In what one local resident called “criminal extortion,” Black Lives Matter “activists” in Kentucky’s largest city have threatened businesses in its East Market District, also known as NuLu (New Louisville).
Meet our demands for racial reparations, they warn, or we’ll tarnish you with bad (false) online reviews.
As WDRB reports, “Protesters blocked off East Market Street to hold a block party Friday. Before the Louisville Metro Police Department arrested dozens of people, the protesters delivered lists of nine demands to each business.”
“The demands came with a deadline of Aug. 17, or else protesters would respond by launching negative reviews and social media posts about the businesses,” the site also informs.
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Provided by Daily Wire, the BLM demands are as follows:
1. Businesses will adequately represent the black population of Louisville by having a minimum of 23% black staff (including management) in front of house positions, and maintain commitment and accountability to increasing that number (accountability roundtable information below).
2. Retail locations will include a minimum of 23% inventory of black retailers OR make a recurring monthly donation of 1.5% of net sales to black local organizations.
3. Business owners will require diversity, equity, & inclusion training for their staffs, to be conducted by any one of the black women leaders on the attached list. Training will be conducted thereafter on a bi-annual basis.
4. Customize your own OR display one of the attached written statements in a viable location within your business to increase awareness and show support for the reparations movement.
5. Non-profits in NuLu district will submit to a voluntary, external audit of their board of trustees and take necessary steps towards 23% representation on those boards.
6. Business owners & non-profit leaders will participate in quarterly roundtable discussions to be held accountable for their communities to these demands, and work together towards increased equity.
7. Maintain adequate black representation in any entertainment and performances booked at your business.
8. Dress code policies inherently discriminate against black folks, women, and the transgender community. You must eliminate dress code policies that promote profiling towards patrons and employees, including their hair requirements or stipulations, which can disproportionately target black folks.
9. 23% black representation on the board of the NuLu Business Association.
Below is a short WLKY news video on the story.
Of course, one could ask what’s next. Why not quotas for Hispanics and every other group as well? Why just blacks?
Overlooked, conveniently, is that there has never been a time or place in history in which all groups were proportionately represented in every endeavor, as Dr. Walter E. Williams has pointed out. Group variation in inclination and capacity — whether resulting from nature, nurture, or both — preclude this.
Moreover, the BLM activists specialize in selective proportionality. They only strive for this “ideal” when “underrepresented” are politically favored groups, such as blacks, women, or the alphabet axis (“LGBTQ”); it’s ignored otherwise, such as when whites are “underrepresented” in the NBA.
There is, however, a truly problematic underrepresentation — of guts in Louisville. A case in point is Rick Murphy, president of the NuLu Business Association, who apparently isn’t a big fan of the rallying cry “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.”
While Murphy did say “I hate the word demands,” reports WDRB, he also stated, “Many of us have embraced not only the protests in downtown Louisville, but the protests through the country calling for change.” In fact, his board created a “Social Justice Committee” three weeks ago to help act upon such demands.
Yet Murphy may one day learn the hard way that he can never be sufficiently “woke” for the cultural revolutionary mob, just as the pandering Seattle and Portland mayors learned (assuming they can learn). These radical leftists — driven by all-consuming, burning hatred and envy — won’t stop until they have their “Year Zero,” but even then won’t be happy because evil designs don’t yield happiness. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, those seeking power or pacification by riding the back of a tiger will end up in its belly.
Part of the BLM extortionists’ justification for their demands is that the NuLu area has undergone “gentrification,” which they say has displaced black people. As their letter states, “This process has been happening to black, indigenous, and persons of color at the hands of white, heterosexual patriarchy since the inception of this nation we call home,” reports the Sun.
“Black folx can’t ‘have this own space’ when wealthy white folks see an opportunity to make more money,’” the paper further relates.
“Gentrification is a palatable term that sugar coats one more aspect of an oppressive system targeted at black folx for 400 years,” the letter continues. “We are here today to demand representation over tokenism.”
Yet there’s some interesting hypocrisy here. Regarding complaints about black or Hispanic neighborhoods turning white due to population shifts, unasked is: What were these neighborhoods demographically before they were black or Hispanic?
Answer: Usually white.
(For example, New York City was 98-percent white in 1900.)
Moreover, earlier complaints about these neighborhoods becoming black or Hispanic, and there were some, are now labeled “racist.” Yet the current griping about their once again becoming white is called “activism.”
There’s more, too. When whites moved from city neighborhoods into the suburbs, it was demeaned as “white flight”; it’s also condemned for eroding cities’ tax bases and social fabric and is ostensibly why, as I reported Friday, cultural revolutionaries aim to destroy suburbia. But when whites do return to a city neighborhood, it may then be called a “bleaching out” of the area, as the New York Times did in 2015. So whites are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
The bottom line is that you just can’t make cultural revolutionaries happy, which brings us to this story’s moral:
Don’t even try.
Image: screenshot from YouTube video
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
