Saturday, June 13, 2020

Don't These Black Lives Matter?

Two women pray in Louisville, Kentucky near the intersection where David McAtee was killed on Sunday evening [Darron Cummings/AP Photo]

In the midst of all the looting and rioting, I was seeking to clarify my thoughts about the issues black people face in America. There are a number of things going on all related to the unnecessary and tragic death of George Floyd but for this little essay, I wanted to focus on the phrase “black lives matter” and the organization “Black Lives Matter”.

I am a science and data-oriented person, but I also want to know personal stories of people affected by the current chaos. While I can feel deeply for people as individuals and in groups, I want to know the truth as clearly as possible so I generally don’t let feelings determine my actions even when I do let them spur me on to investigating an issue and responding to what I find.  So, this is what I know so far and what I think about it.

To set the stage, here is some common ground we all should have:

·         George Floyd should not be dead today. He was killed by police while handcuffed and held on the ground by an officer placing his knee on Floyd’s neck.  While we don’t know the motivation of the officer, we can see that the officer murdered George Floyd. That officer and the other three who watched should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. It was horrible and should not be tolerated in our society.

·         Black lives matter. ALL black lives matter. I am not diminishing this point by saying “all lives matter,” but that is a different subject. Here I am saying that ALL black lives matter.

·         Peaceful protest is a right protected for ALL of us. Following the killing of George Floyd, most protesters wanted to peacefully express their legitimate grievances. Unfortunately, a small number of troublemakers and looters led to violence. These reveal three groups: the peaceful protestors, opportunistic looters, and rioters.

·         Police reform is necessary. The police have been given increased power over the years including military hardware due to the Homeland Security bill(s). In most cases, the police have been responsible and have served the people, but there are always a few that are bad. Police are people, after all. The problem lies in that bad police are difficult to get rid of due to multiple reasons, not just unions.

·         Police Reform at the federal level is not necessary and should not be desired by anyone as it will give the federal government and federal bureaucracy control over police nationwide. This seems to be the opposite of what we all need.


If You Are Going to Get Through This Essay…

If you are going to get through this essay, you will need to get through the next two sections without deciding ahead of time, before seeing any evidence, that the conclusion is wrong. If you don’t at least read the whole thing, your knowledge of the facts will be limited. You may disagree with my conclusion AFTER reading to the end. At least that is an attempt to be honest with yourself. So let’s proceed.

Cognitive Dissonance

If I say “black lives matter” and then I say I do not support the organization “Black Lives Matter”, what is your initial reaction. Will you reject the fact that I started by saying “black lives matter”? Does something clench up inside you? If so, you are experiencing something called cognitive dissonance. That is a normal thing in human beings, but you should all learn to get past that reaction so we can hear other’s viewpoints and look at evidence offered, otherwise you will stay stuck where you are and will not grow in knowledge. Avoiding cognitive dissonance and thus avoiding other’s viewpoints keeps us comfortable and keeps us stuck in an echo chamber of our own ideas or those fed to us, some of which may be incorrect. Cognitive dissonance is not a bad thing since it warns us about ideas that are so different, we need to take a close look at them.

Consider Nicolaus Copernicus. He was a mathematician and astronomer who proposed that the earth and other planets revolved around the sun. His idea was not perfect since he thought the sun was the center of the universe, but we certainly know that he was correct that the sun is the center of our solar system. There is a long history here [i], but generally his ideas were not accepted quickly. We have been taught that “the church” rejected the idea because it conflicted with the Bible, but consider that many other astronomers also rejected the idea because it was so different than what they already believed. Once Copernicus had gathered lots of data and his work was published, some after his death, astronomers and the church were convinced.

Until Copernicus had made his observations and published the data, there was no proof that the sun was the center of the solar system, so scientists were reluctant to agree. So cognitive dissonance is the warning mechanism we all have but we should be open to the evidence that may disagree with our current beliefs.

This is just one example but we have all felt this. Have someone tell you something that you disagree with and see how you feel. It is not a bad thing, but it does tell you that you might be holding on to a belief too tightly and that you should examine all the evidence. 

Here is one for practice. I’ll give you two statements contradictory statements, one of which you will mostly agree with and one that you won’t agree with. How you react to the statements will reveal how you feel.

  1. Donald Trump is not a racist and has been a great president who has helped black Americans.
  2. Donald Trump is a racist and only tries to hurt black Americans.

Think about how you felt and which statement you agree with. Remember this is just practice before looking at whether Black Lives Matter wants to help black Americans or not. Our perception on those two statements has been fed to us by the media. After all, we don’t know Trump personally so everything we know about him has come from the news and other media.

