Black Lives Don’t Matter *UPDATED*
Black lives don’t matter. How do I know this? Because if black lives really mattered, blacks would stop killing each other. Blacks would stop committing genocide against themselves by aborting more children than they allow to be born. Blacks would stop consigning generations to poverty by having the majority of their children out-of-wedlock. And blacks would stop treating education as punishment and instead treat it as an opportunity.
Until blacks start changing these pathologies, the whole “Black Lives Matter” movement, with its insistence that everyone has to change except for blacks themselves is nothing more than Progressive kabuki theater aimed at diverting attention from the fact that Democrats are facilitating self-destructive behaviors in the black community and that blacks are using the Democrat propaganda machine as an excuse to avoid the terrible (but not insurmountable) challenges that really claim black lives.
Here’s a bit of data to support my premise:
According to The Guardian, which tracks the number of people who die at the hands of American police (an interesting thing for a British paper to track, right?) in 2015 American police allegedly killed 1,146 people. Of those, 79 were unarmed blacks (or not quite 7% of those killed). So far in 2016, American police have allegedly killed 566 people, of whom 24 were unarmed blacks (or 4% of those killed). While I wish each of those numbers was zero, the fact is that they are an infinitesimally number compared to the almost 40,000,000 blacks in America.
I’m sure some of those shootings were the results of bad decision-making in the heat of the moment, with a small percentage definitely reflecting police malevolence or even racism. But let’s put those numbers in perspective before we get too upset.
In 2015, 129 officers died in the line of duty. So far in 2016, 61 officers have died in the line of duty. To give some perspective, we need to know how many police there are in America, which is a little hard to nail down because there are so many different kinds of police, ranging from federal to state to county to municipal, etc. A rough estimate, though, puts the total number of police at around 1.1 million. One doesn’t have to run the numbers to realize that police die at criminal hands at a greater rate than unarmed black people die at police hands.
In other words, if anyone should be out protesting on America’s streets, it’s the cops.
So if police aren’t doing all the killing what are the real scourges in the black community, scourges over which the cops have no control:
The scourge that allows Obama and fellow Leftists to start calling for “gun control” is black on black murders. Although the DOJ and other law enforcement agencies are getting increasingly shy about reporting racial statistics in connection with violent crime, in 2010 the DOJ published an analysis looking at violent crime from 1980 through 2008. Its conclusions on race were stark — blacks are grimly determined to kill as many of their own race as possible:
Blacks were disproportionately represented among homicide victims and offenders
In 2008, the homicide victimization rate for blacks (19.6 homicides per 100,000) was 6 times higher than the rate for whites (3.3 homicides per 100,000).
The victimization rate for blacks peaked in the early 1990s, reaching a high of 39.4 homicides per 100,000 in 1991 ( figure 17).
After 1991, the victimization rate for blacks fell until 1999, when it stabilized near 20 homicides per 100,000.
In 2008, the offending rate for blacks (24.7 offenders per 100,000) was 7 times higher than the rate for whites (3.4 offenders per 100,000) ( figure 18).
The offending rate for blacks showed a similar pattern to the victimization rate, peaking in the early 1990s at a high of 51.1 offenders per 100,000 in 1991.
After 1991, the offending rate for blacks declined until it reached 24 per 100,000 in 2004. The rate has since fluctuated, increasing to 28.4 offenders per 100,000 in 2006 before falling again to 24.7 offenders per 100,000 in 2008.
Keep in mind that the above numbers pre-date “the Ferguson effect.” It turns out, sadly, that after blacks succeed in driving the much-reviled cops out of their communities, the killing escalates:
“We are in the midst of a very abrupt, precipitous and large crime increase,” says Richard Rosenfeld, a respected criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He is the author of a study released Wednesday by the Justice Department examining reasons for the increase.
Specifically, murder is spiking — in urban areas. Rosenfeld says last year in the country’s 56 biggest cities, homicides jumped 17 percent.
“That’s a far larger percentage increase than in nearly any other year we’ve seen over the last couple of decades,” Rosenfeld says.
[snip]
But there’s another potential explanation that does, what Rosenfeld and others call the “Ferguson effect.” It refers to the August 2014 shooting death of an unarmed 18-year-old African-American man by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo.
