Blue-City Blackouts Expose the Left’s Race Hustle

Thousands of Gary, Indiana, residents are still without electricity two weeks after a violent storm system swept through the area. Leftists are claiming that the failure to get the power back on in this predominantly black suburb of Chicago is a result of “racism.” But there’s just one problem with that theory – everyone responsible for keeping the lights on is black.

On August 11, thunderstorms ripped through the Midwest around the southern tip of Lake Michigan and left more than 370,000 people without power. As of August 23, around 8,600 were still waiting, most of them in Gary.

To hear liberals tell it, the fact that so many residents are still in the dark is just another example of anti-black racism. In a since-deleted post, an X user going by the handle “@BlvckJxsus” wrote, “Gary Indiana [sic] has been w/o power for 11 days. gary indiana is 75% Black. yet another example of environmental racism, it is so f***ing disgusting.”

But it wasn’t just random social media users spreading this narrative. Bernice King, the daughter of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., alleged on Facebook that the power outage in Gary is “part of a pattern.”

“Black communities have too often been expected to endure conditions that would be treated as intolerable somewhere else,” she wrote. “We are expected to survive the neglect, absorb the loss, help ourselves, and wait for urgency to arrive.”

As it turns out, however, NIPSCO, the utility company responsible for servicing Gary, did respond with urgency. The only problem? Residents began shooting at NIPSCO utility trucks.

As a local NBC affiliate reported, “A NIPSCO vehicle was struck by gunfire on Friday night while utility crews worked to restore power in Gary, Indiana, prompting restoration efforts in the city to be temporarily paused.”

So, it seems that the utility company wasn’t ignoring Gary because its residents were black. It was forced to pause power restoration efforts because its crews were getting shot at by the very people they were trying to help.

The “racism” narrative gets even more absurd from there.

In 2024, NIPSCO was acquired by NiSource, one of the largest fully regulated utility companies in the United States. Lloyd Yates, the President and CEO of NiSource, is black. So are Melanie Birmingham, NiSource’s Group President for utilities, and William Jefferson, NiSource’s Chief Operating and Safety Officer.

In other words, the three officials at NiSource (the supposedly racist utility company that doesn’t care about black people) primarily responsible for returning power to Gary are all black.

Moreover, all nine members of Gary’s city council are also black.

Yet somehow the race hustlers want Americans to believe that the fact that the city is still without power is some sort of racist conspiracy against black people.

Conservative commentator Kira Davis pointed out in a post on X that “Gary is considered the bluest city in America with nearly total Democrat support.”

“Everyone there is at the mercy of the criminals, the weather and a chronically incompetent local government,” Davis continued. “It’s poor leadership and a disengaged population. It’s not racism. It’s apathy and thievery.”

But that analysis was apparently unconvincing for Tennessee Democrat State Representative Justin Pearson, who is already blaming power outages in Memphis following storms over the weekend on racism.

As readers may remember, Pearson is the same Democrat who was expelled from the Tennessee Legislature back in 2023 after he used a bullhorn and joined with protestors in taking over the Tennessee House floor, blocking official proceedings. He later won re-election to the same seat, however, and is now running for Congress in Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District with the backing of prominent progressive Democrats, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Summer Lee (D-PA).

“After a thunderstorm last night, 100,000 households in Memphis are without power – possibly until Thursday. It’s 90 degrees outside,” Pearson lamented on X. “Another majority Black, working class city left in the dark.”

Much like Gary, however, Memphis is almost entirely run by black officials. The city’s mayor, chief operating officer, police chief, and seven of 13 city council members are black. The idea that the city is failing to serve its residents because of conscious or unconscious racism by white people against non-white people simply does not hold water.

Additionally, there isn’t even much evidence that city officials and utility companies are doing a particularly poor job in restoring power. As of Monday afternoon, about 35,000 customers remained without power, down from a peak of more than 140,000.

The response in some corners of the left to power outages in Gary and Memphis exposes the intellectual bankruptcy of the left’s reflexive racial grievance narrative. When something goes wrong in a majority-black city, progressive activists reach for the “racism” explanation before bothering to ask what actually happened.

The result is not merely dishonest; it is destructive. By blaming every failure on some vague, omnipresent force of discrimination, Democrat leaders surrender all agency and conveniently absolve themselves of responsibility for crime, incompetence, crumbling infrastructure, or ineffective government.

At the same time, instead of demanding answers from the politicians who actually run these cities, liberal voters and activists blame an abstraction. That is how failure becomes permanent – accountability disappears, excuses multiply, and the same politicians remain in power while the problems only get worse.