by showing a white boy and an African-American boy on their way to school. As the camera follows the white child, a narrator says, “Because he lives in a wealthy neighborhood, this 6-year-old will attend a good school.” It points out he’ll “likely go on to college.”
The black child is also walking to school. “Because he lives in a poor neighborhood, this 6-year-old will be forced into a failing school,” says the narrator. The narrator adds this child will probably never make it to college.
“Mayor de Blasio,” the ad ends, “stop forcing kids into failing schools. Half a million kids need new schools now.”
One measure of the ad’s power is how vehemently the mayor’s black allies have denounced it. “Racist to the core,” charged Bertha Lewis, an activist who ran the left-wing community organizing group Acorn until it was disbanded. Likewise the head of the state’s NAACP, Hazel Dukes, who calls the ad “an insult to our communities.”
To the progressive left, advocating for better education for minority students is “racist.” Because, you know, #BlackLivesMatter, but one shouldn’t actually try to do anything about it, other than march in the streets, hold signs, get on TV, and condemn white people as racist– well, at least white people who aren’t Democrats.
When will black Democrats wake up and realize they’re being played? Democrats’ policies–including a ridiculous refusal to give parents meaningful educational options other than failed public schools (that resemble prisons more than schools)–are antithetical to the interests of most blacks. But hey, those conservatives are all just whiteys who can’t be trusted, so whatever they propose must be racist in some way, right?