Rosenfeld concludes in his study that some of the increase may be attributable to “some version of the Ferguson effect.”
Chicago is the perfect example of a city in which blacks, having made the police reluctant to do their jobs, have turned on each other with feral savagery:
In the first five months of 2016, someone was shot every two and a half hours and someone murdered every 14 hours, for a total of nearly 1,400 nonfatal shooting victims and 240 fatalities. Over Memorial Day weekend, 69 people were shot, nearly one per hour, dwarfing the previous year’s tally of 53 shootings over the same period.
[snip]
Through the end of May, shooting incidents in Chicago were up 53 percent over the same period in 2015, which had already seen a significant increase over 2014. Compared with the first five months of 2014, shooting incidents in 2016 were up 86 percent. Certain police districts saw larger spikes. The Harrison District on the West Side, encompassing West Humboldt Park, for example, had a 191 percent increase in homicides through the end of May. Shootings in May citywide averaged nearly 13 a day, a worrisome portent for summer.
[snip]
In 2014, blacks in Chicago made up 79 percent of all known nonfatal shooting suspects, 85 percent of all known robbery suspects, and 77 percent of all known murder suspects, according to police department data. Whites were 1 percent of known nonfatal shootings suspects in 2014, 2.5 percent of known robbery suspects, and 5 percent of known murder suspects, the latter number composed disproportionately of domestic homicides.
[snip]
The Emanuel-appointed Police Accountability Task Force claimed that police shooting data give “validity to the widely held belief that the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color.” The task force pointed to the fact that of the 404 individuals shot by the police between 2008 and 2015, both fatally and nonfatally, 74 percent (or 299) were black, and 8 percent (or 33) were white. Predictably, the task force said not one word about black and white crime rates, which were even more disproportionate in 2015 than in 2014. In 2015, blacks were 80 percent of all known murder suspects and 80 percent of all known nonfatal shooting suspects. Whites made up 0.9 percent of known murder suspects in 2015 and 1.4 percent of all known nonfatal shooting suspects. And blacks were overwhelmingly the victims of criminal shootings as well. In 2015, 2,460 blacks were shot lethally and nonlethally, or nearly seven blacks a day. By contrast, roughly 30 blacks were shot lethally and nonlethally by the police in all of 2015. Those 2,460 black victims of criminal shootings constituted nearly 81 percent of all known shooting victims. Seventy-eight whites were shot in 2015, or one white every 4.6 days, constituting 2.5 percent of all known shooting victims. If 74 percent of police shootings have black subjects, that is because officer use of force is going to occur most frequently where the police are trying to protect the law-abiding from armed and dangerous suspects—and that is in predominantly minority neighborhoods.
When it comes to killing, black lives don’t matter to the people doing the vast majority of that killing: blacks.
It’s not just felonious killing that’s the issue in black communities. There’s also a huge problem with legally sanctioned killing in the form of abortions. In state after state, black women abort their babies in numbers far in excess of black representation in the overall population. In 2013, in Louisiana, black women had 60% of abortions despite blacks being only 32% of the population. In New York in 2012, there were more black babies aborted than born alive.
Across America, black teens have initiated a holocaust against future black generations. The data is tragic:
[B]lack teenagers between 15 and 19 years old have an abortion rate of 41 per 1,000 women, more than twice the national average of 18 per 1,000. In comparison, white teenagers have an abortion rate of 10 per 1,000 women, which means that African-American teenagers are having abortions at a rate that is about four times higher than that of their white counterparts.
When it comes to eugenic-style race decimation, black lives don’t matter to the people in the forefront of purging black lives: blacks.
Black lives in America are being destroyed in other ways as well. Take the matter of single-mother homes, which statistically consign any children raised in those homes to a lifetime of poverty. Single motherhood is soaring across America, throughout all racial demographics. Numerically, there are now more single white mothers than there are single black mothers — but that’s reasonable given that there are many more white women in America than black women.
What’s more interesting is the percentage of women within a specific race who opt to go it alone. In 2011, 67.8% of black women had children without fathers, while only 26% of white, non-Hispanic women made that choice. In Chicago today, the numbers are even worse: “Fatherlessness in the city’s black community is at a cataclysmic level—close to 80 percent of children are born to single mothers in high-crime areas.”
