While white liberals littered your Instagram feeds with black squares and Washington, D.C.’s, elite donned kente cloths to take a knee for George Floyd, the Beltway’s black residents who live across the Anacostia River were being shot and murdered in disproportionate numbers, bringing the district’s overall homicide count to a 16-year high. But you would hardly realize the violent crime crisis engulfing the nation’s capital until this weekend, when the violence finally came to the doorstep of D.C.’s elite.
During a Saturday baseball game at Nationals Park, one Arlington woman who had left the game to wait for an Uber was caught in the crossfire of two cars shooting at each other. Despite the fact that the shooting had no actual relation to the game, the chaos from the sound of the gunfire forced not just a premature end to the game but also a national news cycle about D.C.’s crime problem.
While the supposedly most woke activist class in the country was screaming about defunding the police in the name of racial justice, D.C’s least privileged black residents paid the price. Despite comprising just 22% of the district’s overall population, Wards 7 and 8, where more than 9 in 10 residents are black, comprise more than half of last year’s homicides. The same is true of armed assaults from this point last year to now. But because one cop more than 1,000 miles away murdered an unarmed black man (a crime for which he is rotting in prison in part because other cops testified against him), D.C. continued its ridiculous push to defund the police, putting actual black lives in jeopardy to appease the activist class.
Walk anywhere outside of the tony enclaves of Georgetown or Capitol Hill, or the continually gentrifying luxury of Navy Yard or Logan Circle, and the problem has been evident for well over a year now. But to a ruling class with hashtags and the plaudits of performative activism as their moral compasses, one woman getting shot outside Nationals Park, a physical and symbolic harbor of the elite, is a tragedy; hundreds of those poor folks getting shot across the river is just a statistic.
It’s why the Nats shooting became national news while the murder of 6-year-old Nyiah Courtney, who was shot alongside five other adults in the Anacostia neighborhood of Congress Heights on Friday, went all but ignored by the national media. It’s why Mayor Muriel Bowser addressed the Nats shooting within 24 hours, but she ignored the murder of Mohammad Anwar, a Pakistani immigrant who was killed by two teenage girls in a carjacking in broad daylight just outside of Nationals Park, just not during a game.
Nyiah Courtney’s life mattered. Mohammad Anwar’s life mattered. But it’s clear that some only believe so once the sort of crime that killed those two unfortunates finally came to their own privileged doorsteps.
Bowser and her ilk treated last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests as a self-promotional affair because to them, that’s all it really was. Bowser capitalized on the moment to audition for a job in the Biden administration, and the rest of D.C.’s elite realized it was an opportunity to signal to the woke that they ought to be eaten last. But as far as actually believing in the mantra, it seems pretty clear that only some black lives matter to the ruling class.
