‘Black Brunch’: Collectivism Gives Anti-Police Protests Rationale to Strike Random Targets

AP Photo/David Goldman
AP Photo/David Goldman
John Hayward
New York, NY

Anti-police protesters decided it would be a good idea to storm restaurants in New York City and Oakland, California on Sunday, targeting eateries they decided were “white spaces” based on the skin color of the patrons.  This was supposed to link the current anti-cop fever to the lunch-counter civil rights protests of the Sixties — an attempted theft of moral credibility that should enrage the surviving veterans of the civil rights era.

Organized through social media, the “Black Brunch” protests featured gangs of protesters storming into restaurants and reading the names of black people who have died after confrontations with the police.  Something tells me that list wasn’t vetted very carefully for the circumstances of each death, which is another theft of moral credibility.  There’s a big difference between someone who gets shot after attacking police officers, and the genuine victims of improperly-applied lethal force.  Mixing them all together into a list shouted into the faces of captive restaurant audiences is wrong on every level.

Yahoo News collected a few social media posts from the Black Brunch crew, which somehow managed to invade numerous restaurants without anyone getting arrested, even though they boasted of resisting management requests for them to clear out:

 

Rekiya Boyd is the only one of the three women named in this “Black Brunch” Tweet who was actually killed by the police, specifically an off-duty Chicago police detective named Dante Servin, who claimed someone in the group of people standing around Boyd in an alleyway pointed a gun at him.  He fired into the crowd and hit Boyd, fatally injuring her.  No weapon was recovered from the scene; it is believed the object that prompted Servin to open fire was a cell phone.  Servin was indicted for involuntary manslaughter, reckless discharge of a firearm, and reckless conduct, precisely the sort of legal treatment these protesters claim they would have been satisfied with if grand juries in other states had indicted the cops involved in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.  His trial was originally set for last month, but has been postponed until early 2015.

Renisha McBride was killed by a panicked Detroit-area homeowner after knocking on his door late at night, possibly because she had been involved in an accident and was looking for help.  The homeowner, 55-year-old Theodore Wafer, said at trial that he was nervous about rising crime in his neighborhood, and was groggy with sleep after being awakened by an early-morning knock on his door; he responded by firing through the door with a shotgun, immediately calling 911 to report the incident.  Wafer was sentenced to serve at least 17 years in prison before he is eligible for parole.

As for Shaniqua Proctor, she was arrested without injury for disorderly conduct in Bessemer, Alabama and was found dead of a drug overdose in her cell, according to the official autopsy results, but local activists decided to link her death to the Eric Garner “I Can’t Breathe” protests, claiming that she had asthma and died in a delayed reaction to the pepper spray that was employed to subdue her when she resisted arrest. Of course, the innocent patrons of various eateries who were targeted for abuse by protesters, explicitly and solely because of their skin color, probably would not have known these details.  They just heard someone burst into the restaurant and start screaming a list of names.  These weren’t peaceful demonstrations, as a few of the livelier reports collected by Gateway Pundit make clear:

Good job, kids, you managed to make an innocent woman who bought lunch at a lawful place of business cry!  Naturally, the protesters have imbibed deeply of left-wing Marxist power rhetoric and believe themselves incapable of committing racist offenses — as one of them explained, “Black people lack the power dynamic necessary to be racist 2 whites.”  For those keeping track of organized communist infiltration of the anti-cop movement, the same character crowed about “disrupting bourgeois brunch.”

We’re right back to the same crackpot reasoning that drove the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose ideological DNA (and manpower) survives in the anti-cop movement.  Because society is guilty of collective offenses in the minds of these people, the rules of discourse and civilized conduct do not apply to them — they have an unrestricted right to force themselves upon captive audiences, forcing people to listen to them.  Since they believe in collective guilt, they can choose their targets at random, and since they believe themselves in possession of unlimited moral credibility because of institutionalized racism, they think they deserve a pass for even the most blatantly racist offenses.  They’ve been wronged, so nothing they do can be wrong.

Surfing on the breakers of such a movement provides a heady rush, as can be seen from those gleeful celebrations of innocent restaurant staff and patrons reduced to tears or bullied into shouting matches.  Other malcontent movements, such as the aforementioned communists and the rump of the Occupy movement, are plugging their own causes into the anti-police movement’s moralistic power supply.  (It’s no coincidence that public and private property rights, including the right of restaurant owners to provide a peaceful dining experience for paying customers, are the first things to go out the window with this crew.  They don’t much care for capitalism, and often see themselves as its victims, not constructive participants.)  We’re going to see more of this behavior, especially if the authorities do not act to prevent or punish it.

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