Do Black Lives Matter or does only the narrative matter?
Obama spokesman Josh Earnest revealed a deeper truth when he said of US engagement with ISIS that we are “in a narrative fight.” How true. In all matters, the Left shapes a narrative untethered from reality — and then forced American law and culture to conform to this narrative. Nowhere is this more apparent than with Black Lives Matter.
The Leftist Narrative Does Not Care About Black Lives
If Black Lives Matter, the protesters would be in Obama’s Chicago every single day, standing as a human bulwark protecting innocent people from the killers among them.
If Black Lives Matter, the protesters would spread out to failing schools and (a) help maintain order so that children can learn and (b) impress upon the children that knowledge is the key to freedom and personal financial stability.
If Black Lives Matter, the protesters would be agitating for right-to-carry laws in majority black communities so that law-abiding citizens can readily defend themselves against men who ignore the gun control laws controlling America’s most dangerous communities.
If Black Lives Matter, the protesters would be working as hard as possible to shut down all of the Planned Parenthood facilities situated (as Margaret Sanger once dreamed) in primarily black communities that often abort more black babies than are born.
If Black Lives Matter, we would accord American blacks the dignity of expecting them to conform to the life plan that sees so many white people achieving economic stability: get educated, get married, get a job, have children, and make sure daddy sticks around. Instead, the professional Left contends that it’s racist to preach this colorblind conduct to an American cohort that, in the early 1960s was ascending the economic ladder based on this behavior until Johnson’s Great Society chased fathers out of the home in favor of welfare checks from Uncle Sam.
If Black Lives Matter, the infamous “talk” that black parents have with their children wouldn’t tell them that whites are out to get them but would, instead, tell them (a) in any interaction with police, follow their orders and save your fight with them, if you have one, for later when you won’t get shot and (b) reinstate the black middle-class pattern predating the Great Society: education, marriage, children…. Parents would teach their children to become masters of their destiny, not flotsam and jetsam drifting through increasingly perilous waters to an inevitable violent death.
Democrat-Driven, Dysfunctional Black Culture, Not Racist Police, Is The Problem
Here’s the ugly reality: To the Left, Black Lives don’t really Matter. What matters is the narrative — and the narrative is that blacks must turn their eyes away from the self-destructive behavior decades of Democrat policies have forced upon them and, instead, focus all their rage and frustration on the thin blue line that, in many neighborhoods, is all that protects the prey from the predators.
The reality — not the narrative — is that police are the least of the problems American blacks contend with in today’s society:
The exceedingly inconvenient fact of the matter for the “cops are preying on black men” narrative is that far more whites than blacks are killed in confrontations with police. Last year, in fact, it was roughly twice as many.
The social justice warriors can’t have that, of course. So, making like Olympic judges from the old Soviet bloc they so resemble, today’s narrative repairmen knead the numbers to make the story come out right. The spin becomes “fact,” dutifully repeated in press coverage and popular discussion.
In this instance, the hocus-pocus is to factor in that, although there are 160 million more whites than blacks in the country, this 62 percent portion of our population accounts for “only” about half of “police involved” fatalities (49 percent). Blacks, by contrast account for an outsize 24 percent of the deaths despite being only 13 percent of population.
The premise of this exercise is ludicrous. By and large, police are having lethal interactions not with the nation’s total population but with its criminal population.
The elephant in the room, the fundamental to which we must never refer, is propensity toward criminality. It is simply a fact that blacks, and particularly young black men, engage in lawless conduct, very much including violent conduct, at rates (by percentage of population) significantly higher than do other racial or ethnic groups.
Keith Lamont Scott, the man whose death set Charlotte aflame (after Soros shipped in his paid protesters and the Nation of Islam crawled on the BLM train), is a typical example of the black community’s unwillingness to confront head-on the genuinely evil people allowed to flourish so that their very existence can be a Leftist tool with which to bludgeon the white establishment:
He had been convicted of assault with a deadly weapon in two different states and convicted of assault in three states. He had been hit with “assault with intent to kill” charges in the 90s. His record of virtue included “assault on a child under 12” and “assault on a female.”
The media spin; “Family and neighbors call Scott a quiet ‘family man.’”
Nothing says “quiet” like “assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill” and nothing says “family man” like assaulting women and children.
Keith Lamont Scott, the latest martyr of Black Lives Matter and its media propaganda corps, was shot while waving a gun around. He had spent 7 years in jail for “aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.”
