To assign the actions of one person to an entire movement is dangerous and irresponsible,” said Black Lives Matter after five Dallas police officers were killed during a BLM protest by a black man who was upset over recent incidents in which police officers killed black men.
BLM doesn’t practice what it preaches. Neither do President Barack Obama or most in the news media. It’s also dangerous and irresponsible to jump to conclusions when black men are shot by police.
The shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota “are symptomatic of …the racial disparities that appear across the [criminal justice] system year after year,” Mr. Obama said. But the more we learn about those shootings, the less it appears they were racially motivated.
Doubtless some cops are racist. Dallas police who risked their lives to protect black protesters are more typical. A black woman, Shetamia Taylor, 37, said a hero cop died protecting her and her sons.
In what he said was “the most surprising result of my career,” Harvard professor Roland Fryer, who is black, found no evidence of racial bias in his study of shootings in 10 major police departments, although he did find that blacks were more likely to be cuffed or roughed up.
Black Lives Matter began in 2013 to protest the shooting of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin. But a jury acquitted the man who shot him, George Zimmerman, indicating that he acted in self-defense.
BLM claimed that Michael Brown, a black man, had his hands up when he was shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 Mr. Brown was shot after trying to take the officer’s gun, a grand jury concluded.
Some people taking part in BLM demonstrations have called for the murder of police.
Was the shooter in Dallas, who said he “hates white people,” listening? A black man in Bristol, Tenn., said he shot four whites at random because he was angry about police violence against African-Americans; one died in the July 7 incident.
The number of police officers shot and killed between Jan. 1 and July 9 is up 44 percent over the same period last year — 26 vs. 18. Even before the Dallas tragedy, the increase had been 17 percent.
Greg Allen, the black police chief of El Paso, Texas, calls Black Lives Matter “a radical hate group.” David Clarke, the black sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wis., calls BLM “a vile, vitriolic hateful movement.”
At a memorial service Tuesday for the slain Dallas police officers, Mr. Obama defended the BLM protests and, in effect, likened the murders of police to the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.
In supporting protests against police, Sheriff Clarke said, Mr. Obama “reminds me of a pyromaniac who sets a fire and then calls 911.”
In 2008, 70 percent of whites and 62 percent of blacks told Gallup that race relations were good. Last year, only 45 percent of whites and 51 percent of blacks said that.
When Mr. Obama was elected, the silver lining in the cloud I saw descending on America was that the election of the first (half) black president might promote racial healing. But he’s been the most racist president since Woodrow Wilson.
For every black person killed by a white cop, 71 blacks are killed by other blacks. The real tragedy is that so many blacks must live in inner-city neighborhoods where gangs run riot, schools are terrible, jobs are scarce.
Whites aren’t to blame for the terrible conditions in which so many blacks live. Those at fault are local government officials (Democrats mostly), politicians in Washington whose policies hurt black families (Democrats mostly), and blacks themselves.
Chicago and Gary, Ind., are “like death,” said a black woman named Va’shona Dixon in a Facebook video post gone viral. “The Democratic Party, Obama, has done nothing for the black community,” she said. “… All they [are] doing is using black people to stay in power.”
“We as black people, we’ve got to do it better,” said former NBA star Charles Barkley, who also is black. “We never get mad when black people kill each other. We need the cops, especially in the black community.”
Jack Kelly is a columnist for the Post-Gazette (jkelly@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1476).
First Published: July 17, 2016, 4:00 a.m.