Black Lives Matter Doesn’t Believe Its Own Slogan

Dave Carter:

Like so many, I’ve watched with a heavy heart the malicious violence that is sprouting like poison ivy across the country, germinated by liberal applications of incendiary rhetoric and misplaced indulgence. In the city in which I was raised, Baton Rouge, three police officers were assassinated and three officers were hospitalized with gunshot wounds. One of the dead, a black officer with 10 years on the force, had recently posted on Facebook about the angst and mounting pressure he felt from the very community he ultimately gave his life defending. Does his black life matter? Where are the protestors on his behalf?

Yet the list of horribles continues. On the same day officers were killed in Baton Rouge, officers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin were dispatched on a domestic disturbance call where a 20 year-old with two felonies on his record opened fire on the police car, wounding an officer inside the vehicle. Eight officers have been killed nationwide in 11 days. Here in Memphis a week ago, protestors took to the streets with their signs and chants and didn’t stop until they had shut down Interstate 40 in downtown Memphis.

For more than five hours, truckers, travelers, parents, and children sat, helplessly stranded on the I-40 bridge over the Mississippi River. (And you think the kiddos can be a challenge when the car is moving!) In one case, paramedics struggled to extract a sick child from the stranded traffic and transport the child to the hospital. How many others who needed medical attention remained stranded is unknown to us and to the resolutely impervious crowd that held commuters hostage.

Naturally, I was interested to see what my colleagues at The Federalist would have to say about events, and went right away to David Marcus’ very moving essay, “This Week We Are All Black Lives Matter.” While the overall appeal to greater understanding and empathy was laudable, somewhere along the way David was carried aloft on the headwind of his good intentions, and deposited somewhere between sentimentality and mawkishness.

The Disproportionality Runs the Other Way

Highlighting the fatal confrontations of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile with the authorities, David writes, “Every white American paying attention already knew that police kill black men at alarming rates.” That’s a pretty sweeping statement on behalf of a lot of people David has never met, and it needs some further scrutiny.

In 2015, according to information collected by the Washington Post, 26 percent of the people killed by police officers were black. Now, if that is alarming, what then are we to make of the fact that a full 50 percent of people who died at the hands of police officers were white? Should the fact that whites were killed by the police at nearly double the rate of blacks take us from alarm to outright panic? Should we shout that white lives matter and wreak havoc, or should we take a deep breath and dig a little deeper into the facts?

Heather Mac Donald, author of “The War On Cops,” has done a stunning and thorough amount of research which has yielded, among other things, the fact that blacks make up just 15 percent of the population in the nation’s 75 largest counties (2009), yet comprise 45 percent of all assault defendants, 62 percent of all robbery defendants, and 57 percent of all murder defendants. In New York City alone, where blacks comprise 23 percent of the population, they account for 75 percent of all shootings, 70 percent of all robberies, and 66 percent of all violent crime.

The wonder therefore, isn’t that a group so highly represented in violent crime comprises 26 percent of deaths that occur in altercations with authority, but rather that the rate isn’t higher still. Whites, who account for 33 percent of New York City’s population, commit less than 2 percent of all shootings, 4 percent of robberies and 5 percent of all violent crime while having the highest fatality rate in confrontations with police. Happily, they haven’t resorted to blocking interstate highways and targeting the police and show no interest in doing so.

It’s Not Necessarily Racism to Pursue Black Suspects

“As black Americans shout, yell, and cry that their lives matter, the eerie silence of white Americans carefully balancing causes and solutions whispers back, ‘No, they don’t,’” David Marcus writes. To divide a group of people by race and assume that they think monolithically is not only erroneous on its face, it’s the sort of presumptuous tribal division we usually associate with the hard left. To further presume to reach into the minds of these people en masse and hear them whisper that black lives don’t matter is insulting.

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