Watch: Women Cleaning Up Graffiti Told They're Showing 'White Privilege'
Apparently cleaning up after a riot is now racist.
That is what three women in Washington, D.C., were told as they removed Black Lives Matter vandalism from a federal building this week.
The women, by all appearances, had taken it upon themselves to clean up graffiti on a building in the city following multiple nights of large-scale rioting.
Sadly, they were berated for doing so, and accused of exercising “white privilege.”
In a viral Twitter video, the ladies are seen scrubbing the letters “BLM” from the Lafayette Building, a federal office building in our nation’s capital, when they were confronted.
A passing motorist, who was identified online but later deleted her social media accounts, filmed her exchange with the women, whom she accused of not caring about “black lives.”
Breaking: It’s now racist to clean up graffiti. pic.twitter.com/UzEKGoPaHq
— Digital Forests (@DigitalForests) June 4, 2020
“Why are you guys removing Black Lives Matter’s graffiti?” the woman asked them from her vehicle. “Why do you want that to come off?”
“Because it’s a federal building and we care about our city,” one of the women responded.
“So, you don’t care about black lives then?” the angry woman asked them.
“We certainly do care about black lives,” one of the ladies said.
“Not enough to leave up a message?” the motorist asked.
“We don’t disagree with the message, ma’am, it’s just on the building. We’re just trying to clean it,” one of the young ladies explained.
“Not a great way to use your white privilege, ladies,” the enraged woman said as she berated the women. “That’s disgusting.”
The woman has since disappeared from social media following her display of contempt for these good citizens, who apparently were guilty in her eyes of helping preserve a National Historic Landmark.
There is a theory in criminology that I first learned of while studying for a law enforcement career in college.
I never became a police officer, but even today, when I work cases as a licensed private investigator in the urban areas of the state of Oklahoma, I think of the broken windows theory.
The broken windows theory is essentially this: In areas where there are visual signs of crime and neglect — places where buildings have broken windows or otherwise obvious signs of decay — it is likely that such areas can become hotbeds for crime and havens for nefarious activities.
These areas represent lawlessness, and people of goodwill do not want to look at them.
Law-abiding people tend to avoid such areas, and as a result, crime tends to run rampant in them, as they become magnets for the unlawful, who fill the vacuum left behind by good citizens.
When good citizens see areas with broken windows, chipped paint and graffiti, there is a natural sense to avoid them, the broken windows theory tells us.
But due to the events of the past week or so — since the death of George Floyd, who died with a knee on his neck while in the custody of the Minneapolis Police Department — broken windows and painted messages are prevalent in areas that are frequented by people who do not engage in committing crimes.
As buildings in American cities have been burned, looted and defaced amid ongoing civil unrest, some of our country’s most beautiful landmarks, places that stand for the principles on which the country was founded, are now a symbol for what can occur when anarchy takes hold of an area of a city.
So it’s reasonable that a good citizen, or good citizens, would want to eliminate any signs of the decay of from areas which otherwise represent the virtues of freedom and democracy.
The Lafayette Building was completed in 1940, and its previous inhabitants, those at the Federal Loan Agency, helped the country fund its fight against global tyranny during World War II.
These young ladies, apparently recognizing the significance of the area, or wishing to preserve the rule of law, were simply being stewards of faith and goodwill, and servants for the greater good.
Like most people, they didn’t want to see a good neighborhood remain in disarray.
Graffiti on a historic building is unsightly and screams of instability, no matter what message that graffiti promotes.
Opponents of the broken windows theory have attempted to discredit it since former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton used broken windows policing to clean up the city, beginning in the early 1990s.
The tactic, by any rational metric, worked, as even NPR admitted in its takedown of the tactic.
It curtailed crime and it angered the right people — those on the far-left.
So, as we see citizens take it upon themselves to clean up the aftermath of riots that are owned by the left in recent days and weeks, it is again angering the right people.
Criminals, and those who defend them, are aiming for the takedown of the values on which our republic was founded.
It will take actions from ordinary citizens, like the ladies in this video, to restore a sense of order.
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