{"id":8671,"date":"2015-09-20T04:18:04","date_gmt":"2015-09-20T11:18:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=8671"},"modified":"2015-09-18T00:30:13","modified_gmt":"2015-09-18T07:30:13","slug":"black-lives-matter-a-year-from-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/black-lives-matter-a-year-from-now\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Black Lives Matter\u2019\u2014a Year From Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

Exploring the many reasons why the slogan \u201cBlack Lives Matter\u201d will be gone within a year. What will replace it?\u00a0<\/em><\/h3>\n

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJ Media<\/a><\/p>\n

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This is CNN<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the post-civil rights era of the last half-century, a number of black triumphalist slogans and movements have come and gone.<\/p>\n

\u201cBlack is beautiful\u201d was an informal self-help attitude that sought to encourage blacks not to emulate so-called arbitrary constructs of white majority aesthetics, but instead to rediscover a natural black essence \u2014 from Afros to Ebonics and Kwanzaa \u2014 that need not be discouraged.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cBlack power!\u201d was a more assertive, political, and collective strain of \u201cblack pride.\u201d It \u00a0unfortunately descended from legitimate efforts to organize blacks collectively into an effective political force (e.g., the resulting \u201cblack caucus\u201d in Congress) and finally into the violence and incoherence of the Black Panthers and other nihilistic violent groups, whose chauvinism was fueled by their own versions of abject racism. It too is now forgotten.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s came a more informal angst characterized by the slogan \u201cIt\u2019s a black thing. You wouldn\u2019t understand.\u201d This fad sought, in in-your-face style, to remind non-black America, but especially its white majority, that there was an exceptionalism in African-American popular culture that could never really be emulated or adopted in any genuine manner by non-African American wannabes \u2014 much less co-opted by na\u00efve do-gooders or conniving profiteers.\u00a0 It was a separatist idea that assumed society\u2019s reciprocal standard did not apply to itself.<\/p>\n

Now there comes \u201cBlack Lives Matter,\u201d a movement that argues that reckless law enforcement habitually shoots and kills black suspects in disproportionate fashion and due to racist motives \u2014 a crime spree that is supposedly empowered by the general neglect of the white population.<\/p>\n

But like all the other past racially chauvinistic movements, \u201cBlack Lives Matter\u201d will fail to convince anyone outside a small subset of African-American urban youth to embrace its ideology and advocacy. A year from now it will become another artifact like \u201cIt\u2019s a black thing.\u201d It was, after all, the logical denouement to Rev. Wright and the Obamas\u2019 \u201cget in their face,\u201d \u201cpunish our enemies,\u201d \u201ctypical white person,\u201d \u201cclingers,\u201d \u201cdownright mean country,\u201d \u201cnever been proud before,\u201d \u201cstereotyping police,\u201d Travyon as the son Obama never had, and the assorted \u201cyou didn\u2019t build that,\u201d \u201cnot the time to profit,\u201d and lectures about knowing when to quit making money. At some point whining causes weariness.<\/p>\n

There are many reasons why Black Lives Matter will be gone within a year.<\/p>\n

1)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/b>Racial chauvinism<\/b><\/p>\n

Of course, given the history of slavery and Jim Crow, many in the black community are naturally suspicious of the white majority, in a way that even other often exploited and discriminated-against groups \u2014 Native Americans, the Irish, Jews, Mexican-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Chinese, Italians \u2014 are not. The subtext, then, of all of these slogans and groups was that the tragic history of blacks in America still exempts them from the normal parlance and protocols of both other minority groups and the white majority: we rarely hear \u201cJews are beautiful,\u201d \u201cBrown Lives Matter,\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s a white thing. You just don\u2019t understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

And if we did, we would object that such chauvinism had crossed some unspoken line. The problem with all of these racial-pride movements, although they are certainty more than that, is that there is a shelf-life to them. Eventually they are subject, fifty years after the civil rights movement, to the same rules and manners that other groups abide by.<\/p>\n

When most people who are non-African-American hear \u201cBlack Lives Matter\u201d \u2014 just as they did with \u201cIt\u2019s a black thing. You wouldn\u2019t understand\u201d \u2014 they do not compute slavery or Jim Crow, especially the tens of millions of youths who grew up in the era of affirmative action, not segregation in the South. Instead, they shrug \u201cOK, whatever\u201d and concede such separatism, and then draw back from the goal of a racially blind, integrated society. In other words, racism is racism and separatism hurts the black community most of all.<\/p>\n

