Black Lives Matter has attracted some truly reprehensible people, and it will, in the end, almost certainly end up being a net loss for the economic and political well-being of black Americans. But it is not based on a fiction. Not entirely. We can argue (and should argue) over the data regarding black Americans’ interactions with the police, but there really isn’t any arguing that a significant share of America’s radically bifurcated black population is in a pretty grim position vis-a-vis municipal services, of which the police are one high-profile example among many. Given the state of education, housing programs, economic development, and simple services such as trash-collection in many black communities, it doesn’t exactly beggar belief to consider that African-Americans may be in many cases poorly served by the police, too.

Pardon me for noticing, though: Who, exactly, is in charge of these cities and city agencies about which African-Americans do have many legitimate complaints? Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago: Not exactly famous enclaves of conservative Republican political dominance. Because Dallas is in Texas, people sometimes forget that it is a city like any other American city, and Democrat-dominated. In Dallas, as in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Detroit, that Democrat domination is due in great part to a black Democratic voting bloc.

Eventually, someone is going to figure out that the black progressives protesting municipal arrangements in places such as Baltimore are protesting the municipal arrangements created by black progressives working for the interests of the Democratic party. Dallas’s racial politics aren’t as one-sided as Detroit’s, and neither are its party politics; it is Democratic, but not as lopsidedly Democratic as, say, Philadelphia. It even has had a Republican mayor (the office is technically nonpartisan) within living memory. No doubt somebody in Dallas already is trying to figure out a way to blame that mayor for the murder of those five police officers.