What do you do if ou think black lives matter?

Can anyone speak or write candidly about welfare reform, affirmative action, capitalism, anti-crime measures, or measures taken against voter fraud, without being called a racist?

Kevin Williamson writes:

It is a seldom-appreciated irony that irresponsible allegations of racism are politically effective in the American context precisely because American society takes racism so seriously; in a society with more cavalier attitudes toward racism, such dishonest opportunism would bear less fruit. Politicians in Spain and the Republic of Korea, for example, worry a good deal less about insinuations that they might harbor insensitive racial attitudes. But in the context of the United States, one can effectively win a political argument not by demonstrating to any reasonable standard of evidence that one’s opponent is a racist but simply by maneuvering him into explaining that he isn’t a racist. It’s the “Have you stopped beating your wife yet” gambit on a grand and nasty scale.

So when former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani takes seriously the operative slogan of the Ferguson protests — “Black Lives Matter!” — and asks the obvious question — “Don’t they matter in the 93 percent of cases when the lives of black murder victims are taken violently by black criminals?” — the Left’s reflexive response is to denounce him as a racist. The Washington Post’s hilariously Orwellian fact-check column labeled Giuliani a liar even as it confirmed that his observation is, as a matter of fact, entirely true.

But real life doesn’t go according to script. That’s why we have the New York Times et al. — to write the script according to the Left’s dramatic imperatives, regardless of what actually happens. The media may not control the stage entirely, but they do control the lighting and the sound.

And thus we have the very peculiar situation in which “Black Lives Matter!” but black perpetrators don’t. Only white perpetrators matter. And if, as in the case of George Zimmerman, they are not exactly white, then they can be declared white by the New York Times. Only white perpetrators matter to the people behind the Ferguson protests because only white perpetrators are politically useful.

If you believe that black lives matter, then you should be working for school reform, economic growth, and — yes — more effective law-enforcement and crime-prevention measures to protect black communities, which suffer an enormously disproportionate share of crime and violence. Never mind the stagecraft: That’s what you actually do if you think black lives matter.

And the drama that’s going on in Ferguson right now? That’s what you do if you think black lives are merely useful to you — and, in the end, expendable.

Read more here.