The war on standards, knife fight edition

When I began my “war on standards” series many years ago, I recognized that the left was trying to tear down core standards of behavior and merit for no other reason than the fact that one racial group was failing, disproportionately, to meet them. I expected the rot to spread far and wide, and it has — to the detriment of society.

However, I never thought it would spread to an attack on the standard against knife fights.

Yet, that now has happened, following the fatal shooting of a black teenage girl who attacked another black teenage girl with a knife. John Kass reports:

One of the more insane developments from the tragic shooting death of knife wielding Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio, has been the emergence of a desperate fantasy from the political left:

The “Let the kids have their knife fights” coalition that must think “West Side Story” is real life.

Valerie Jarrett, the former Obama administration adviser, offered her idiotic notion, echoed by many others.

“A Black teenage girl named Ma’Khia Bryant was killed because a police officer immediately decided to shoot her multiple times in order to break up a knife fight,” Jarrett tweeted. “Demand accountability. Fight for justice. #BlackLivesMatter.”. . .

“Teenagers have been having fights involving knives for eons,” tweeted Bree Newsome, a prominent defund-the-police activist. “We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon against one of the teenagers.”

Kass points out that the Bryant incident wasn’t a knife fight. The girl Bryant attacked was unarmed, from all that appears. It also seems clear that the only way to prevent Bryant from stabbing the victim was to shoot the perpetrator (and not in the leg).

But the larger point is that (1) knife fights shouldn’t be deemed business as usual among teenagers, such that the police must refrain from doing what’s necessary to prevent stabbings and (2) Jarrett and Newsome wouldn’t be arguing that they should be if Bryant had been a white girl attacking a black girl (or, indeed, if both Bryant and her potential victim were white).

Conservatives have responded to this line of argument primarily with parody. That’s probably the best response, given the obvious idiocy of what Jarrett and Newsome have said. One shouldn’t have to demonstrate, as Kass does, that stabbings can very easily be fatal.

But it’s no laughing matter that the war on standards has taken us to the point where teenage knife fights are viewed by some on the left as “girls being girls.” At this point, I can’t help but wonder if any standard that Blacks disproportionately fail to meet, no matter how self-evidently justified the standard, is safe from attack from the increasingly influential Black/left coalition.

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