Tag Archive for: black lives matter

When Will A Prominent Black Athlete Stand Up to the Mob?

The recent expressions of support for Black Lives Matter by professional athletes can be understood as a legitimate reaction to tragic episodes of injustice that occur in the United States. But everything beyond that noble sentiment is flawed.”Systemic racism,” to the extent it even exists, explains very little of black underachievement, and the Black Lives Matter organization offers absolutely nothing that will help the black community.

The reality for at least the last forty years in America is that Blacks are beneficiaries of programs – college admissions preferences, incentives for minority-owned businesses, quotas towards achieving proportional representation in corporate hiring and promotions, and subsidized housing, to name a few – designed to uplift them. These programs have been administered at a cost that by now probably amounts to trillions of dollars. If Black activists and the politicians who pander to them for votes truly think “reparations” are justified, reparations have already been tried and are ongoing. They’re not working. They may have actually done more harm than good.

Most every citation of “systemic racism” either references things that were ended several decades ago, or they are based on flawed statistical analysis. To the first point, slavery was eliminated in 1863. Segregation was abolished in 1965. Redlining was outlawed in 1968. And as noted, starting in the 1960s, incalculable sums have been spent on systemic benefits and preferences designed to help America’s Blacks. So much for institutionalized racism persisting in America. If anything, it’s the opposite, institutionalized anti-racism.

Statistics, however, at least at first glance, tell a very different story. Despite outlawing racist institutions and policies, and despite institutionalizing a comprehensive and extremely expensive assortment of preferences and policies and benefits designed to compensate for the historical legacy of racism, according to nearly every statistical metric, Blacks still lag behind Whites in group achievements.

Black Lives Matter activists, along with most liberals, point to disparities in Black achievement in academia and economically, as well as disparities relating to law enforcement, and claim this is proof of systemic racism. But a deeper look at the statistics does not justify this conclusion. Statistics relating to law enforcement, the ones that matter, are completely ignored by BLM and a sympathetic media, with tragic consequences.

The most prevalent, and very incendiary, statistic heard is that Black people are being disproportionately killed by police. If some of the politicians and pundits exploiting this supposed fact are to be believed, a genocidal slaughter is taking place. If the consequences of making these outrageous claims weren’t so tragic, they would be laughable. The statistic fails on every level.

As shown on the chart below, using data from the FBI, the Kaiser Foundation, and Statista Research Inc., in 2018 a total of 209 Blacks were killed by police, the overwhelming majority of them armed. This compares to 399 Whites killed by police in that year.

The first thing to understand is that in a nation of over 300 million, these are ridiculously small numbers, although that’s scant comfort to the people and communities affected. The root of the claim of a police war on Blacks comes down to this: If you’re Black, in 2018 you had a one in 190,000 chance of having a fatal encounter with police, and if you’re White, your chances of the same were only one in 495,000. Hence you will hear that Blacks are 2.5 times as likely to be killed by police as whites.

If that were all there was to it, perhaps there’d be a reason for more concern. But here are facts that cannot be ignored: Blacks commit more crimes. In terms of arrests, Blacks are twelve times as likely as Whites to be arrested for murder, three times as likely for rape, eleven times as likely for robbery, and four times as likely for aggravated assault.

This brings us back to the crux of the issue, which is whether police encounters with Blacks result in a disproportionate number of fatalities. If you look at the death rate per arrest rate, they do not. In 2018 (these statistics are fairly consistent from year to year) the chances of dying while being arrested were exactly the same for Whites and Blacks, a nearly infinitesimal one one-hundredth of one percent. 

Presenting these statistics is not meant to diminish the impact of police misconduct, or the necessity to reduce it as much as possible. But this brings up another sad but inevitable statistical reality. There are nearly 700,000 full-time law enforcement officers in the United States, along with roughly an additional million armed private security guards.

In groups of individuals this big, no matter how carefully screened and no matter how well trained they may be, some bad actors will exist. Similarly, when there are over 50 million individual encounters between police and citizens every year, a few of them will have an unforeseen, avoidable, tragic outcome. People are not universally good, and everyone is fallible. Just as we shall never perfect any other aspect of our society, because that is impossible, we shall never perfect the art of policing.

These are the truths that the BLM movement and all of its supporters ignore. Most know better. And there are many, many alternatives to the popular agenda being pushed – defunding the police, enforcing even stricter systems of racial preferences, paying reparations, and sliding further towards socialism.