If you examine the evidence, Donald Trump was generally loved by the media until he decided to run for president as a republican, when the media started labelling him as racist. So, is Donald Trump a racist or not? We don’t know! We only know what we have been told by the media. But we CAN go find actual evidence such as pictures and actions taken before and after Trump became president.  Since that is not the purpose of this essay, you can do that separately and make your own decision.

That may have been a hard section to get through, but if you made it this far, you’ll probably make to the end since you at least have an open mind. If you struggled with that, then you will struggle with the rest of this. You will want to ignore the evidence and keep believing a media narrative. You decide.

Truth

Next, you will need to grapple with the fact that multiple truth statements can exist at the same time. Many of these truths are expressed in Turning Point USA’s video “ALL Black Lives Matter” by Graham Allen. [ii]  

·         We can fully stand with peaceful protestors who want to bring about positive change.

·         There are racist people in America. We will stand with you to stop true racism.

·         America as a whole is not a racist country. The system itself is not racist but racists can abuse the system.

·         Looting, rioting, violence is not justice. It is not even protesting. Rioting and looting do nothing to further the cause of justice.

·         The entire world was united because of the death of George Floyd. We have an amazing opportunity to come to the table together and make positive change. In a matter of a few days some have attempted to burn that opportunity. Antifa attacks along with the media that profits from tragic stories are trying to make us believe that we are more divided than we really are.

·         The loss of an innocent life does not justify the loss of other innocent lives. One example is the death of David Dorn, a black retired police officer, who was shot to death in the street trying to stop looters from stealing TVs from a store.

·         If black lives truly matter, then it shouldn’t only matter to the black lives that 100% agree with your or fit your media narrative (in this case, that police officers are racist and the policing system is racist).  Just like equality, true equality applies to everyone, not just the people you agree with.

·         If all black lives don’t evoke the same level of justice and call for action as George Floyd, then “Black Lives Matter” is not a justice movement, it is a political movement. You cannot claim to want justice for everyone, then pick and choose who that justice belongs to.

·         There are bad people in every profession but 99 percent of police officers are good and treat people with respect no matter their skin color.

What about the organization Black Lives Matter?

Innocent black lives that been affected by looting and rioting. Consider this, do you see them as collateral damage to achieving the cause? Whoever does, is a hypocrite in the black lives matter movement.

Here is a small list of the deaths of innocent black Americans. Access the references to see pictures and short bios.

In Chicago, 18 people were killed on Sunday, May 31st making it the single most violent day in Chicago in six decades. There were others killed on the previous Friday and Saturday too. Those who died include:
Darius and Maurice Jelks[iii]
18 year old Teyonna Lofton
30 year old Danyal Jones
36 year old father of 2, Angelo Bronson
32 year old John Tiggs
18 year old Lazarra Daniels
18 year old Keishanay Bolden
You can see more including pictures here.[iv] Also here.[v]

In Louisville, Kentucky, David McAtee who was a 53-year-old African American man known for offering free meals to officers who stopped by his restaurant

In Oakland, California, David Patrick Underwood, a 53 year old black security officer killed in the riots[vi]

In St. Louis, Missouri, David Dorn, a 77 year old black retired police officer, a father of five[vii]

In Indianapolis, Indiana, 38 year old Chris Beaty, a former offensive lineman for Indiana University football team

In Davenport, Iowa, 22 year old Italia Kelly

You can search and find many more deaths of innocent black Americans due to violence during protests. Each of these has a story the ended too soon. This doesn’t even address those who were wounded, of which there are many.

Our hearts break also for those who lost businesses. We have been confronted by others who say “its just property, you shouldn’t care more for property than for people. Insurance will just replace it”  But we do care for people when we are heartbroken over the loss of their property. They work hard to make a living and often either don’t have insurance or their insurance doesn’t cover “civil unrest.” The business that they poured their hearts into to make successful is not just some property that can be replaced. It is an entity that serves their community and allows them the dignity of making their own way rather than being dependent. It is a cruel thing to say that their business should be destroyed because it is just property.

“Korboi Ball is a black firefighter who poured his life savings into a Minneapolis sports bar that was reduced to a pile of bricks. He has no insurance.” A Washington post article states “It’s not just the owners but their employees, too, whose lives have been devastated. After suffering the worst economic destruction since the Great Depression during the pandemic, which disproportionately affected African Americans, many had just returned to work — only to see the business that employed them destroyed. My heart breaks for Gina Robinson, a black woman in Chicago who posted this message on Twitter last week: “I’m so hurt. I’m barely surviving and not only did y’all burn my job (Walgreens) down but the grocery store in my neighborhood was looted for what. Now my mom can’t get her prescription or food. How was this ‘for us’?”[viii]  Think about that. Walgreens (or Target, Walmart, or CVS) doesn’t have to rebuild there if the people in the community feel free to treat a business that serves their own community and provides opportunities for their friends and neighbors. The rioters and looters are destroying their own community and their own opportunities.

