The Black Lives Matter movement has blamed a litany of death and violence on police nationwide. Their accusations are false, and their “solutions” cause increased carnage.
In the two years since Ferguson, Black Lives Matter (BLM) has gone from a hashtag on social media to a force to be reckoned with. But the basic premise behind the Black Lives Matter movement and its agenda — encapsulated by the slogan “Hands up, don’t shoot!” — is a lie. This premise is that racist white police officers who systematically and routinely target black men for violence and murder are the single greatest threat to black men — and that black police officers are sell-outs for going along with the systemic racism of police departments across the nation. The false narrative has been used to condemn the police and to justify riots and mayhem. And so as BLM has grown, the war on police has grown, as well.
By casting the issue as a matter of racism, the people and organizations responsible for the war on police have made it almost impossible for police groups to offer any defense; the mere accusation of “systemic racism” is at once both an indictment and a conviction.
While BLM insists that the phrase “Black Lives Matter” includes the silent and implied “Too,” as in “Black Lives Matter, Too,” the reality is that it actually includes the silent and implied “Some,” as in “Some Black Lives Matter.” Crime statistics show that the narrative of BLM is predicated on a lie that is designed to hide a simple truth. That truth, if the numbers are allowed to speak for themselves, is that black men are themselves the single greatest threat to black men. Before this writer is accused of racism, he did not say that. A black man did. That black man is a police officer in Palm Beach County, Florida, who writes under the name of Jay Stalien. In a viral Facebook post, Stalien made the salient point that crime statistics tell a very different story than that which is put forth by BLM.
As a black young man growing up in Brooklyn, New York, watching the increase of black-on-black crime in his community waste the life of one young black man after another, Stalien decided to become a police officer and do what he could to help make black lives better. As he wrote in his viral post:
I wanted to help my community and stop watching the blood of African Americans spilled on the street at the hands of a fellow black man. I became a cop because black lives in my community, along with ALL lives, mattered to me, and wanted to help stop the bloodshed.
As a police officer, Stalien said he came to realize that
Black Lives do not matter to most black people. Only the lives that make the national news matter to them. Only the lives that are taken at the hands of cops or white people, matter. The other thousands of lives lost, the other black souls that I along with every cop, have seen taken at the hands of other blacks, do not matter. Their deaths are unnoticed, accepted as the “norm,” and swept underneath the rug by the very people who claim and post “black lives matter.”
Part of his realization was based on the fact that the very people who march in protests shouting that “black lives matter” when a police officer of any color shoots a black man — even when that black man was armed and committing a violent crime — will flatly refuse to help police solve the murder of black men killed by other black men.
In an effort to understand what was going on, Stalien began researching the claims of BLM in light of the evidence. His research eventually led him to a study of crime statistics by University of Toledo criminologist Dr. Richard R. Johnson in which Professor Johnson examined the most recent data available from the FBI and Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The findings of that study unravel the threads of the BLM narrative and reveal that black men kill other black men at a rate 40 times greater than do police officers.
That study shows, as Michele Hickford wrote for the website of Allen West:
On average, 4,472 black men were killed by other black men annually between Jan. 1, 2009, and Dec. 31, 2012, according to the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports. Using FBI and CDC statistics, Professor Johnson calculates that 112 black men, on average, suffered both justified and unjustified police-involved deaths annually during this period.
So BLM is protesting the average yearly death toll of 112 black men at the hands of police while completely ignoring the nearly 5,000 black men killed each year by other black men as a direct result of the collapse of black culture in the inner cities of America. Of course, BLM also ignores the fact that the vast majority of those 112 black men killed by police, on average, each year were violent criminals, with many of them threatening the life and safety of the officers who were attempting to arrest them for their crimes.
By blaming the deaths of black men on racism, BLM has not only dodged the responsibility of doing something to make black lives better, it has actually aided and abetted the deaths of nearly 5,000 black men a year at the hands of other black men. And by targeting police, BLM is endangering the one group of men and women who routinely put their own lives on the line to prove that “black lives matter.” It takes little imagination to predict the outcome in these crime-ravaged, lethal neighborhoods if the police who lay their lives on the line to protect them continue to be hamstrung. In the absence of police, those inner-city ghettos would quickly go from bad to worse.