How Professional Black Athletes Can Truly Help Their Communities

The personal qualities that enable athletes to play at the level of the NBA or NFL are not the qualities that define the rhetoric or the mentality of Black Lives Matter activists. Their entire premise, that Black people are victims, even if it is true, is unhealthy. Did LeBron James or Steph Curry become two of the best basketball players in history by thinking of themselves as victims?

A Black conservative who has explored this theme in-depth is nationally syndicated talk radio host Larry Elder. In a recent monologue, he asked why the work ethic that an athlete would apply to their sport cannot be applied equally to academics. “If you’re willing to spend two hours a day working on your jump shot,” he asks, “why aren’t you spending that much time working on algebra problems?”

This mentality: That individual resolve and self-discipline can overcome adversity, is something a professional athlete can explain with the credibility of their own accomplishments. This fact, that character can overcome disadvantages has been proven by other groups in America; Chinese, Indian, Jewish, and Nigerian immigrants all have success stories to tell; all of them have aggregate group achievement in academia and household income that surpass Whites.

As for changing the institutions that are harming the Black community, why aren’t athletes like LeBron James and Steph Curry taking an honest look at public education in the inner city? Why don’t they watch the closing arguments in the Vergara case, where Marcellus MacRae, a Black attorney, proves that work rules forced onto school districts by the teachers union have had a disproportionate negative impact on low income communities? Why don’t these athletes demand school choice? Why don’t they denounce the teachers union, which has monopolized and all but ruined public education, especially in the inner cities?

A final argument, considered the clincher, made by social justice advocates and members of BLM is that it is the low income status of Blacks that itself explains their high rates of crime, substance abuse, broken homes, and academic underachievement. This is a dubious assertion, contradicted by the successful upward mobility of so many other nonwhite communities. An exhaustive data analysis on the website Random Critical Analysis makes a convincing case that racial differences in group achievement are poorly explained by economics. But so what?

Staying sober, staying married, finding a job, studying diligently, obeying the law – these are all choices that people make, and priorities that communities choose to embrace or reject. Why aren’t Black athletes going into their own communities and challenging them all to make choices that will help them instead of hurt them? Why are they instead encouraging their brothers and sisters to consider themselves victims? What benefit do they see in placing blame for Black underachievement on Whites, when the basis of these accusations is not well supported by data, and the cure is worse than the disease?

LeBron James, Steph Curry, and all the rest of these athletic stars have real power and influence. They are paragons of physical strength and skill. But for them to have real courage, and offer genuine help to their communities, they should review the facts, tell the hard truths, and stand up to the mob.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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All Livelihoods Matter

When examining the challenges facing the black community in America, the conservative response – if they have any courage at all, that is – is to attack the policies that Democrats have implemented supposedly to help blacks. This is a valid response, which can be summarized as follows:

Increased spending in public schools is futile because Democrats have taken away the ability to discipline disruptive students, and the teachers union has monopolized public education. For example, instead of being fired, thanks to these unions, bad teachers end up teaching in low income communities. Public education is a disaster in black communities.

Welfare spending has taken away the necessity for households to have a male breadwinner, and hence, a male role model and authority figure. This has disproportionately impacted black families because a higher percentage of them collect welfare and other entitlements. Two thirds of black children are growing up in single parent households.

There are other reasons conservatives may cite, centering around the theme of personal and community accountability. Why aren’t more black conservatives stepping up and demanding school choice, family values, and a collective rejection of gang culture? And why isn’t the media elevating those black conservatives who do speak out, instead of pointing the cameras at the same old Sharptonesque hacks, year after year?

These responses explain a lot, and deserve to be heard, but there’s another factor at work affecting black lives in America, and it’s also mostly the fault of Democrats.

The Democratic Attack on Black Lives AND Black Livelyhoods

Between 1916 and 1970, in what is referred to as the Great Migration, over 6 million blacks moved from the rural South to the cities of the North, Midwest and West. This was a time of rapid industrial expansion in the United States, and well paying factory jobs attracted workers of all races. During the period after World War Two and up until 1970, America’s economy dominated the world. Millions of black workers were able to afford homes and raise families. But three things happened starting in 1970.

First, the world caught up to the United States. In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, the U.S. was the only industrialized nation that wasn’t devastated. As foreign manufacturers were slowly rebuilding in the ashes of war, American exports poured into recovering markets all over the world. America’s labor unions enjoyed unique leverage during this time, because management could afford to negotiate excellent wage and benefit packages for the workers yet still make a profit.