Worse, when there are multiple children living with a single mother, it’s highly likely that none of those children share a father. To the extent that men roll into and out of the home, each of those men is a significant threat to any child with whom the man does not share any genetic material:
A 2001 study in Child Maltreatment found that “the presence of a non-biological father figure in the home should be considered a significant predictor of a future child maltreatment report.” In a sample of 644 mother-child pairs, the authors found no significant difference in maltreatment between mother-father households and single-mother households, but did find that children with a cohabiting “father surrogate” were “twice as likely to be reported for maltreatment after his entry into the home.”
When it comes to putting black children at risk, black lives don’t matter to the people who too often make life choices dangerous to black children: blacks.
Although I contend that, with the loony tunes having taken over American academia, kids leave college less educated than they were when they entered, the reality is that education in America is still a predictor of economic success. Heck, being able to read and do math with ease is a predictor of economic success. Unskilled labor is physically hard and pays badly. Skilled work, whether blue or white collar, still brings in those middle-class dollars. So how are blacks doing in school? Badly:
Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.
Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.
I don’t believe that this differential has anything to do with overall intelligence. Instead, I’m pretty sure that black academic failure has a great deal to do with a culture that still castigates education as a “white” thing, unworthy of blacks.
When it comes to putting black children at economic risk, black lives don’t matter to a racial subgroup that denigrates education: blacks.
The biggest threat to black health and well-being in America is other blacks. Yet if you look at the Democrat race mongers, whether in politics, entertainment, or the media, when they decry problems in black America, none will ever say that black communities need to step up to improve their own lives. Instead, it’s all a blame game: whites, Republicans, Congress, Jews, teachers, police, racism . . . you name it, they’ve got a finger pointed anywhere other than their own behaviors.
And maybe, just maybe, blacks wouldn’t be enraged to the point of killing if the first black American president, instead of continuing the Kabuki theater of focusing on everything but blacks’ own behavior said this:
“Yes, there is racism in America. Yes, there are racist cops and just plain bad or stupid cops. But here’s the deal: At some point, the black community has to take responsibility for itself. It’s not up to the cops, good or bad, to stop you from aborting blacks, killing blacks, and consigning future generations of blacks (those who escape abortion) to lifetimes of poverty. You need to make the change. You need to take advantage of educational opportunities. You need to stay away from drugs. You need to get married before starting a family. And you need to stop killing each other. And here’s a thought to chew on: When you stop engaging in these suicidal behaviors, you might find that you’re on the receiving end of fewer behaviors that you claim are racist.”
UPDATE: I’ve been drowning in legal work for the past week, which has prevented me from adding a few thoughts to what I wrote above. I finally have a little time, though, so I thought I’d offer the following update:
I am not the only one to have noticed a problem within the black community that only blacks can fix. People with a much more intimate understanding of the problems of black crime, poor relationships between blacks and the police, and the overall, visible failure of a sadly significant portion of the black community, have weighed in along the same lines that I have. These words by a black police officer are “must read” material in that regard.
I simply want to state here what I didn’t include in the original post, which is that I recognize that the majority of American blacks are just ordinary folk: hard working, law abiding, etc. The problem is that there is a large and visible minority of blacks — especially in Democrat-run cities — who are not ordinary folks and, indeed, who too often prey on those in their community who struggle to live ordinary lives.
The Black Lives Matter movement insists that this sub population is the sole creation of white privilege and tyranny, and therefore that blacks as a whole have no responsibility to repair the terrible tears in the fabric of too many black lives. I believe that’s wrong. I believe that the black community can only be prepared when it stops looking to the government (especially the Democrat Party) for help and starts working on itself.
To that end, BLM shouldn’t be blocking freeways and attacking cops; its members should be marching through the slums of Detroit, LA, NY, DC, and Chicago, exhorting the residents to raise themselves up. The fact that BLM wouldn’t dream of going to those places and making those demands, not on white people two thousand miles away, but on the black residents themselves, but instead confines its efforts to sun-dappled, expensive college campuses, and relatively safe neighborhoods in urban communities, speaks volumes about BLM’s goals, all of which involve divisive shakedowns, rather than community uplift.
