The “white savior”slurs Jeff Brown

It was bound to happen.

If you are a white person and don’t loudly and endlessly proclaim that you are “anti-racist,” then you are a racist to the Woke.

If you are a white person and have actually done things to help Black people, then you are derisively slurred as a “white savior.”

By some of the Woke.

And that’s where mayoral candidate and ShopRite owner Jeff Brown finds himself.

He has opened some of his supermarkets in minority neighborhoods a.k.a. “Food deserts,” he has hired ex-cons a.k.a. “Returning citizens,” he has talked the talk and walked the walk, yet gets labeled “white savior” by self-appointed Black savior Asa Khalif, a so-called “racial justice activist” who has a potty mouth, a bullhorn and virtually no followers. 

I first heard of him some years ago when he claimed to be the local leader of Black Lives Matter. Alas, the actual leaders of Black Lives Matter said, uh, no he’s not.

As a matter of fact, Black Lives Matter Philadelphia said, “Any attempts on his behalf to promote himself as the voice of Black Philadelphia activists is disingenuous and self serving.”

But some in the media, a few anyway, keep pretending he is more than a solitary actor reciting a soliloquy with a loud voice.

There are racial inequities in our society, but Khalif’s actions are designed more to draw attention to himself than to solve problems — such as by interfering with government process and by vilifying police in an attempt to provoke them into striking back. 

I have seen him get in the face of white cops and call them MFers and racists, while using the N-word on Black cops. Provocative without purpose.

In 2017, Khalif and a henchman disrupted a planned City Hall news conference. Here’s how I described the scene:

“City Council President Darrell Clarke was at the lectern when Khalif and Gardner started screaming about justice, dropping the F-bomb and the MF-bomb, and actually questioning Clarke’s blackness. Clarke responded that he grew up in North Philly.

“To Clarke’s right, Mayor Kenney was twisting in a throne-like chair, his chin resting on his right palm, his face expressionless. Here’s a pet Kenney project announcement being torpedoed, and what does he do? Nothing.”

After being harangued for 10 minutes, Clarke and Kenney slithered out of the room, handing Khalif a victory.

“This is part of an ongoing campaign, with Khalif promising to ‘shut down’ any meeting he chooses. His rationale is that City Hall is the ‘people’s house’ and that he has a right to speak and protest peacefully.”

That is unquestioned, but City Hall is everyone’s house, and he has no right to stop business. That’s not free speech — it’s anarchy.

In 2019, Khalif ran for an at-large seat on City Council, and that proved to be a big mistake. He received 1.4% of the vote, which placed him lower than whale dung in the results. His astonishingly poor showing proved that when he speaks, he is speaking for himself and practically no one else.

In January of that year, Philadelphia magazine profiled Khalif, and the headline said “he might just have a shot” at being elected. 

Robert Huber wrote the profile — he didn’t write the headline — and made the mistake of calling Khalif a leader of BLM, which we know he was not. But he did present an accurate bio of Khalif, complete with his vocabulary dominated by MFers. 

So this is the guy, Khalif, who is throwing racial slurs at Jeff Brown, a guy who actually has improved Black lives through his stores’ policies.

As they say, critics are like a**holes. Everyone’s got one.