Black Lives Matter needs to change its name 

To the Editor:

The weekend before George Floyd was gruesomely murdered by renegade police in Minneapolis there were 40 people shot in the black sections of Chicago. Ten of them died. Worse — this was not an atypical weekend in Chicago.

The Black Lives Matter movement and Alice Green had nothing to say about the violence and deaths.

In the ensuing violence following Mr. Floyd’s death, a number of people including African Americans were brutally killed by rioters, among them David Dorn, the 77-year-old ex-police chief of St. Louis.

The Black Lives Matter movement and Alice Green have had nothing to say about Mr. Dorn’s murder.

On Saturday, June 6, the Times Union reported on the shooting  of a 10-year-old boy — the fourth person shot in Albany in a week — when two so-far-unidentified men began shooting at each other in Albany’s South End. Albany County District Attorney David Soares was quoted as saying, “It’s evident [the shooters] don’t care about themselves and they don’t care about people living in this community.”

Albany Police Chief Eric Hawkins was reported as saying that Albany is facing a sharp jump in gun violence with shootings, shooting victims, and confirmed shots-fired incidents all roughly triple from what they were in 2019. He also said that city police have made 15-percent more gun arrests than in the first five months of  2019.

The Black Lives Matter movement and Alice Green have had nothing to say on these matters, either.

In the chaotic aftermath of Mr. Floyd’s death, we have seen crowds, city councils, and mayors calling for the defunding or total abolition of police forces. It does not take a genius to understand that innocent African Americans would suffer vastly more than other groups in cities such as Chicago if these irresponsible demands were ever implemented.

George Orwell's novel “Animal Farm” was an allegory using animals to represent the events of the Russian Revolution in which the slogan “All animals are created equal” was usurped by the vile pigs — representing the Communists. They seized control and occupied luxurious living conditions and changed the slogan to “All animals are created equal but some animals are more equal than others.”

Whatever its true original purpose, it seems that Black Lives Matter needs to change its name to “Black Lives Matter, But Some Black Lives Matter More Than Others.”

Michael Nardacci

Albany