The Black Lives Matter movement is about a lot more than its name implies. Even on the surface, however, its key premise is not supported by empirical evidence. White police officers are less likely to kill black suspects. Instead of kowtowing to it, we should resist this movement.
Let’s get the stipulations out of the way. Black lives matter. They really do. Police brutality is a problem. It really is. Racial prejudice is deplorable, and when committed by the state, ought to be vigorously resisted.
Few people would disagree with these propositions. Those who do are part of the problem, not the solution.
Black Lives Matter (BLM) emerged as a protest movement in the wake of the 2013 acquittal of a neighbourhood watchman who shot and killed an apparently innocent black teenager, Trayvon Martin.
It gained momentum with several high-profile incidents in which black victims, usually suspected of nothing more than petty crimes, were brutally killed by white police officers or, occasionally, vigilantes. In many of these incidents, there were no consequences for those who appeared guilty of using excessive force or, indeed, of murder.
Over the years, the BLM movement has incited widespread protests and riots in the US. It exploded onto the international stage in late May 2020 when a convicted felon, George Floyd, under arrest over a petty crime, was killed by a white police officer with a spotty record who kneeled on his neck for eight minutes until he was dead.
In open defiance of lockdown regulations, crowds protested and rioted in support of BLM. Vandalism was directed at public symbols of supposedly racist history. Looting of private shops and businesses has been rampant. Within the movement, there were conflicting views on whether or not such violence was an appropriate response to the alleged systemic racism in the police.
Many cases of further police brutality have surfaced during the course of the protests, with video evidence showing apparently unprovoked attacks on civilians and egregious cases of excessive force, including against elderly and disabled people.
That these incidents happened on camera, during high-profile protests that everyone was watching, certainly raises the question how brutal the enforcers get when the cameras aren’t rolling.
Libertarians largely agree with the BLM movement that police brutality is a problem. The police, after all, are the enforcing agency of the state, and enjoy a legal monopoly on the use of force. Police departments continually seek greater powers to infringe on individual liberty, and greater shielding from accountability, and they routinely receive legal and political cover for their actions. Police are widely viewed as, and in many respects are, above the law.
Classical liberals likewise agree that police brutality is an unacceptable violation of individual rights and liberties and undermines the rule of law.
The BLM movement has demanded recognition from a wide range of public figures and institutions and has largely received it. It has become de rigueur to express support for the movement.
However, any movement that demands unreserved submission, on pain of reputational lynching on social media, should be viewed with suspicion. After all, it is entirely possible to agree with some of the movement’s sentiments and objectives, but not with others.
Response to Ngidi
South African sport offers a microcosm of the controversies incited by the BLM movement that swept first the US, and then the world, since 2013.
Fast bowler Lungi Ngidi believes not only that he should take a stand and support BLM, that but Cricket South Africa should do so collectively. This prompted criticism from several former national cricketers.
Boeta Dippenaar was the most expansive in his criticism of BLM: ‘I am afraid to say “Black Lives Matter” have become nothing more than leftist political movement. I would suggest that Lungi Ngidi listens a bit more to likes of Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, Walter Williams and Milton Friedman. All lives matter. If you want me to stand shoulder to shoulder with you Lungi then stand shoulder to shoulder with me with regards to farm attacks.’
Of course, supporting one cause does not preclude, nor should it be predicated upon, support for another. Besides that, however, was Dippenaar right?
The usual suspects in the media sure don’t think so. Judith February thinks he is on the wrong side of history.
In a sense, she’s right. Cricket SA has declared that it stands in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, whether or not Dippenaar likes it.
Being ‘on the wrong side of history’ is not as decisive a critique as those who use the phrase believe it is, however. It is a fallacy to suppose that the hypothetical opinion of an authority or a majority in the future is necessarily correct or moral.
Moreover, Dippenaar does not, as February claims, ‘[fail] to recognise a system which ensures that black people are the victims of poverty, general violence, state violence and inequality’.
Reading all that into his statement creates a false straw man, allowing February to avoid dealing with the more substantive criticisms he raises. Besides, if Dippenaar is so steeped in whiteness and ignorant on controversies of race, why would three of the four authorities he cites be black?
I used to believe that saying ‘all lives matter’ misses the point, which is that black people are disproportionately likely to be victims of police violence. This is also the dominant view in the media.