2)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/b>Untruth
\n<\/b><\/p>\n

Black Lives Matter is based largely on a lie. President Obama has referenced \u201cFerguson\u201d as if it automatically invoked some sort of racial solidarity or was synonymous with bias. But what exactly does Ferguson mean? That Eric Holder\u2019s Justice Department found no criminal culpability in the Michael Brown shooting? Note the quick disappearance of \u201cHands Up, Don\u2019t Shoot\u201d as a national rallying cry, given that it was a total fabrication based on a mythical account from a disreputable witness with a criminal record.<\/p>\n

In the most sensationalized cases where unarmed suspects have died after coming into contact with police \u2014 Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, etc. \u2014 while there may be reason to object to police attitudes or protocols, so far there has been no legal verdict that finds police guilty of manslaughter or murder, and some reason to believe that there were additional or in fact entirely extraneous reasons for the tragic deaths and not just alleged inordinate police violence.<\/p>\n

There is also no evidence that black suspects are killed at a higher frequency than other groups that are detained or arrested by police. The honest base statistic is not the percentage of blacks in the general population, but rather the pool of all Americans who are detained or arrested by police. In the latter case, blacks are not dying in inordinate, much less epidemic fashion in comparison to the percentages of other groups arrested and detained.<\/p>\n

Some fundamental questions that frame every invocation of \u201cBlack Lives Matter\u201d ensure that, like any movement based on an untruth, it too will fade away shortly:<\/p>\n

1)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If black lives really do matter, where is the commensurate outrage at the real epidemic of black-on-black murder? Faulting the lack of gun-control laws is banal, given that almost all the suspect shooters have prior criminal records that under any existing gun laws would, if enforced, have denied them legal access to guns. At some point, nearly 7,000 blacks murdered by other blacks each year matter as much as roughly 130 who die annually as a result of interaction of all sorts with law enforcement.<\/p>\n

2)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Interracial violence is relatively rare in America, but to the extent that it exists, blacks are far more likely to inflict rather than suffer from it. Either race matters as an incitement to violence or it does not; if it does in matters of policing, then surely it does as well in interracial crime?<\/p>\n

3)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 At some point, those blacks who are self-appointed collective advocates must address the inordinate crime rate of the inner-city male young African-American, a small section of no more than 3-4% of the U.S. population that commits often 50% of several varieties of reported violent crime. It is legitimate to debate the social and cultural causes of such sky-high criminality, but not to either deny that it exists or to suggest that it does not contribute to volatile police interactions or to a general negative perception of such inordinate behavior by other groups that are less statistically likely to commit violent crimes.<\/p>\n

4)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 America is not the old America. American racial polarity was for centuries a product of the old binary of 90% so-called white and 10% so-called black population. No longer. Immigration, assimilation, and integration have redefined race. When race is constructed as in the case of Rachel Dolezal or Elizabeth Warren, or those of mixed ancestry are arbitrarily racially categorized (e.g., George Zimmerman as a \u201cwhite Hispanic\u201d [in similar liberal parlance is Barack Obama a \u201cwhite black\u201d?]), then the old divides no longer apply. In almost every family, there are interracial members and intermarried couples. Are they to resort to mini-civil wars that trump familial ties each time some ethnic group appeals to racial solidarity?<\/p>\n

Black versus white is now a reactionary construct, when non-European, non-white immigrant groups often achieve average incomes above the so-called majority. Black Lives Do<\/i> Matter if we consult the statistics of black representation in the federal public work force where blacks are more than fairly represented, given their percentages of the general population. If black lives don\u2019t matter, then no one told the president of the United States, the attorney general and several cabinet officials. By the same logic, examine the NBA player roster or the NFL coaching pool, and one might object that Asian Lives Don\u2019t Matter at all.<\/p>\n

3)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/b>So what is the problem?<\/b><\/p>\n

Black Lives Matters did not resonate \u2014 even before its more firebrand members openly called for the shooting of police officers and embraced racist language. Why? Because most of it was based on a series of lies.<\/p>\n

