By Darren McKinney
As many Washington Post stories have since anti-police protests, arsons and lootings began a year ago, reporter Marissa Lang’s featured Metro story Sunday romanticized the life of two local protesters, including 21-year-old Jorryn Campfield, a “rookie protester” last May who “wanted to see the looting up close, wanted to feel the crunch of broken glass under her feet” [“In protests, lives changed forever,” B1, May 30].
Long story short, Ms. Campfield managed to get pregnant by another nightly protester who “did not want to participate in [Lang’s] story” and, just a guess, may be reluctant to participate in his newborn son’s life. But as some readers may recall, the late George Floyd’s father and the fathers of most criminals failed to play much of a role in their sons’ lives, too. So let’s all pray that Ms. Campfield’s baby-daddy can be coaxed into doing the right thing and breaking the self-dooming cycle of fatherlessness, so D.C. streets don’t erupt in flames again 20 years from now when another unguided man-child resists arrest or gets run over by an SUV when fleeing police on a scooter. If you’re not the praying type, you’re invited to visit Campfield’s audacious baby registry or the GoFundMe page set up to help her with housing costs.
Meanwhile, a Post front page story today, “Portland at a crossroads,” June 1], reports on the escalating, post-police street violence now ravaging that insanely left-wing enclave where “African Americans account for just 6 percent of the population” but “are dying at near-historic rates. . . .”
Last summer’s siege of Portland’s federal courthouse and anarchists’ imposition of a lawless “autonomous zone” of several square downtown blocks “have been replaced by a kind of generational hopelessness, a tenuous sense of security across an under-policed city and a return to an old-school style of gun violence reminiscent of a tit-for-tat cycle of deadly reprisals, almost always among [fatherless] young men of color,” writes Post reporter and would-be poet Scott Wilson.
Moving beyond today’s front page, the Post scrupulously avoids offering even a basic physical description of the almost certainly fatherless young black men, caught on surveillance video, now on the lam and subject to arrest for the murderous mass shooting outside a Miami-area rap show Sunday night [“Police search for gunmen in Miami -area shooting; at least 2 dead, 21 injured,” A4, June 1].
Readers will remember, however, that when a psycho white kid recently shot up Atlanta massage parlors his race was reported almost immediately by the Post, as were various editorial musings about his possible racial motives in speculative follow-up coverage. But white-guilt-tripping Post editors must feel it would be “racist” to similarly speculate about black killers’ motivations.
In any case, after several days of coverage of the dark 100th anniversary of the reprehensible white-on-black massacre in Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood [“In Tulsa, a day of ‘solemn energy,’, A3, June 1], one thing should be clear to fair-minded Americans of all races, if not to the reporters, columnists and editors of the Washington Post. Namely, that the whole rap for blacks’ continuing troubles – from fatherlessness and poverty, to achievement gaps and murderous violence – cannot be pinned on the Blue-Eyed Devil alone. So perhaps incoming Post executive editor Sally Buzbee can instill in her staff a fresh willingness to acknowledge and deal fairly with this obvious truth. (Congratulations on your first day in the new job, Ms. Buzbee! And best of luck.)