ANALYSIS/OPINION:

It’s official. Black Lives really don’t Matter. At least not inside the Democratic Party.

For a party so thoroughly obsessed with race, it is amazing just how white they are.

If you were one of the Americans who declined to tune into last week’s Democratic debate, you missed just how thoroughly white the party of Barack Obama has become.

There was one candidate white as the snow drifts of Minnesota, two white socialists from the Northeast, a bumbling white former vice president and a white billionaire. And then a white mayor of a university town in Indiana.

The only drop of pigmentation on the stage came in the form of businessman Andrew Yang, who also happens to be the least insufferable of the bunch. Actually, Mr. Yang can be downright interesting at times and seems like he is at least trying to be honest when he speaks — something you cannot say about anybody else presently running for the Democratic nomination.

Obviously, the vast, vast majority of normal Americans have long ago moved on from paying any mind to such irrelevant nonsense. But the Democratic Party remains obsessed with race and making everything about race. So, if we are going to judge anyone by those standards, we should start with the Democratic Party.

Adding actual injury to insult, one of the dazzlingly white Democrats on the stage last week actually spent her entire white-privileged adult life pretending to be a woman of “color” to take advantage of programs designed to help actual people of color overcome past inequalities.

Part of me really hopes that Sen. Elizabeth Warren wins the nomination so that political opposition researchers can dig up all the deserving people who were denied opportunities at Harvard so that Ms. Warren could play cowboys and Indians.

Nowhere do Democrats’ pandering claims about Black Lives Matter ring more hollow than in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Gov. Ralph Northam remains in office despite his sordid history of wearing blackface, dressing up as — or alongside — a Ku Klux Klan member and calling himself “Coonman,” which many perceived as a racially motivated pejorative. Such a scandal would sink any politician.

But Ralph Northam? The leader of the Virginia Democratic Party? Nope.

Turns out, if you really don’t give a rip about all your party’s platitudes about racial sensitivity and how Black Lives Matter, you can do whatever you want and never pay a price. Also, it helps to be utterly shameless.

Nobody is prouder of this than Mr. Northam himself.

“I am the leader of this party,” he bragged in an interview with the Richmond Times-Dispatch as the anniversary of his blackface scandal drew near.

“Virginians have stuck with me and I am proud that they have,” he said, modestly, without providing evidence for such a claim.

“If you look at my life, at least my adult life, it’s been one of service,” he said. By “adult life,” Mr. Northam presumably meant his post-blackface life.

• Charles Hurt can be reached at churt@washingtontimes.com and on Twitter on @charleshurt.

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