The view that ‘all lives matter’ apparently ‘ducks the truth’ because black lives are ‘subject to particular perils’. Saying ‘all lives matter’ is allegedly problematic because saying so ‘redirects the attention from Black lives, who are the ones in peril’. It is said, rather preposterously, that saying ‘all lives matter’ ‘communicates to Black people that their lives don’t’.
Dippenaar reportedly stands by his views that ‘all lives matter’. Is he right to do so?
What’s behind the BLM movement?
He certainly is correct to say that BLM is a leftist political movement, and ‘a Marxist system that seeks to break down the very system of family that we are built on’.
Moreover, BLM’s fundamental premise, that victims of police brutality are disproportionally black, as a consequence of individual or systemic racism, also turns out to be false.
In South Africa, the brutal death of Collins Khosa, a black man who was guilty of no crime, came at the hands of black soldiers and police, who had black superiors, serving under black cabinet ministers, acting under laws written predominantly by black politicians, who are members of an African nationalist party. They were exonerated by black officials.
In the US, too, the claim that black people are more likely to get killed in encounters with white police officers doesn’t ultimately hold water, as Institute for Race Relations analyst Gabriel Crouse painstakingly lays out in a new report released today, entitled Because Black Lives Matter.
He cites an empirical analysis by Roland G. Fryer, Jr., in a 2018 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, which finds that ‘(controlling) for all characteristics from incident reports, black suspects are 24.2 percent less likely to be shot than non-black suspects’
A paper in the British Medical Journal in 2016 found: ‘Ratios of admitted and fatal injury due to legal police intervention per 10 000 stops/arrests did not differ significantly between racial/ethnic groups.’
Yet another paper, from 2019, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, concludes: ‘We find no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers. Instead, race-specific crime strongly predicts civilian race. This suggests that increasing diversity among officers by itself is unlikely to reduce racial disparity in police shootings.’
It turns out that the apparent over-representation of black people among US police shooting deaths is entirely an artifact of their over-representation in stops and arrests. It does not prove systemic racism any more than the fact that victims of death by cop are overwhelmingly male proves inherent sexism among police officers.
While racial bias among police officers no doubt exists, it does not appear to make white officers more aggressive towards black suspects. On the contrary, there is evidence that they are significantly less likely to use deadly force against black suspects. Perhaps most of them don’t want to end up going viral on social media, after all.
Crouse’s report quotes extensively from an excellent review of the issue by Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, written for City Journal. Hughes offers a long list of white victims of police brutality that was every bit as heinous as the violence inflicted upon black victims. Contrary to the narrative of BLM, it is those white victims who are ignored by the media and the public, not the black victims, who all become martyrs to the cause.
Hughes writes, ‘If the challenge for the Left is to accept that the real problem with the police is not racism, the challenge for the Right is to accept that there are real problems with the police.’
It shouldn’t matter, but it probably does: Hughes is black himself. He used to support BLM, before he got sight of the data and the human stories that debunk the narrative of persecuted black victims of police violence.
Crouse’s report also corroborates, in detail, Dippenaar’s view that BLM is nothing but a left-wing political movement. Its founders declared themselves to be trained organisers in the Marxist tradition. Its ideological objectives go far beyond mere police reform, to the abolition of private property, redistribution of wealth, and dismantling the institutions that, allegedly, perpetuate racial violence, which is all of them. That includes the nuclear family, against which BLM rails, as Dippenaar correctly says.
Organisations that pledge support to BLM should be aware that the movement views them largely as guilty or complicit in systemic racism. Their endorsement of BLM, and gestures like ‘taking the knee’, are acts of obeisance and penance. These acts cannot lead to redemption, however, because BLM’s ideology conflicts with the ideas of individual liberty and private property upon which those institutions are founded.
Ultimately, BLM’s view of the world is not only factually incorrect, but it is inherently racist. It asserts that mere membership of one race or another makes you either a victim or a perpetrator, and if you don’t accept such racial predestination, you’re denounced either as a racist, or as a ‘race traitor’.
Yes, racism is a scourge against which we should take a moral stand. Yes, police brutality and police impunity is a problem against which we should fight. However, we should do so not because black lives matter, but because all lives matter.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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