And yet while police officers of every color risk their safety — and their lives — to take dangerous criminals off the streets in the inner city, BLM misses no opportunity to attack police and defend the very criminals who have terrorized black lives.
Time and again BLM has seized upon the deaths of dangerous criminals to foment violence and destruction. Recent examples include Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Sylville Smith in Milwaukee, and Keith Scott in Charlotte. In the first two cases, black men were armed, were in the process of committing crimes, refused to obey lawful orders from police, and attempted to use their weapons on police. The only difference in the third case may be that Scott has not been shown to have actually pointed his weapon at the officers. In all of these cases, police officers were left no choice but to use lethal force against the criminals, and then BLM used the deaths of these dangerous criminals as a pretext for rioting and looting while shouting “black lives matter!”
BLM is employing a common tactic of subversives: divide and conquer. By drawing the battle lines along racial lines, the “leaders” (read “agitators”) of the movement have largely succeeded in blurring the fact that this issue is not about race; it is about culture.
The Cambridge English Dictionary defines “culture” as “the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time.” So culture is about behavior, customs, and beliefs, not color. A person born into a particular culture may choose to live by the norms and mores of a higher or lower culture. One can “switch” cultures; one cannot “switch” races. Race and culture — while often seen as related — are separate things. While all races — like all individuals — are created equal, the same is not true of cultures.
Any examination of different cultures will reveal — to the honest observer — that some cultures are better than others. Some cultures have built civilization while others have destroyed civilization. Some cultures have fostered a sense of society, while others have torn down that sense of society. Some cultures elevate a sense of duty to others over selfish pleasures, while others posit that Self is greater than Other. Some cultures consider the mental and spiritual to be more worthy than the merely physical and sensual. Some cultures value human life, while others do not.
Of course BLM ignores all of this because it does not fit the narrative that racism is at the root of the problems in black America. If BLM wanted to address the root problems in the black communities, it would have to ask some hard questions such as, “Why is crime — including and especially violent crime — higher in black neighborhoods?” and “Why do young black men have such low rates of graduating high school — not to mention college?” and “Why is an intact black family almost an anomaly in the inner city?” There are only three possible answers to these — and similar — questions: (1) The white supremacist claim that black people are genetically inferior to white people, (2) the politically correct claim that black people are being held down by the white man, and (3) the recognition that it has nothing to do with color and everything to do with culture. It is a fact that there are millions of hard-working, educated black people who have prospered and made something of their lives. Among them are millionaires and businesses owners and doctors and lawyers and congressmen and senators and governors and even a president. These facts remove the illusion of the legitimacy of answers (1) and (2), leaving the fact that the culprit is culture, not color.
The main culprit in the decline of culture, which has led to the new wave of crime and lawlessness in the cities of America, is the decline of the intact black family — particularly in the inner cities. After the dark days of slavery — and even during the dark days of Jim Crow — black culture, marked by intact families and a strong work ethic, was the backbone of black communities. As George Mason University economist and best-selling author Walter E. Williams has said, “There is no question, though it’s not acknowledged enough, that black Americans have made greater gains, over some of the highest hurdles and in a very short span of time, than any other racial group in mankind’s history.”
But now, the modern disintegration of the black family has reversed most — if not all — of those “greater gains.”
For instance, between the 1920s and the mid 1960s, the rate of blacks in America with at least four years of college had risen from a paltry one-tenth of one percent to 4.7 percent, according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education and the U.S. Census Bureau. That means that in 1965, the college graduation levels of blacks was nearly half that of whites. And while in 2008 the percentage of blacks in America with college degrees had risen to about two-thirds that of whites, there are a couple of important facts that need to be considered before those numbers appear to be an improvement: (1) A disproportionate number of blacks in America with college degrees today are either immigrants from Africa or the West Indies or their children; (2) In the 25 years between 1940 and 1965, the percentage of blacks in America with college degrees had risen from less than a quarter that of whites to almost half that of whites. If that trend had continued, it is reasonable to conclude that blacks born in America would likely have graduation levels equal to or greater than whites born in America. Instead, the numbers — when immigrants and their children are removed from the equation (and not allowed to artificially skew the numbers) — show that the gap is wider than it was before all of the government “programs” for black Americans. Since education is a major key to prosperity, a lack of it is a path to poverty.