Starting around 1970, all of that changed. Japan, then the “Four Tigers” of Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong, and now dozens of nations including Brazil, India, Indonesia and heavyweight China are all competing with American manufacturers. Which comes to the first great betrayal by Democrats: They joined with their Republican counterparts to adopt the gospel of “free trade,” heedless of the consequences. This began slowly, but by the Clinton years the Democrats were indistinguishable from the Republicans. Good jobs went away, lost to cheap labor overseas. White and Black workers suddenly found themselves working harder and making less, if they had a job at all.

The second trend that attacked black livelihoods, along with the livelihoods of everyone else, was the increase in the cost-of-living. This is probably the least discussed element in the destruction of black livelihoods, along with the livelihoods of everyone in America, but it is perhaps the most important because relative to the other factors, it has just begun. The cost-of-living is continuing to rise, despite the fact that productivity is higher than ever. Why is this?

In some areas, imported high tech gear and generic consumer projects, costs are declining. This is misleading, because for most households, the products that are getting cheaper are nonessential, whereas the cost for essentials like housing and healthcare are soaring. To show why Democrats are to blame for this assault on affordability, consider this excerpt from a California Policy Center analysis evaluating home prices in different parts of the United States:

“The median price of a home in Los Angeles is a larcenous $617,000, whereas the same home in Houston will only set a family back by $189,000. Based on a 4 percent, 30 year fixed mortgage, this translates into a crippling $2,900 monthly payment in Los Angeles, vs a manageable $915 mortgage payment in Houston. Making house payments that low used to be normal in California. They still are in those parts of this nation, Houston included, where the progressive Democrats haven’t yet taken control.”

The Democratic response to poor schools and unaffordable housing is to expand government. Hire more union teachers. Build more government housing. For fifty years, this has been their solution, and the only thing they have to show for it are the highest taxes and spending deficits in history. In recent years, building affordable housing has become more corrupt than ever, with Democrat ran cities spending over a half-million on average per unit of subsidized housing. At those prices, only a fraction of needed housing is built, and only crony developers benefit from the arrangement.

The solutions, which even Republicans usually lack the courage to espouse, is to restore competition to public education, ideally via school vouchers – good for home schooling, religious schools, private schools, charter schools and public schools. Break the teachers union monopoly. For affordable housing, break the grip of extreme environmentalists who have successfully lobbied for laws in blue states and cities that have effectively cordoned off all development. Allow suburban expansion, spend public budgets on roads instead of pensions, and the market price of housing will come back down to earth.

The Economics of All Lives Matter

One of the saddest betrayals of black and white workers in America is by their unions. While these unions have been arguably too militant about protecting wage and benefit packages, and trying to increase them to keep pace with inflation, ultimately these are tactical battles. On the defining strategic issues these unions have betrayed their members. If not initially back in the 1970’s, then definitely by now. These unions have not fought effectively to prevent jobs from migrating overseas, and they haven’t fought at all to prevent an ongoing flood of cheap immigrant labor. On the issue of lowering the cost-of-living, these unions have scarcely recognized extreme environmentalism as a primary reason housing and building materials cost so much, much less tried to challenge it.

When it comes to the livelihoods of black lives and white lives, these mega trends are having a decisive and decidedly colorblind impact. And the union betrayal goes beyond their failure to address the issues of offshoring, immigration, and environmentalism in a manner consistent with the interests of their members. They have adopted and support the entire agenda of the American Left.

They utterly fail to recognize that public sector unions aren’t unions at all, they are government workers using government for themselves instead of for the public. As a result, private sector unions support public sector union monopolies in public education, along with the attendant leftist indoctrination of students on issues of race, gender, economics and American history, and they offer unqualified support for more government spending. Private sector unions, unlike public sector unions, have a legitimate and vital role to play in American society. Why can’t they be focused on the economic interests of their members, properly understood, and nothing else?

The Black Lives Matter movement, like the labor movement in America today, is not concerned about black livelihoods. Or if they are, they are tragically delusional. Because black livelihoods will not be uplifted by eliminating whatever vestiges of racism may still exist in America and implementing socialism. They will be uplifted by black and white workers finding common ground within a capitalist framework, working together to reject the agenda of the global Left: offshoring manufacturing, importing cheap labor, and imposing extreme environmentalist laws.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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