Black Conservatives Laugh at BLM Protest After They Notice No Black People
I have a new hashtag for your consideration: #BlackLivesMatterSoWhite.
Like it? I think it’s catchy and accurate. For all the talk about how black people are taking to the streets to demand equal treatment, one thing that’s curious about the recent spate of protests is that they don’t seem, well, very black.
When white people began showing up en masse to these events, people attributed it to bad actors. The right said it was antifa, while the left said it was “white power” groups.
There couldn’t have been that many of either group, however — and really, it was mostly just virtue-signaling white people.
Conservative Benji Irby — who is black — found out just how white these protests were when he and friend Shemeka Michelle came across one at the North Carolina state Capitol in Raleigh.
In a viral post last week, Irby said the protest was 100 percent white.
He said he “was coming here to be a nerd and add this to my collection of State Capitol selfies when we ran into a #BlackLivesMatter … protest… with NO BLACK PEOPLE!
“Should we go over there & ruin their day right now?”
Me and @ShemekaMichelle at the North Carolina State Capitol.
I was coming here to be a nerd and add this to my collection of State Capitol selfies when we ran into a #BlackLivesMatter protest…
with NO BLACK PEOPLE! ??♂️
Should we go over there & ruin their day right now? ?? pic.twitter.com/tuPwkNKuYL
— Benji Irby ??♂️?? (@realBenjiirby) June 27, 2020
Irby, the host of “UnPopular Opinion” on YouTube, talked about the encounter Tuesday on “The Jason Rantz Show” on KTTH-AM.
“As we were walking down a little path, Shemeka was like, ‘Is that a Black Lives Matter sign?'” he said. “And I’m like, ‘What? Is this a Black Lives Matter protest?’ And I’m like, ‘But there are no black people.’ And I’m like, I don’t even do live videos, but I have to share this video, this is absolutely crazy. And there was a whole Black Lives Matter protest there — not a single black person at all.
“So we were laughing at that, but also we were laughing at the irony that we, the two Trump-supporting black Republicans who are known for this, are the two black people of all the 40 million black people in America, that we are the two that would run into this thing.”
ICYMI: @realBenjiirby, host of Unpopular Opinion, was at the state capitol in North Carolina and saw a Black Lives Matter protest — without any black people at all. He tells @JasonRantz about the irony in a tweet that’s gone viral.
LISTEN: https://t.co/SNG5FfJ3CJ
— AM 770 KTTH ? (@770KTTH) June 30, 2020
It’s almost as if these Black Lives Matter protests aren’t black people speaking for themselves.
And it’s not just anecdotal evidence that says these protests are about the unbearable wokeness of being white. A Pew Research Center poll about the protests found that only one in six people who went to the protests was black — and almost half were white.
“Black Americans account for 17% of those who say they attended a protest focused on race or racial equality in the last month, compared with their 11% share of all adults in the survey,” a news release from Pew Research Center said.
“Hispanic Americans account for 22% of recent protest attendees, versus 15% of all adults. The difference is less pronounced but still statistically significant when it comes to the share of protesters who are Asian (8% vs. 5% of the adults surveyed). While 64% of U.S. adults are white, just 46% of those who said they attended a protest focused on race in the last month are white.”
You probably didn’t need numbers on this one. All you needed to do was go on Instagram or Twitter and look at “influencers” proving how woke they are by talking about the perniciousness of racism in America as if they had just discovered it; they were Paul on the Damascene road, and watching the video of the events that led to George Floyd’s death forced the scales from their eyes.
The most capital-W Woke influencers went out to the Black Lives Matter protests as if tweeting selfies from them was helping with black liberation.
And yet Pew said protest-goers were “more likely to be nonwhite and younger than Americans overall.”
This is technically accurate but overstating the case. Keep in mind that a sign of being ostentatiously woke and white is saying you’re muting yourself so that black voices can be heard. But notice how loudly and loquaciously white liberals talk about how they’re muting themselves.
They’re being just as loud as they always were, if not louder. The irony is lost on them.
And then there’s the beautiful contrast here. Oh, look, a bunch of white people who are Very Angry at what’s happening to black people — and black people who are utterly perplexed at their attitude. In fact, they’re openly derisive of the protesters, laughing at the preposterousness of the situation.
My guess is that this isn’t confined to black conservatives, either. Everyone realizes just how this is nothing more than ostentatious self-flagellation of privileged white people — and no one wants to say anything.
Benji Irby is one of the few willing to point at the naked emperor. One can only hope more will follow his lead.
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