Equality under the law \u2014 even when and if it is strictly applied and constantly monitored, or in fact weighed for minorities as in the case of set-asides and affirmative action \u2014 does not ensure, in a free market republic like the United States, an equality of result.<\/p>\n

After fifty years of civil rights legislation, perhaps somewhere between a third to half of the black population has not achieved parity with other population groups. In response, black elites seek to leverage government to ensure parity (\u201cdisproportionate impact\u201d), based on perceived grievances. Threats of unrest and collective violence by the urban underclass often come in handy.<\/p>\n

But other groups, subject to present and past discrimination, from Punjabis to Arab-Americans, do not embrace the same racial chauvinism. There are no Cuban Jesse Jacksons or Asian Al Sharptons. Moreover, it is not clear how affirmative action for the children of Eric Holder or Michael Jordan helps the inner-city population. Class, in other words, in America increasingly trumps race, and the two are not always synonymous. \u00a0Black elites parrot the charge of \u201cwhite privilege,\u201d but usually to other black and white academic and journalistic one-percenters and often in careerist fashion. If they sincerely believed in \u201cwhite privilege,\u201d they would have tested their theories at town meetings among the destitute in Appalachia or appealed to poor rural Oklahomans to be more self-critical on how their race has given them a supposed leg up in the American rat-race.<\/p>\n

It is a hard sell to insist that poor white Delmas Marshall of rural Arkansas has it made compared to a tormented Oprah who claims she was treated rudely over a trendy purse in Switzerland or a supposedly marginalized Morgan Freeman who occasionally whines that not supporting Obama is proof of racism \u2014 or the 21% of the federal Postal Service workforce that are black.<\/p>\n

Finally, we come to the pernicious role of self-serving white elite liberals who castigate conservative blacks, who do not see their own race as key to their identities. The reason liberals despise \u00a0Clarence Thomas or caricature a Ben Carson, more so than they do white conservative justices or public figures, is the threat that they pose to the entire engine of liberal condescension \u2014 and Democratic politics. When successful blacks prove that they easily compete in the marketplace of talent and ideas without liberal racial policies and their political henchmen, then the entire architecture of liberal racial politics collapses.\u00a0 The disdain shown a Thomas or Carson suggests that liberal racial politics serve as private medieval penance in the abstract, and at little personal cost for assuaging guilt over liberal apartheid. If one were to examine the schools, neighborhoods, and socializing of liberal white elites, one would discover that their rhetoric was used to mask, rather than to confirm, the lives that they lead.<\/p>\n

A final note. Words matter. The most abject racist could not have invented a more effective way to achieve racial polarization than the many current manifestations of the \u201cBlack Lives Matter\u201d movement. Did a racist think up the movement\u2019s absurdities: its criticism of \u201cAll Lives Matter,\u201d the implicit encouragement of violence against the police who alone battle barbarity in the inner city, the constant whine about white privilege that is sloppily addressed and often reverberated by whites who enjoy it against other whites who do not, the cynical use of the movement by black elites whose privileges sometimes derive from the disparities of the underclass \u2014 and the reluctance to discuss and address the epidemic of inordinate black illegitimacy, crime, drug use, rap vulgarity, social service dependence, and the romance of the violent cult of the male, all of whose assuagement could lead to parity?<\/p>\n

Black Lives Matter will shortly be history, like the age of Obama that empowered it, as it falls by the weight of its own contradictions and hypocrisies. A year from now it will be as heard as often as \u201cblack power!\u201d \u2014 and replaced by yet another popular slogan to avoid confronting truth and reality, even as most people of all races struggle to get along.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2015 Works and Days. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Exploring the many reasons why the slogan \u201cBlack Lives Matter\u201d will be gone within a year. What will replace it?\u00a0 by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJ Media In the post-civil rights era of the last half-century, a number of black triumphalist slogans and movements have come and gone. \u201cBlack is beautiful\u201d was an informal self-help […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[11,86,383,46,536,135],"tags":[1086],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2fR","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11329,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/08-13-2018-angry-reader\/","url_meta":{"origin":8671,"position":0},"title":"08-13-2018 Angry Reader","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 13, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"From An Angry Reader: Subject: You are a racist idiot Your articles and ideas lower the IQ of this country every time they are published. 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