The seriously insistent woke of mostly upper-caste activists among us now insist that black lives matter, and matter most of all. And why? They claim that those Americans of somewhat African descent are consistently and viciously targeted by the rest of us solely for the color of their skin. The content of the character of the inner-city urban element of that demographic gets rather less consideration on the part of the Professionally Woke. The conduct of those poor, misunderstood children of the inner city sink neighborhoods is, to say the least, somewhat questionable. Examples abound, the most recent example being the pair of feral teenagers who hijacked a delivery driver’s vehicle in Washington DC last weekend, and subsequently crashed the vehicle, killing the delivery driver in the wreck. For decades there have been depressingly violent crimes perpetuated by the urban thug elements of color on their neighbors, local retailers, and passing strangers of all colors and ethnic backgrounds occurring on a regular basis, without much comment by the Professionally Woke other than to blame white prejudice/systemic racism for Making Them Do The Crime.

It appears that currently, black lives only matter when circumstances can be construed so as to blame a white person for ending said life. The life of a non-black person damaged or ended by the act of a violent black thug is hardly worth comment at all. That the last half dozen black martyrs whose deaths are regularly lamented by the Professionally Woke were of considerably less than sterling of character and irreproachably innocent in their relations with the law is a small detail which the Professionally Woke prefer to ignore.

In the eyes of the Professionally Woke, only that small handful of lives really matter; especially if some kind of Woke Protest event can be created from the loss of them. (Do the lives of the black unborn matter, for instance?) This is depressing to contemplate in considering contemporary inner-city black urban ghetto culture: aggressively ignorant, violent, crass, mired in generational welfare and crime. This in spite of half a century of affirmative action, of outlawing racial segregation, of spotting extra points to students of color when it comes to college admissions. The most well-known black leaders, both political and cultural have done practically nothing positive for the people they claim to lead, offering lip-service but little more when it comes to bettering lives.

Encouraging black youth to better themselves by achieving in school, working at legitimate jobs, eschewing substance abuse and sexual experimentation, and forming stable two-parent families is somehow not in their lane; so much easier, more immediately satisfying and rewarding when it comes to regular gigs in national news media, academia, or in the newly popular gravy train of corporate anti-racism training. At the bottom line of this all is the realization that the problems and pathologies afflicting the worse-off urban black communities can really only be fixed by the community itself. Blaming everyone else for those pathologies is a useless and potentially dangerous diversion. Discuss as you wish.