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Black lives matter. It’s not a sentence easily disagreed with. Indeed, when it first went viral (after a spate of controversial police shootings) I found it rather articulate. The only improvement perhaps would have been the addition of ‘too’ at the end. But that didn’t really matter. The message was still simple and direct: Black lives are not inherently less valuable than white or Hispanic lives, and so the police shouldn’t feel more entitled to fire at black criminals than criminals of any other background. Fair enough.
The best part of a year on from its inception, however, and Black Lives Matter has become something far less reasonable. Despite any noble beginnings, BLM is now a barely-organised cult of anger, of random society-bashing and raging self-pity. Its proponents are motivated more by hatred of white people than by sympathy for vulnerable blacks. Some on the political right have gone so far as to designate it ‘racist’ and a ‘hate group’; the mirror image of the KKK. I am not compelled to disagree with them.
Whether on college campuses, at political rallies, or in the street, BLM activists have been causing a riotous disruption to American intellectual life, and for no reason greater than the exercise and development of an industry of phoney grievance and community self-denial.
In the words of Wall Street Journal columnist Jason L Riley “(BLM) is not about the fate of blacks per se but about scapegoating the police in particular, and white America in general, for antisocial ghetto behavior. It’s about holding whites to a higher standard than the young black men in these neighborhoods hold each other to. Ultimately, it’s a political movement, the inevitable extension of a racial and ethnic spoils system that helps Democrats get elected. The Black Lives Matter narrative may be demonstrably false, but it’s also politically expedient…It’s the black poor—the primary victims of violent crimes and thus the people most in need of effective policing—who must live with the effects of these falsehoods.”
Mr Riley’s comment about black victims of violent (black) crime deserves extended analysis. It is still acceptable in liberal academia to blame the failings of African Americans on the existence of ‘institutionalised’ or ‘structural’ racism. A more honest and pro-black narrative would highlight the pitifully high rates of black-on-black crime in the neighbourhoods in which the acts of police ‘brutality’ are alleged to have occurred. Could it be that the police are merely trying hard to save black lives? Could it be that police excess in these neighbourhoods is the unfortunate overspill of a desire to protect black people?
No. It couldn’t be that. Well, not according to BLM anyway. Crackers, they reason, are just being crackers. White people love the sight of a puddle of black blood expanding on a pavement. It’s what got them to enrol in the first place.
Falsehoods cannot persist indefinitely. Sooner or later even the most doctrinaire bien pensant will end up reading forbidden arguments, or hearing unapproved statistics. Given enough time, and enough rope, the BLM cult will burst like a bubble.
And American Blacks will be all the better off for it.
D, LDN
Defend the Modern World 
The root cause of the movement has a lot of support, from left and right groups. Over-zealous policing of poor black neighbourhoods is real and palpable when you are in them; as is gun ownership among the people in these areas. Gun ownership is the elephant in the room. It can not be reformed when there are more guns than people. Sad, but true. The triggers are pushed very quickly by police and urban poor. It’s the American way.
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The only cure for over-zealous policing is the reduction of crime – at least that’s what I think. Gang crime (bound up with the issue of crack manufacture/distribution) is the number one enemy of Black people in America. BLM simply diverts attention away from this problem. They should be ashamed. I don’t doubt that there is racism in the American police force, but this can only be rooted out by slow, meticulous institutional reform. It can’t be helped by breaking into universities and shouting ‘suck my #### cracker bitch!”.
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First off, “black lives matter (so don’t kill them)” is as profound a statement as “atoms are important (so don’t split them)” in terms of its insidiously clever way of contorting a self-evident statement of fact into a one-size-fits-all argument that is inherently immune to intellectual/ethical questioning (what if they’re gonna kill someone/what if they need energy, etc).
One cannot argue with the fact everyone’s life matters to someone/something (be it themselves, family, some deity, or local flora/fauna). But the underlying reasoning is logically fallacious to say the least.
The BLM movement is a well-intentioned, albeit misguided, ephemeral lefty fad that will dissipate like the haze of bong smoke in the dorm room in which it was conceptualized…
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I agree with everything you’ve said.
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See, I don’t think anyone denies there are racist cops out there. And should the police better learn to interact with the mentally ill? Sure. It’s the calls of institutional racism that are controversial, especially given black-on-black crime that cops are responding to because black victims of such evildoing — their lives matter (*shocker*).
I think blacks aren’t completely incorrect in their perception of mistreatment, but their race is contingent to the issue, not essential to it. The use of officers as tax collectors is an abuse by the state, for instance, and skin color need not apply, especially in a more rural municipality with less blacks or racial minorities. It might seem that race is an issue to the black man pulled over by a cop looking to fulfill quotas, but it’s governmental overreach not a white cabal out to exploit and keep black communities subservient because they’re black.
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I agree. The government (especially Democrat regimes) like to keep Black communities subservient for political (i.e. electoral) reasons. I’m happy to see an increasing number of Black commentators in America are waking up to this.
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Your ignorance can’t persist indefinitely. Or so one would hope.
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