Who Kills African Americans?
The death of George Floyd while in custody of brutal Minneapolis police officers has sickened and disgusted all Americans. There is no one who has not expressed support for the peaceful protests by citizens of all races about this violation of humanity, citizenship, and the law.
But race activists and leftist anti-Americans see profit from dividing Americans and sparking race hatred. They draw false lessons about “structural racism” and the need to pull down American civil and political institutions. Their constructive advice, heard in the last days in riots in Minneapolis and elsewhere: “It all needs to be burnt down” and “Kill whites.”
Some race activists, such as those of Black Live Matter, argue that African Africans are suffering from a genocide enacted by white police and other racist whites. “Black Lives Matter Foundation, Inc is a global organization in the US, UK, and Canada, whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.”
But BLM’s analysis of the troubles of black communities is highly distorted, not least by what they systematically ignore, which is that most murdered blacks are murdered by other blacks.
Let us be clear at the outset that African Americans legitimately have grave complaints about the extreme abuse their ancestors suffered under slavery and the discrimination and disabilities imposed upon them after slavery. Even today, long after the anti-slave campaigns of white Americans, the court decisions outlawing various forms of discrimination, and the good will efforts of many individuals and institutions to be inclusive and welcoming, African Americans live with serious disadvantages.
One catastrophic condition in the lives of many African Americans today is the horrendously high murder rate that they experience. While, according to the U.S. Census (U.S. Census Quick Facts), African Americans made up 12.6% of the U.S. population in 2010, and 13.3% in 2015, they, according to the FBI were in 2013 victims of 45% of the murders, in 2018 victims of 52.4% of the murders in the U.S., more than three times the rate that might be expected by population.
What are the facts about the extremely high rate of African American victims? One might get the impression from the energetic campaigns of Black Lives Matter that African Americans are murdered by white racists, especially police. But, according to the FBI, in 2013, of the 2,491 “Black or African American” murdered, 189 were murdered by “whites,” 20 by “other,” 37 by “unknown,” and 2,245 by “Black or African American.” In other words, in 2013, 90.12% of African Americans murdered were murdered by other African Americans.
The years since are much the same, e.g. in 2018 , of 2,925 African Americans murdered, 2,600 or 89% were murdered by other African Americans. It is difficult to attribute this to white racism. And while in 2013, 189 African Americans were murdered by whites, 409 whites were murdered by African-Americans. In cross-race murders, more than twice as many whites have been murdered as African Americans.
The other side of the coin is that 48% of all murders are committed by African Americans, more than three times what would be expected from African-Americans’ 13% of the population. So African Americans are involved in the most serious crime, either as victims or perpetrators, at a rate that far exceeds other American communities. This cannot be considered a direct effect of anti-African American racism.
African Americans, like all Americans, have choices and make decisions. They are not automatons mechanically reacting to an adverse environment. African Americans have agency, select their goals, and act to achieve them. Most African-Americans do not choose to engage in crime; most choose to become productive citizens.
But too many African Americans do choose to engage in crime, and too many African-Americans have been their victims. How has Black Lives Matter addressed this sad fact? What campaigns are they carrying out to correct this catastrophic loss of their fellow citizens?
Why is Black Lives Matter shouting “racism” rather than looking at the difficulties in their community? It is the African-American community that needs emergency aid. How will increasing race bating and fueling the fire of race hatred contribute to healing the black community?
Some spokesmen of Black Lives Matter have recommended the decrease of police presence in African American communities, or even the disbanding of police entirely. The official BLM “Campaign Zero” demands that there be a reduction of “all police violence in the US to zero,” a stop to policing of minor crimes, restrictions on weapons available to police, and much more.
We have already seen an experiment in this measure in recent years, when Black Lives Matter and local politicians reined in police in Baltimore and Chicago. What was the result? Murder in 2015 was up in Baltimore to a historic high of 55 per hundred thousand; whereas in blood soaked Chicago, murders were up 72%, and shootings were up 88% in the first months of 2016.
According to the FBI, “In 2011, 72 law enforcement officers were feloniously killed in the line of duty. By race, 68 of the victim officers were white, 3 were black, and 1 was American Indian/Alaskan Native. 43 of the alleged offenders were white, 29 were black, 2 were American Indian/Alaskan Native, and 1 was Asian/Pacific Islander. The race was not reported for 2 offenders.”
What has Black Lives Matter done to address the murder of law enforcement officers by African-Americans? Some might say, thinking of the five police slain by a sniper in Dallas, that rather than ameliorating such murders, Black Lives Matter has encouraged them.
There are other serious problems afflicting black communities that BLM does not address. For example, family structure and culture that disadvantages black children. Fully two-thirds (66%) of African American children grow up in single parent families.
Single parent families are associated, especially for boys, with poor academic performance and incarceration. Single parent families are a reflection of the culture of African American communities. Given the deleterious results, some reconsideration and reform would be beneficial. But this does not appear to be a subject of interest for BLM.
Black Lives Matter apparently does feel that it has the situation so well in hand in America, that it can embark on international relations. Taking a stand with the Palestinians, who, along with Palestinian Americans, refer to African-Americans as abid, “black slave,” BLM has condemned Israel as a colonialist, apartheid, genocidal state.
These counter-factual delusions not only serve to chase away BLM’s Jewish supporters, but demonstrate BLM’s penchant for looking everywhere but at the African-American community’s own problems. It is apparently easier for BLM to chant “racism” than to help African-Americans toward safer and more constructive lives.
The problem is far from limited to small race organizations such as BLM. A much greater influence is the adoption in the universities and colleges of America, Canada, and elsewhere in the West, of a Marxist class-conflict model of society, in which members of economic classes, genders, races, sexualities, ethnicities, religions, and degrees of ableness are ranged in conflict against one another in a fight for power, control, and resources.
America, Canada, and the West are portrayed as inherently unjust and requiring destruction before the rebuilding into a socialist utopia run by females, people of color, and transsexuals. As in most Utopian visions, neither facts nor reality are regarded as interesting; only the revolution sets the heart aflutter.
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