What about Hussein Aloshani, an immigrant from Iraq who owns a deli.  A New York Times article stated “many store owners said they felt like the victims of misplaced aggression. They said their businesses, already ailing from an outbreak of the coronavirus that has been particularly devastating to small and minority-owned businesses, may not recover.”[ix]

There are more destroyed businesses than we can list here. Even where a business had some windows broken, the owner and employees are affected by the violence.

Non-police related homicides

As shown in the following figure from a study done by the Harvard Kennedy School,[x] the number of homicides of black Americans by black Americans has been between 40 and 50 percent for the last 25 years. While “blacks suffer much higher rates of personal violence and violent victimization than whites,” (the homicide rate for blacks was almost eight times higher than the rate for whites) “The vast majority of homicides are intraracial, with 84 percent of white victims killed by whites and 93 percent of black victims killed by blacks.”



While comprising about 13 percent of the American population, “black people have consistently accounted for close to half the country's homicide victims”[xi]  and the previous graph shows that most blacks die at the hand of other blacks. Young black men are killing each other at an alarming rate every year. Black males accounted for about 52% (or 6,800) of the nearly 13,000 male homicide
victims in 2005. Black females made up 35% (or 1,200) of the nearly 3,500 female homicide victims.

So in 2005, 8000 black men and women were murdered. Don’t all those black lives matter?  Where is Black Lives Matter? Every death is a tragedy, but they are consistently ignored. Why doesn’t Black Lives Matter get involved in figuring out solutions to the problem of black on black homicides? The causes are generally known, such as a lack of education in poor black communities. If Black Lives Matter cared about black lives, they would help black Americans be involved in their children’s education, which would decrease temptation to commit crime and increase the prosperity of the black population. But Black Lives Matter is generally silent about this problem and does nothing about it. Where are the protests that bring attention to the poor education for inner city blacks?

Abortion

Finally, what about abortions? I am not arguing about why women get an abortion nor am I condemning those women. No doubt they feel like they have no other options.

Aborted black babies account for 40% of abortions in the US.[xii]  In the Arizona Capitol Times, Walt Blackman, a member of the Arizona House of Representatives, wrote[xiii]

When you use those percentages, it indicates that of the over 44 million abortions since the 1973 Roe vs Wade Supreme Court ruling, 19 million black babies were aborted. African Americans are just under 13 percent of United States population.

White women are five times less likely to have an abortion than black women. Perhaps it is a matter of availability. A study by Protecting Black Lives, in 2012, found that 79 percent of Planned Parenthood’s surgical abortion facilities are located within walking distance of minority communities.

In the past, we criticized the tobacco industry for targeting young people with their advertising. Recently, the nicotine vape industry has been criticized for similar practices. The prevalence of abortion providers in African American and Hispanic neighborhoods indicates the abortion industry is targeting too. It smacks of the eugenics-linked past of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and her views of contraception and abortion as ways of diminishing the black population.

And

According to the Guttmacher Institute, which generally supports abortion, in 2011 360,000 black babies were aborted. CDC statistics for 2011 show that 287,072 black deaths occurred from all other causes excluding abortion. By these numbers, abortion is the leading cause of death among blacks.

360,000 black babies aborted in a single year!

Black Lives Matter has been around since July 13, 2013, yet I have heard nothing about how the lives of
Three hundred and sixty thousand black babies matter. I suppose Stalin’s declaration that “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic”[xiv] is true in the case of black babies. I am not arguing about providing “health care” in the form of an abortion. I am stating the each one of those aborted babies is a black life that matters, but Black Lives Matter doesn’t want deal with all the dead babies since no one in politics or the media gets emotional about aborted babies. We all get emotional when a white police officer kills a black man and the situation must fit a certain narrative, one that gets black people angry. The number of blacks shot to death by police was 223 in 2017, 209 in 2018, 235 in 2019, and so far 88 in 2020.[xv] Those statistics do not distinguish between people who were resisting arrest or not, but according to a Washington Post database, in 2019 there were nine unarmed black people that were killed by police.[xvi] I want to be clear that each one of those deaths is tragic and I am not diminishing their lives whether they were innocent or not.

If black lives really mattered to Black Lives Matter, the deaths of so many caused by abortion, black on black violence, and the rioting and looting we see today, would certainly matter just as much.

Right!?!