Scott’s reign of terror over anyone unlucky enough to get in his path came to an end when another black man, Brentley Vinson, made a split-second judgment call that Scott was imminently about to shoot the police trying to disarm him. Vinson is everything Scott was not:
The son of a police officer, Brentley dreamed of following in his father’s footsteps. He used to organize his football team’s bible studies and mentored younger players. Former teammates describe him as a “great guy” with “good morals.” His former coach calls him a “natural leader” and says that, “We need more Brent Vinsons… in our communities.”
If Black Lives really Mattered, the entire BLM establishment would have held Scott up as a terrible example, who made decisions throughout his adult life that led inevitably to his death, and would be lionizing Vinson, a man who has lived a model life by any standards — but that’s not what’s happening. Scott is reconfigured as a plaster saint, while Vinson is deracinated, his black skin vanishing into his blue uniform.
In Both Tulsa And Charlotte, Police Responded To Behavior, Not Skin Color
Having set out what I believe are the parameters for the cultural debate — facts v. narrative — I’d like to direct your attention to two fascinating posts, both of which describe what’s going through police minds when they end up involved in interactions with unstable or dangerous citizens. The first is a long, but very readable, article by Detective Chelsea Whitaker, a black woman in a Dallas Area police department. Whitaker walks readers through every step of a police officer’s thinking when he (or she) is confronted by the facts surrounding Terence Crutcher’s shooting in Tulsa, starting with the fact that he abandoned his car in the middle of the road:
As a detective, Mr. Crutcher’s vehicle did not appear to be a disabled vehicle. It appeared more like an abandoned vehicle. When people commit burglaries and robberies, they typically steal a vehicle so that they can commit their crime. After the crime is over, they drive the stolen vehicle away from the scene, get into their real vehicle and drive away. Many times when people commit these crimes, they leave the car running, they jump out of the vehicle without putting it in park, they let the vehicle crash into a wall and a long list of other methods of abandonment. Those people don’t care about the stolen vehicle. Their primary concern is to escape quickly. As a detective, I have seen this many times. No one is around the vehicle. Many times the vehicle hadn’t even been reported stolen yet. The way that Mr. Crutcher’s vehicle was parked diagonally across the yellow line made me think that the vehicle was “abandoned” as opposed to a stranded motorist because of my experience. This does not mean that Mr. Crutcher’s vehicle was not actually disabled. It is possible that his vehicle was disabled. I am just saying what my detective sense told me when I first saw the vehicle. Maybe he told his family he was having car trouble earlier in the day or maybe the family has some other reason to continue saying that his car broke down. I don’t know. I will be interested in hearing what becomes of his vehicle problems. I hate to be sexist, but I will. I have never had a man have car issues and jump out of his vehicle, after parking it diagonal in the middle of the street.
[snip]
As soon as I heard the 911 calls and watched the video of him walking away from the officers, the detective in me immediately believed that Mr. Crutcher was on PCP. There is no doubt about it in my cop mind. I look forward to hearing the autopsy report because I am willing to bet that they will find it in his system. After hearing the 911 calls and seeing his behavior, some things started to make more sense to me. If Mr. Crutcher was high on PCP, he may have actually believed that his vehicle was about to blow up. Many people on PCP believe that they have ants crawling all over them. Some of them take off their clothes in an effort to get the ants or other perceived pests off of them. Some of them run away at fast speeds for no reason. Some of them believe that people are trying to harm them. Some of them believe that they need to attack or hurt people for their safety. After hearing all of this, I don’t believe his car actually broke down. I think his PCP kicked in and he thought his vehicle was going to blow up. If any of us thought that, we would jump out of the vehicle in whatever state it was in at the time. That explains why he left his vehicle in the middle of the street parked diagonally.
You really should read the whole thing, here. No matter how much his family claims Crutcher was trying to turn his life around if he was hopped up on PCP he was a suicide-by-cop waiting to happen.
The second thing you should read is the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department’s statement about what happened to Scott, along with some video footage that partially shows what was going on:
I consider blacks to be men and brothers, and women and sisters. That means that I expect that they are capable of the same standards of behavior I demand from my children. In that, I differ from the professional Left, especially the Soros-funded Black Lives Matter astroturf movement. On that side of the ideological spectrum, blacks are neither men nor brothers; and they are neither women nor sisters. They are widgets who can be manipulated to achieve larger goals.
A couple of months ago, I wrote a satire imagining Satan behind the Black Lives Matter movement, which he is using to destroy the Second Amendment. Although I was definitely joking in that earlier post, I am certain that the Democrat party is using and abusing American blacks to achieve its larger goals. Once it achieves its goals, it will abandon blacks just as surely as it abandoned women when the transgender movement gave the professional Left better political traction and a more useful springboard to attack conventional religion in America.
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