So what caused the reversal of the rise of a strong, family-oriented, educated, black culture? Williams aptly lays the blame at the feet of the welfare state, writing in an article entitled “Black People Duped,” “The black family managed to survive several centuries of slavery and generations of the harshest racism and Jim Crow, to ultimately become destroyed by the welfare state.”
And while blacks are in positions of authority and power in cities all across America, those cities are unfortunately controlled and held down by the same liberal politics that are also to blame for the crime and poverty many blacks know as their only reality. As Williams wrote recently:
Among the nation’s most dangerous cities are Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, Memphis, Milwaukee, Birmingham, Newark, Cleveland and Philadelphia. These once-thriving cities are in steep decline. What these cities have in common is that they have large black populations. Also, they have been run by Democrats for nearly a half-century, with blacks having significant political power. Other characteristics these cities share are poorly performing and unsafe schools, poor-quality city services, and declining populations.
Williams is not the only black man with the courage to say that. In the wake of the riots in his city, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke wrote in an editorial piece for The Hill:
Here are the facts: Milwaukee is run by progressive Democrats. Their decades-long Democrat regime has done nothing to reduce these urban pathologies, in fact, their strategies have exacerbated the situation by expanding the welfare state.
That things have not improved and in fact worsened in the American ghetto after eight years of Barack Obama is remarkable only to those who have not been paying attention to our nation’s cities.
Clarke went on to say that the blacks in Milwaukee who have drunk deeply at the poisoned well of BLM “are the ones lied to, exploited by and ultimately manipulated by the Democrats who claim to care.” He added, “They are victims of the Left, but they are not without blame. It’s time for them to remember their own humanity, their own dignity, and to fight for that return to the American Dream that the Left would withhold from them.”
Rather than address the root problems in black communities, and help them “return to the American Dream,” BLM has capitalized on and exacerbated those problems. And it appears the reason BLM has done this is simple: money. As has been widely reported as a result of leaked e-mails and documents, BLM has been heavily funded by George Soros and other deep-pocketed leftists. One leaked report shows Soros funding BLM to the tune of $650,000 with the goal of seizing “a unique opportunity to accelerate the dismantling of structural inequality generated and maintained by local law enforcement.” But that $650,000 is just the beginning. The Washington Times recently reported that between the Soros Open Society Foundations and the Center for American Progress, BLM has been the beneficiary of $33,000,000. And just to top matters off, the Ford Foundation and Borealis Philanthropy have recently formed the Black-Led Movement Fund with a six-year commitment to a pooled donor campaign in the amount of $100,000,000.
The organizations under the BLM umbrella could use those millions to actually improve black lives by hosting education and job training programs, as well as drug and alcohol abuse prevention programs and programs to encourage abstinence before marriage and fidelity within marriage to help break the cycle of poverty that always accompanies low graduation rates, high drug and alcohol dependency rates, and high illegitimacy rates in any society. If black lives mattered to these “leaders” in the BLM “movement,” they would seek ways to make black lives better. Instead they use black lives as cannon fodder in their war on police — which is part of a larger war on society.
Take for instance just one of the many subversive organizations that will receive part of that $100,000,000 from the Ford Foundation and Borealis Philanthropy. The Movement for Black Lives (MBL) advocates for programs that are the very antithesis of those that would help black lives. MBL’s website (www.policy.m4bl.org/platform) lists their demands for reparations, including free college and a higher minimum wage, with no requirements for the one receiving the “wage” to perform any work in order to receive it. One is left to wonder what the free college education is for if people will get money for nothing. MBL also demands the legalization (they prefer the term “decriminalization”) of drugs and prostitution. Their demands go so far as to make such policies retroactive and to include additional reparations for those who have been jailed for these crimes. And with a wink and a nod to Marx and Engels, MBL demands “economic justice,” to include “collective ownership, not merely access” of businesses in black neighborhoods.
The Marxist nature of these and other demands of the organizations under the BLM umbrella are a clear indicator of the real intent of BLM. The deep-pocketed funding by the likes of Soros, the Center for American Progress, the Ford Foundation, and Borealis Philanthropy show that BLM is the means, not the end. BLM is little more than a tool of social revolutionaries who have waged a war on police as part of a broader war on the society that police officers have sworn to serve and protect.