A NYT Op-Ed

I read the NYT Opinion piece[xvii] written by Chad Sanders and there was one paragraph in his set of suggestions on how to make a real impact. I agree that sending “positive vibes”, “thoughts”, and similar communications are not at all helpful but I think that this one paragraph will not help Mr. Sanders’ cause and will likely injure it. The suggestion states that those who are already on board with the BLM cause
should send

Texts: To your relatives and loved ones telling them you will not be visiting them or answering phone calls until they take significant action in supporting black lives either through protest or financial contributions.

An action that holds your family or other significant relationships hostage to some action is manipulation and will cause many to push away from supporting the cause. People find manipulation repugnant. No one likes being punished into some sort of “re-education”.

I know some who have already done this and while it may shock family into doing something, there will be great damage to the relationship. Why destroy families even more when there is a better way? Clear communication is much better for those family members that are open to listening, even if it takes a few tries. Often, both sides learn something about the other that bring them closer. I have experienced this in the past with my son-in-law when we had a discussion about our different perspectives on the term “white privilege”. We understood each other a bit more.

Don’t misunderstand me here. Mr. Sanders’ article was insightful and well written. It helped me understand a little more just like my conversation with my son-in-law. So, if a family member is trying to understand, cutting off communication is one of the worst ways to bring about change. As it affects me, I feel like I am being pushed to take action when I don’t have the full picture and I feel like I am being pushed to think a certain way to satisfy the cause or the ideology. I would rather have the conversations necessary to understand and then take action with a clear understanding of what I am giving my life to.

Conclusion

Getting back to the original question. Do black lives matter? We can state conclusively that every black life matters, absolutely.

But should I support the organization “Black Lives Matter”? For myself, I do not find evidence that the organization is worthy of support, not even support from the black people they claim to speak for.

The evidence is clear that only those black lives that further the narrative and increase the power of the organization are the lives that matter. George Floyd was murdered by a policeman with three others complicit in that murder. I can fully support the peaceful protests being held in show our politicians that something needs to change in the way policing is done. Reform is needed and it will take many ideas and many voices to reach a solution. At the very least, bad cops should not be immune from prosecution for wrongs they do. Bad cops should be weeded out before they wrongly kill anyone while good cops should be encouraged and protected.

If Black Lives Matter really cared about black lives, then they would also focus on all the other black lives that are lost. They would seek to find the root causes of all the lost black lives and fix the real problems. Blaming everything on the police and racism is the easy way out. A black man killed by police is an easy way to gain public sentiment and get everyone fired up for the cause. When policing is reformed some black lives will be saved and that is good, but if Black Lives Matter really cared about black lives, why are they only vocal for those killed by police when that number is so small compared to the number of black lives lost due to other causes?

A Few Thoughts About a Solution

A concept called the “success sequence”, if followed, greatly increases your probability of success in life, including financial success. The success sequence is simple, get at least a high school degree, start working full-time, and get married before having any children, in that order.  The report can be found here: https://www.aei.org/research-products/working-paper/millennials-and-the-success-sequence-how-do-education-work-and-marriage-affect-poverty-and-financial-success-among-millennials/.

While this version of the study is related to “millennials”, the concept applies to all young people in general. According to the study, people who get married before having children have a 95% success rate and are not poor, while those who had children first have a 72% chance of being poor. Even in low-income families, those who married before having children have a 71% chance of escaping poverty while those who had children first only have a 41% chance.

If Black Lives Matter cared about black lives, they would bring to our attention all those black lives that must deal with living in poverty and being tempted to enter a life of crime all due to lack of opportunities to get a good education. They would focus their ire on those who control the terrible education low income areas receive.

That is the harder solution of course, but people banding together to bring about change is a powerful force. Currently, Black Lives Matter only focuses on political gains and uses the power of the movement for its own gain. Black Lives Matter should prove they care about ALL black lives and use the power they have been given by everyone who supports them to bring about real change at the root. In my worldview, I want everyone to succeed and have a good life. I mean everyone. Skin color is not a factor at all in a human being’s potential. A good education free of social propaganda is a significant factor and would go a long way toward saving the lives of all those black people. Reforming under-performing schools is possible if parents work with those schools in their districts. It is difficult and takes time, so perhaps Black Lives Matter could provide guidance and support and even represent a group of parents one city at a time.

The lost potential for our society is tremendous when the focus is on only one cause of black deaths, such as the police, instead of all the causes of black deaths. Take a look at the book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly, or watch the movie, and think about how many mathematicians like Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden are lost every year. How many generals like Colin Powell, entrepreneurs like Oprah Winfrey and Daymond John, and neurosurgeons like Ben Carson are lost?

