My article in today’s FrontPage:
Hating Whitey’s Brunch
By Matthew Vadum
Taking a page from the Ku Klux Klan, Black leftists are now trying to bring about social change by terrorizing people as they get together for Sunday brunch.
This past weekend, “Black Brunch” organizers and their followers stormed upscale eateries in New York City and Oakland, Calif., reading out the names of black criminals killed by the police and shrieking that whites had no right to be there. They accused whites of committing “genocide.”
This is what the Left does. Left-wingers politicize everything. Now they’re getting in the faces of people when they get together to enjoy brunch. If Barack Obama weren’t busy destroying America from inside the government, he’d be out in the field leading these retail-level petty terrorists.
Radical blacks also tried to shut down a ceremony in Oregon over the weekend in which Dario Raschio, a 100-year-old World War Two veteran, was given a medal. More than a hundred activists started shouting “hands up, don’t shoot,” forcing the white centenarian to urge the demonstrators to be quiet and to “show a little respect.” After three quarters of an hour of chanting, the town hall meeting was shut down.
Interrupting a meal, by comparison, may seem like a minor matter.
It’s not that disrupting Sunday brunch, a setting in which friends of all colors typically reconnect by putting their hectic urban lives on pause for an hour or two, is necessarily all that horrifying — in a way it’s comically pathetic — but the race hatred fueling the protest is real and disturbing.
The protest tactic itself is borrowed from racists, largely pro-segregation Democrats, of the past.
Harassing and taunting restaurant patrons specifically because of their skin color is Ku Klux Klan-like behavior. It’s what white segregationists did when blacks sat down at lunch counters in the South in the 1960s. Racist whites at the time said blacks had no right to be there. The racists of the Sixties were wrong then just as the Black Brunch racists are wrong today. Of course, today’s activists don’t see it that way.
According to politically correct dogma, blacks are incapable of being racist because they supposedly lack power.
Attacking diners is also a long-running tradition among community organizers.
Members of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now were outraged in 1996 when a business owner in Clayton, Mo., publicly took a stand against an ACORN-backed state ballot question to raise the minimum wage. Chanting angrily, ACORN stormed Bob Candice’s Italian restaurant and gave him a mock award for “Keeping People in Poverty.” ACORN acknowledged in-your-face tactics were part of the group’s standard operating procedure. “Intimidate the guy with the money bags,” said member Gus Stroud. “Try to make them understand.”
On the weekend Black Brunch participants posted defiant, self-righteous messages on Twitter about their protests, often including photographs of surprised-looking Caucasian brunch diners. The words they used could just as easily have come from a rant against Jews in Der Stürmer or The Final Call.
A woman named Camila Ibanez, who identifies herself as a “Community organizer,” tweeted, “ATTN WHITE Man, I have no guilt disturbing your brunch. Its [sic] YOU that has no right to be here. #blackbrunchnyc[.]”
Someone called Kat Yang-Stevens tweeted, “#BlackBrunchNYC happening now & white fragility is on full display. When confronted with complicity in genocide most whites brains melt[.]”
The individual is described in politically correct argot on his or her Twitter page as “Queer 1stGen Asian Am* settler/ writer / educator / agitator / organizer / smashing colonialist imperialist capitalist white supremacist cis-hetero patriarchy[.]”
Black Brunch activists reportedly told their captive audiences that, “Every 28 hours, a black person in America is killed by the police. These are our brothers and sisters. Today and every day, we honor their lives.”
Of course the activists ignored what these black individuals killed “every 28 hours” by the police were actually doing when confronted by police. Black youth, in particular, are incredibly violent, according to studies.
“[Y]oung black men do commit about 50% of the murders in the U.S.,” African-American John McWhorter, a professor at Columbia University noted in 2013.
He continued:
Hardly uncommon are cases such as the two black guys who doused a white 13-year-old with gasoline and lit him on fire, saying “You get what you deserve, white boy’ (Kansas City, Mo.) or 20 black kids who beat up white Matthew Owens on his porch ‘for Trayvon’ (Mobile, Ala.).
[I]t’s just fake to pretend that the association of young black men with violence comes out of thin air. Young black men murder 14 times more than young white men. If the kinds of things I just mentioned were regularly done by whites, it’d be trumpeted as justification for being scared to death of them.
To no one’s surprise, the depraved left-wingers at Salon sided with the brunch-busting racists. Salon assistant editor Joanna Rothkopf hailed the disruptions as “powerful demonstrations in predominantly white spaces” and smeared those who objected to the anti-white harassment as part of a “hateful backlash.”
Apparently only one prominent black politician in the Big Apple has denounced the brunch disrupters.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric L. Adams, a garden-variety identity politics-driven leftist who differs little on the issues from New York’s small-c communist mayor Bill de Blasio, said the restaurant occupations were a bridge too far.
“I think it’s unacceptable,” he said. “My private time is my private time. And I want to sit down and enjoy.”
Adams said he would have confronted demonstrators had they interfered with his brunch.
“I still need my moments of self-reflection and to re-energize myself, and I would tell them when is the appropriate time to speak with me,” he said. “I’m trying to learn more about what happened, but I don’t like to be disturbed at any time, and I don’t think anyone wants that.”
The theory behind the Black Brunch actions appears to be that annoying white people at brunch will somehow bring about social change.
The Weasel Zippers website published a 9-page manual that organizers prepared prior to the actions. (Soon after posting the document, the conservative website was hacked.)
In a blizzard of ahistorical, postmodernist-sounding drivel, the document states:
Anti-Black racism is a violent force that often diminishes the safety of Black people in public spaces. We reclaim our humanity and right to unapologetically hold space in public. Our history of struggle for Black liberation continues and we proudly draw on the tactics of previous Black struggles including slave rebellions, civil disobedience used during the Civil Rights Movement and movement to end apartheid in South Africa.
“There is a war on Black people in America that cannot be ignored,” it continues, “and the Black Brunch tactic is one that is committed to interrupting ‘business as usual’ until the war against us has ended.”
Of course anyone who is honest about race relations has to acknowledge that the United States is probably the least racist nation on earth. They also would have to admit that no one has deprived American blacks of their “humanity,” and that unfortunately police are quite reluctant to prevent trespassing activists from “hold[ing] space in public.”
Whoever wrote the manual is obviously well-versed in the organizing techniques of Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky.
The document also states:
It is our goal that this manual will help black people across the US to carry the weight of their pain to communities and to people who otherwise never have to think or feel for us. The beauty in the Black Brunch tactic is that it is easily replicable and allows for Black folks of all backgrounds, generations, identities etc. to mobilize together and create space for inclusive Black leadership and Black resistance.
The Black Brunch phenomenon comes as black racist attacks on white Americans are now being mainstreamed by the media. The explosion of black violence following the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner is barely reported at all.
Some brainwashed young whites even say they deserve to be attacked by blacks. Georgetown University School of Foreign Service student Oliver Friedfeld took diplomacy to absurd new heights after he was mugged, saying nice things about his assailants. In an op-ed that reads like a satirical piece from The Onion, this youthful useful idiot refuses to judge his attackers.
Who am I to stand from my perch of privilege, surrounded by million-dollar homes and paying for a $60,000 education, to condemn these young men as ‘thugs?’ It’s precisely this kind of ‘otherization’ that fuels the problem.
No doubt a job is waiting for this budding young diplomat at the State Department.