Last year, when then-49er Colin Kaepernick explained why he knelt instead of showing respect for our nation, its flag, or its anthem, he was very clear about the nature of his pointedly anti-America protest.
“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
This was, of course, in the wake of the Ferguson riots and during the rise of Black Lives Matter. The context was very pointed and very deliberately anti-America, and it mattered not that it was based on misinformation at best and outright lies at worst.
Heather Mac Donald’s City Journal article, “Hard Data, Hollow Protests,” demonstrates that the idea that police officers disproportionately leave black bodies littering our nation’s streets is a fallacy of the highest order.
She begins by looking at the FBI’s report on crime for 2016 and the number of black people killed during that year.
The FBI released its official crime tally for 2016 today, and the data flies in the face of the rhetoric that professional athletes rehearsed in revived Black Lives Matter protests over the weekend. Nearly 900 additional blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide-victim total to 7,881.Those 7,881 “black bodies,” in the parlance of Ta-Nehisi Coates, are 1,305 more than the number of white victims (which in this case includes most Hispanics) for the same period, though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The increase in black homicide deaths last year comes on top of a previous 900-victim increase between 2014 and 2015.
What the left tries so desperately to hide is that it is black people, not law enforcement, who are responsible for the bulk of the homicides of other black people.
Mac Donald continues:
Who is killing these black victims? Not whites, and not the police, but other blacks. In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous, according to the Washington Post. The Post categorized only 16 black male victims of police shootings as “unarmed.” That classification masks assaults against officers and violent resistance to arrest. Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police.In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer. Black males have made up 42 percent of all cop-killers over the last decade, though they are only 6 percent of the population. That 18.5 ratio undoubtedly worsened in 2016, in light of the 53 percent increase in gun murders of officers—committed vastly and disproportionately by black males. Among all homicide suspects whose race was known, white killers of blacks numbered only 243.
Another point worth noting is the “Ferguson effect,” whereby law enforcement, unwilling to put themselves into the glare of the national spotlight, are less rigorous in their enforcement duties. This has led to an increase in violent crime, Mac Donald reports.
Violent crime has now risen by a significant amount for two consecutive years. The total number of violent crimes rose 4.1 percent in 2016, and estimated homicides rose 8.6 percent. In 2015, violent crime rose by nearly 4 percent and estimated homicides by nearly 11 percent. The last time violence rose two years in a row was 2005–06.The reason for the current increase is what I have called the Ferguson Effect. Cops are backing off of proactive policing in high-crime minority neighborhoods, and criminals are becoming emboldened. Having been told incessantly by politicians, the media, and Black Lives Matter activists that they are bigoted for getting out of their cars and questioning someone loitering on a known drug corner at 2 am, many officers are instead just driving by. Such stops are discretionary; cops don’t have to make them.And when political elites demonize the police for just such proactive policing, we shouldn’t be surprised when cops get the message and do less of it. Seventy-two percent of the nation’s officers say that they and their colleagues are now less willing to stop and question suspicious persons, according to a Pew Research poll released in January. The reason is the persistent anti-cop climate.. . . . Four studies came out in 2016 alone rebutting the charge that police shootings are racially biased.
The rebuttal from the left—from Obama, former Attorney General Eric Holder, on down—is that there must be racism at work because a larger proportion of black people are killed by police than are white people.
According to the Washington Post’s 2016 police shootings data, 466 white people were killed by police and 233 black people were killed by police. Because the national percentage of black people (13%) is significantly less than that of white people (63-69%), the illogical response from the left is that this shows black people are “disproportionately” killed by police. The number, they insist, should instead align with national percentages of black people to white people. If (say) 23% of white people are criminals, then to them it follows that only 23% of black people are criminals.
