by Alex Carros
It doesn’t seem like a week can go by without the political left asserting ad nauseum that the police are endemically and systemically racist, and that black Americans are being butchered by the hundreds because of it. Even at the funerals of slain police officers, they (in this case, the President) cannot seem to help themselves. Vacuous buzzwords like “institutional racism” and “white privilege” have become favorites amongst these shameless race baiters, including the especially fact-free movement known as Black Lives Matter. Not only are their indictments against law enforcement largely (almost entirely) counter to the facts; their unashamed demonizing of our men and women in uniform have actually led to the deaths of more black Americans than the supposed evil, racist criminal justice system. If we want to improve race relations in this country, it can’t be done by scapegoating the police or white Americans. For these reasons, Black Lives Matter has accomplished nothing towards actually improving black lives in the US. In fact, they’ve made it exponentially worse.
For starters, almost none of their claims has any basis in reality. The infamous “hands up, don’t shoot” mantra, for example, was based on a provable lie: Michael Brown never had his hands up, had assaulted Darren Wilson, and attempted to reach for his gun. The supposed widespread, unapologetic shootings of unarmed black men? Not true: studies from Harvard and the University of Washington have both shown that black suspects are *less* likely to be shot than white suspects under similar circumstances. The unfair sentencing disparities between black and white convictions? Again, not true: a meta-analysis conducted by U.S Department of Justice titled ‘The Relationship between Race, Ethnicity, and Sentencing Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis of Sentencing Research’ found that these disparities “can be explained by differences in legally relevant factors such as offense seriousness, prior criminal record, and other legally legitimate factors” and concluded that “it is virtually impossible to statistically prove the existence of discrimination.” So why do black Americans seem to have more interactions (including violent ones) with police officers? Well, the simple inconvenient truth is that, proportional to population, black Americans commit more crimes than white Americans. Here are the facts: despite constituting only 15% of the population, blacks have committed 45% of homicides, 62% of robberies, and 45% of assaults in the country’s 75 largest counties. Black-on-white crime is eight times more likely than the reverse, and the number 1 leading cause of preventable death in young black men is other black men (for whites, it’s car accidents).
Despite all of this evidence, Black Lives Matter bends over backwards to paint police officers as the bad guys rather than look at themselves in the mirror. And this wilful delusion has deadly consequences. Their rhetoric has not only inspired cop-killers in Dallas and Louisiana, but a nation-wide vilification of law enforcement that has caused crime-rates to skyrocket; our police now no longer feel wanted or appreciated (why should they?), so they have simply checked out of proactive policing. And as a direct result, black Americans are dying: in the countries largest cities (such as Baltimore), homicide rates have risen anywhere from 54% in Washington D.C. to 90% in Cleveland.
If Black Lives Matter actually cared about black lives in this country, they would stop trying to pass the blame onto other people and take responsibility for themselves and for their own communities. The best place to start? Addressing the utter breakdown of the intact black family: from the 1960s to the present day, the single-motherhood rate in black communities has risen from 23% to 75%. As Barack Obama himself has said, “children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to dropout of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.” What is to blame? The welfare state that largely started with LB Johnson’s War on Poverty; welfare officers went door to door apprising women of their potential benefits so long as a man wasn’t in the household. And as one would expect, the rate of single motherhood skyrocketed. This isn’t unique only to black families, but to to white ones as well: single motherhood in white communities has jumped from the single digits to ~24% today. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (who would become a Democratic senator of NY) wrote the report, “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action”, had stated exactly this.
If we want to truly improve the lives of black families in this country, it has to start with a return to personal responsibility and an obligation to one’s family and community. There is no bogeyman like institutional racism forcing black men to abandon their financial and moral responsibilities to their children and their children’s mothers. Rather, it is a pervasive and continuing departure from traditional moral values that is causing this perpetual social ill to plague the country’s inner cities. So before we all blame someone or something for our problems in life, maybe we should look inward and see what *we* could do better to improve our situations.