What about these revolutionary black lawyers?[xviii]

·         Macon Bolling Allen, First African American Lawyer & Judge, born in 1816
·         Charlotte E. Ray, First Female African American Lawyer, pass the bar in 1872
·         Jane Bolin, First Female African American Judge, sworn in 1939
·         Thurgood Marshall, First African American Supreme Court Justice, appointed in 1967
·         Barack Obama, First African American President of the United States, 2008

With 19 million black babies aborted since 1973, plus all of the tragic deaths by all other causes every year, how much human potential has been lost?

Shouldn’t Black Lives Matter care about that? Shouldn’t we all?

If Black Live Matter doesn’t care about ALL black lives, then you should not support them.





[i] Sheila Rabin, “Nicolaus Copernicus”, Last modified 09/13/19, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/copernicus/
[ii] Graham Allen/Turning Point USA, accessed 06/12/2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51tgkrCXZvc
[iii] Matthew Hendrickson, “After brother, cousin killed, Canadian man laments: Third-world countries are safer than Chicago”, Chicago Sun Times, 06/08/2020, https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/8/21282805/chicago-murders-darius-maurice-dionte-jelks-englewood-canada
[iv] Tom Schuba, Sam Charles, and Matthew Hendrickson, “18 murders in 24 hours: Inside the most violent day in 60 years in Chicago”, Chicago Sun Times, 06/08/2020, https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/8/21281998/chicago-violence-murder-history-homicide-police-crime
[v] AP NEWS AGENCY, “Nearly a dozen deaths tied to continuing unrest in US”, Aljazeera, 06/03/2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/06/dozen-deaths-tied-ongoing-unrest-200603162256559.html
[vi] “Sister Of Federal Guard Killed In Oakland Tells Congress ‘He Did Not Deserve To Die’”, CBS San Francisco Bay Area, 06/10/2020, https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/06/10/sister-of-patrick-underwood-federal-guard-killed-in-oakland-tells-congress-he-did-not-deserve-to-die/
[vii] Kim Bell, “Retired police captain shot to death at St. Louis pawn shop in slaying caught on Facebook Live”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 06/03/2020, https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/retired-police-captain-shot-to-death-at-st-louis-pawn-shop-in-slaying-caught-on/article_d482138c-0224-5393-bd87-9898bebb3fd1.html
[viii] Marc A. Thiessen, “The deaths that don’t fit the ‘defund the police’ narrative”, Washington Post, 06/09/2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/09/deaths-that-dont-fit-defund-police-narrative/
[ix] Caitlin Dickerson, “‘Please, I Don’t Have Insurance’: Businesses Plead With Protesters”, 05/31/2020, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/minneapolis-protests-business-looting.html
[x] Anthony A. Braga and Rod K. Brunson, “The Police and Public Discourse on “Black-on-Black” Violence” in New Perspectives in Policing from the Harvard Kennedy School, May 2015 https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/wiener/programs/pcj/files/PoliceandPublicDiscourseBlackonBlackViolence.pdf
[xi] Matthew Cella and Alan Neuhauser, “Race and Homicide in America, by the Numbers”, US News and World Report, 09/29/2016, https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-29/race-and-homicide-in-america-by-the-numbers
[xii] KFF.org, “Reported Legal Abortions by Race of Woman Who Obtained Abortion by the State of Occurrence”, https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/state-indicator/abortions-by-race/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D
[xiii] Walt Blackman, “Abortion: The overlooked tragedy for black Americans”, AZ Capitol Times, 02/25/2020, https://azcapitoltimes.com/news/2020/02/25/abortion-the-overlooked-tragedy-for-black-americans/
[xiv] Oxford Reference, “Joseph Stalin 1879–1953, Soviet dictator”, https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191826719.001.0001/q-oro-ed4-00010383
[xv] Statista, “Number of people shot to death by the police in the United States from 2017 to 2020, by race”, Published by Statista Research Department, Jun 5, 2020, https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/
[xvi] Hiram Reisner, “Opinion: Black Lives Matter rhetoric doesn’t match facts on police violence”, HOUMA Today, 06/10/2020, https://www.houmatoday.com/opinion/20200610/opinion-black-lives-matter-rhetoric-doesnt-match-facts-on-police-violence
[xvii] Chad Sanders, “I Don’t Need ‘Love’ Texts From My White Friends”, The New York Times, 06/05/2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/opinion/whites-anti-blackness-protests.html
[xviii] Emily Mermell, “5 Revolutionary Black Lawyers That Changed America”, Law Preview, Last Updated 02/05/2020, https://lawpreview.barbri.com/revolutionary-black-lawyers/