I sometimes feel guilty criticizing Justin Phillips, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist whose specialty is Black issues. He really annoys me with his anti-police rhetoric and his “Black people are always right and White people are always suspect” approach. At the same time, I realize that I, too, am kind of fixated on certain topics here on the blog, so maybe I need to cut Justin some slack.
(By the way, why does the Chronicle capitalize the word “Black” but never the word “white”? As a writer who loves the English language, that makes no sense, from a grammatical point of view. But the Chronicle’s current management has made race their idée fixe, and so “Black” people deserve the honor of a capital letter while “white” people don’t. Isn’t that racism? I’ve emailed the editors and reporters repeatedly asking for an explanation, but nobody’s bothered to give me the courtesy of a reply. If this isn’t an example of wokeness perverting our language, I don’t know what is.)
Anyhow, Justin’s latest complaint is that, although San Francisco has elected lots of Black political leaders (Willie Brown, Kamala Harris, London Breed), Black people are “poorly represented when it comes to the issues that affect them most.”
What does Justin mean? He is offended by San Francisco’s “disappearing Black population,” which he blames on current and past leadership, as if the city’s Mayors and District Attorneys have the power to set housing prices. He also criticizes Breed personally for refusing to defund the San Francisco Police Department of $120 million “and investing it in the African-American community.” Of course Breed refused to comply with such a stupid, dangerous stunt. Crime is bad enough in San Francisco; stripping SFPD of that much money would have been sheer madness, and the citizens of San Francisco wouldn’t have tolerated it.
Justin also rehashed the left’s familiar trope of San Francisco “cops beating, rubber-bulleting and tear-gassing Black Lives Matter protesters.” Justin makes it seem like this happens all the time. Actually, the last time SF cops used those tactics was back on May 30, 2020, more than two years ago, when a George Floyd demonstration grew completely out of control and threatened large tracts of the city. That night, more than 80 people were arrested when looting and vandalism struck shops from Union Square to Market Street and South of Market. Thank God for SFPD, I say. I have no problem at all with police stopping violent demonstrators intent on destruction. In fact, if they didn’t, I’d be the first one condemning them for failure to do their jobs.
But Justin Phillips doesn’t care about public safety. Like his woke colleagues in Oakland, he blames the disproportionate stopping and arresting of Black people on racism, rather than on what we suspect is the true cause: a disproportionate number of Black people committing crimes. I’m fully aware of how some people object to that statement, but I won’t shy away from speaking the truth just because it upsets people who don’t like truth. When Justin goes so far as to bash the new S.F. District Attorney, Brooke Jenkins—herself a Black woman--for her “tough-on-crime” approach, he reveals himself, yet again, as completely out of touch with the vast majority of San Franciscans, who are not racist; they just want peace and safety.
Where Justin gets his analysis egregiously wrong is when he talks about the “counterintuitive dynamic of Black politicians misrepresenting Black constituents.” This is disingenuous babble. Black Mayors and Black District Attorneys aren’t elected to “represent Black constituents,” they’re elected to represent ALL of us, thank you. If Justin Phillips thinks that London Breed and Brooke Jenkins should turn a blind eye to Black crime just because they’re Black, then I’m grateful he has no power, beyond his capacity to air his grievances in a newspaper that long ago lost all credibility.
Steve Heimoff