Black Lives Matter, But To Whom?

The "Black Lives Matter" movement is a fraud. Worse, it is a vicious and racist fraud. To the movement's adherents, "Black Lives Matter" means "ONLY Black Lives Matter", which is why they immediately label as racist anyone who says "All Lives Matter", or indeed "(any word but Black) Lives Matter".

Yes, black lives matter. Asian lives matter. Native American lives matter. Hispanic lives matter. Anglo lives matter. Eskimo lives matter. Pacific islander lives matter. Aborigine lives matter. Everybody else's lives matter, too. In other words, yes, ALL LIVES MATTER !

The movement was made up after a violent young black criminal was shot by a police officer. It claims the police are routinely shooting down blacks, that the police are the biggest danger for young black men. But to maintain that claim, they have to completely ignore reality:

Every year, approximately 6,000 blacks are murdered. This is a number greater than white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, even though blacks are only 12 percent of the national population. Blacks of all ages are killed at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined.

That black death-by-homicide rate is a function of the black crime rate. The national black homicide rate is eight times that of whites and Hispanics combined. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at 10 times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens combined.

In other words, the Black Lives Matter claim is all pretense. And it's not just murder. That same logic applies to other crimes as well, because the statistics show that other crime statistics mirror the murder statistics. Black citizens are disproportionately the victims of these crimes. As s Heather MacDonald reports":

Homicide is not the only crime that is vastly racially disproportionate. New York City is representative of other crime spreads across the country. Blacks are 23 percent of New York’s population, but they commit 75 percent of all shootings, 70 percent of all robberies, and 66 percent of all violent crime, according to the victims of, and witnesses to, those crimes.

Whites are 33 percent of the city’s population, but they commit less than 2 percent of all shootings, 4 percent of all robberies, and 5 percent of all violent crime.

These disparities mean that virtually every time that the police in New York are called out after a shooting, they are being summoned to minority neighborhoods looking for minority suspects.

So the Black Lives Matter movement's claim is clearly false and, indeed, fraudulent. As Heather MacDonald notes in the same article, "[T]here is no government agency more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the police." As a result, minority neighborhoods that complained for decades that police ignored crimes where they live, now complain they police are always in their neighborhoods. That's because the police focus on where people are being victimized, which is in the minority communities. This focus is called "police harassment." (The same neighborhoods complain all the louder if the police quit responding so much, like in Baltimore after Freddie Gray's death.)

All of the above must be considered against an interesting backdrop. Crime rates — for murder and other crimes alike — were much higher 20 and 25 years ago. By about 40% overall nationwide and 85% for New York City murders. Where were the Black Lives Matter activists through all of that period? Didn't black lives matter to them until now? Or is it just that it wasn't politically expedient to use as an issue until now?

Given all this, this writer would say that black lives matter to the police and to the population at large, but not to Black Lives Matter activists and those they have intimidated into submission. If black lives really mattered to Black Lives Matter, they wouldn't completely ignore the realities of black on black crime, and would do things to actually reduce black on black crime and protect black citizens.