The enforcement of ideological purity: how the topic of black-on-black crime is handled by the left

Leftist write Lee Fang quotes a black man about Black on Black crime.

During protests, he tweeted this interview with an African-American man named Maximum Fr, who described having two cousins murdered in the East Oakland neighborhood where he grew up. Saying his aunt is still not over those killings, Max asked:

“I always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?… Like, if a white man takes my life tonight, it’s going to be national news, but if a Black man takes my life, it might not even be spoken of… It’s stuff just like that that I just want in the mix.”

Fang is denounced and forced to recant.

It’s what you’d expect, if you’re familiar with leftist thought on race. First of all, such talk is verboten because it’s an argument that the right sometimes uses, which of course makes it racist by definition because everyone knows that the right is racist. But it’s also racist because it blames black-on-black crimes on black people, as though they are at fault, which of course they’re not because everything seemingly bad that a black person does is a result of systemic racism at the hands of white people. So to mention black-on-black crime without blaming white people for it is to be racist. QED.

Forget about Maximum Fr, whose family is outraged and grieving at what happened to their loved ones. Maximum Fr is not to be blamed, though, because in the mind of the left he doesn’t know any better. He said what he said about black-on-black crime because he’s not educated as to the real causes. He’s not an anti-black racist, he’s just ignorant. His opinion does not count. It’s the young reporter Lee Fang, whose progressive credentials are peerless (ThinkProgress, The Nation) who’s to blame because he should know better.

Even the fact that Fang was quoting another person such as Maximum Fr rather than making the statement himself is no excuse, because such remarks must be censored no matter who utters them. They inflame the tender sensibilities – not of inner city black people such as Maximum Fr – but of Fang’s mostly white leftist colleagues. Fang (who I’m going to assume is most likely an American of predominantly Chinese heritage, which would give him no favored-group status at all) has transgressed and must be made to apologize or become an unperson. One never knows if the apology will be enough, but apparently in this case it was.