The National Review illustrates why this is fallacious:
The Washington Post recently ran an article about police killings nationwide in the first half of the year. That story made the same mistake Post reporters have been making for years by comparing the racial composition of those killed with the overall racial composition of the United States.“Police have continued to shoot and kill a disproportionately large number of black males, who account for nearly a quarter of the deaths, yet are only 6 percent of the nation’s population,” the paper reported.The Post’s unspoken assumption is that police killings should match America’s overall demographic statistics. That might sound right at first, but it is well understood in academic circles that using population as a benchmark can be dangerous, because not all people are equally likely to come into confrontation with the police.To borrow an example from Michigan State University researcher Joseph Cesario, an officer is not as likely to shoot the cashier selling him a cup of coffee as he is to shoot a citizen with an outstanding warrant he has just pulled over.. . . . Even the Post itself has noted the relevant data in the past. “In 74 percent of all fatal police shootings, the individuals had already fired shots, brandished a gun or attacked a person with a weapon or their bare hands,” the paper reported in 2015. “Another 16 percent of the shootings came after incidents that did not involve firearms or active attacks but featured other potentially dangerous threats.”Those figures are consistent with other data. In 2015, two-thirds of unarmed people of any race killed by police had been in the process of committing violent crime or property destruction. Fourteen percent were engaged in domestic violence. Ten percent were committing a robbery, 20 percent a burglary or vandalism, and 21 percent an assault on another civilian.
Other factors in supposed “police brutality” include observations that black people are far more likely to interact belligerently with police officers and / or refuse to comply with law enforcement officers’ orders.
Failure to respect police officers when they are acting in their official capacity is asking for trouble . . . for blacks and whites alike. It would never occur to me not to do what a police officer told me to do at a traffic stop or when I’ve called for assistance in an emergency. Granted, these are the only interactions I’ve had with police, but there’s a lot to be said for being a law-abiding and -respecting citizen. Law-abiding citizens of any race who are complying with law enforcement officers’ orders are rarely, if ever, shot and killed by the police in this country.
But all of this may be moot. The radical left appears recently to have given up on Black Lives Matter and the bogus “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative of police brutality and are instead busily working to recast disrespecting our nation’s flag and anthem as a fight against “white supremacy.”
“White supremacy” does not mean what we think it means, however. Instead of referencing the approximately 5,000-6000 actual white supremacist group members (i.e. neo-Nazi groups and the KKK) in the U. S., the left has moved the goal posts to include anyone who thinks we should not remove and destroy Civil War statues, anyone who voted for or supports President Trump, anyone who opposes illegal immigration, anyone who wants secure national borders, anyone whom the left deems “anti-government” (this includes limited government conservatives and libertarians), anyone who is a member of any “patriot” group, and anyone who is appalled by able-bodied Americans kneeling during the national anthem and before our flag. White supremacists one and all.
If this sounds like the same list of conservatives and libertarians that we got from Obama’s DHS in that infamous 2009 memo about “rightwing extremist groups,” it’s because it is essentially the same thing. The same people are targeted, they’ve just changed the label. We went from being RAAACISTS to “rightwing extremists” and now to “white supremacists” (a term loosely, carelessly, and ignorantly used interchangeably with “fascists” and “Nazis”). Each term, of course, encapsulates all the others and each incarnation is designed to maximize division and discord.
The latest push from the left is to shame white athletes into rejecting their own values, patriotism, and morals to meet the increasingly shrill demands of the left.
Beyond simply shaming Alejandro Villanueva into making a sniveling apology for doing the right thing and standing in pride for the national anthem while saluting the flag of these United States, the left is now stepping up its attempts to shame non-compliant athletes.
A HuffPo article entitled, “White Athletes Still Standing For The Anthem Are Standing For White Supremacy” tells us all we need to know about the turn these protests have taken. Our national anthem is now deemed “white supremacist.”
Let that sink in.
While Kaepernick originally intended his protest to be an organic part of the then-insurgent Black Lives Matter movement rooted in “bodies in the streets,” the core of his protest, kneeling during the national anthem, was anti-American. America, he insisted, was the root of the problem.
The regressive left is running with it, and the national anthem itself is now an expression of “white supremacy.”
Where does this end?
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