Whites, Blacks and Culture...

If you spend any time online (particularly after Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show) you’ll come across memes that say that America was built by blacks or that Shakespeare’s work was written by a black woman or that black Africans built western civilization. I’m not convinced.   

To put it bluntly, has black Africa ever given the world anything of consequence since humans originated there? Has black Africa ever had a civilization worthy of comparison to the great civilizations we’re all familiar with? Is there a reason why Africa has the lowest IQs on the planet? That almost every country in Africa is poor while the continent has a majority of the world’s gold, cobalt, diamonds, and platinum? Is it any coincidence that 8 of the 10 most violent countries in the world is either in Africa or is majority black? Ditto for wars? Is it any coincidence that black Americans are 600% more likely to commit murder than whites?

We’ve been told that white racism is the driver behind all of that. If that were true we would expect black Africa before Europeans arrived to be a thriving continent bustling with advanced civilizations. But is that the case?

Some claim it is, and indeed there were a number of large civilizations in Sub-Saharan history.  There was the Mali Empire that dates back to the 13^th century and was once led by Mansa Musa, said to have been the richest man in history. There’s the Great Zimbabwe Empire also from the 13^th century and the Songhai Empire which dates to the 15^th.  Then there was the Kingdom of Aksum that operated as a trading center between Europe, North Africa and Asia and lasted 1,000 years from about 200 BC to 800 AD.

Those and others were no doubt complex societies that traded, warred and lasted for centuries but somehow managed to not become particularly advanced. Compare the intact ruins of the 13^th century Zimbabwe Empire to Paris’s Sainte-Chapelle, also from 13^th century or the 11^th century Dogon Cliffs in Mali to Britain’s 11th century Windsor Castle. The word that comes to mind is primitive. And most of sub-Saharan Africa never really advanced much from there.  While it’s likely that when the Portuguese began exploring the continent in the early 15^th century they encountered numerous population centers of significant size, most would not be what we might call advanced. Compare sculptures from 15^th century West Africa to what was being produced in Europe at the same time. 

While we’re constantly told that the condition of Africans in the 21^st century is the result of European imperialism, the reality is, Africa south of the Sahara was barely out of the stone age when the Europeans arrived in the 15^th century.

What about black Africans today?  Sadly, while from afar the continent is covered with beautiful modern cities, upon closer look virtually every country is economically distressed and many are wracked with violence and war. What about blacks whose ancestors left Africa, what has become of them?  Well, sadly the picture’s not much different. Whole countries, like Haiti, which freed itself from European rule in 1806 – coerced to sign a suffocating indemnity with France that would take more than a century to repay – is one of the poorest and most dysfunctional nations in the world.  Here in the United States black communities are wracked with a spectrum of problems from violence to unwed motherhood to illiteracy to drugs and economic stagnation. Indeed, in some black communities the murder rates are among the highest in the world.

So what does all of that mean?  Lower IQs, lack of civilizational development, extraordinary levels of violence?  Are blacks genetically coded to be inferior to everyone else?

No, I don’t think so. The hardest working and kindest man I’ve ever know was black.  Thomas Sowell is arguably the greatest economist of the last half century.  We’ve all see Hidden Figures, the true story about how Katherine Johnson and her team played a critical role in sending the astronauts to the moon.  Madame CJ Walker was America’s first self-made female millionaire, overcoming actual, real racism and creating a company that employed 20,000 women at the beginning of the 20^th century.  There are countless more examples of why it’s impossible for DNA to be the cause. So then what is it?

Dr. Sowell argues compellingly in his cultures trilogy that sub-Saharan Africa was backward (my word not his) because with its dearth of navigable rivers, deep water ports and lack of trade and the exchange of ideas with the world beyond. By the 16^th century Europeans had been fighting, trading with and learning from one another as well as Asia and north Africa for thousands of years. European advancement, like most, came as a result of man’s natural competitive forces being honed in the crucible of conflict and war taking place within a geography capable of facilitating efficient exchange of goods, information and ideas over a large area. They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and the interactions between the different peoples fueled their development. By the 16^th century those interactions had produced Shakespeare and Monteverdi and Galileo and Columbus and DaVinci, Michelangelo and many more. Black Africa had nothing comparable.

But what about intelligence? Are blacks biologically unequal?  Jason Riley, in his outstanding book Please Stop Helping Us provides the definitive answer: No. In looking at the past half century in America Riley demonstrates that it is culture that has damaged America’s black communities.  He references today’s black ghetto culture and its origin, which arrived in the first half of the 19^th century via the Irish, Scottish and Welsh migrants who heavily populated the south.  He quotes Sowell: “The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music…”

While most of those whites would move away from that culture, as would many blacks, in the second half of the 20^th century not only would many backtrack, but a majority would champion those very characteristics in an effort to “avoid acting white”.

In championing those values and crying victimhood, black leaders have betrayed the very people they claim to defend.  Riley contrasts the results of black students in teacher’s union controlled NYC public schools and those in nearby charter schools where the outcomes differed like night and day. Drawing students from the same communities and demographic, the former would expect and attain failure while the latter would not only expect success, but would produce some of the state’s best students, regardless of race. Culture matters.   

He further talks about the fact that in the early 20^th century, when blacks were making consistent and significant gains, there were times when more black children lived in 2 parent homes than whites. But then the government got involved and through a variety of programs intended to combat poverty, eviscerated black families. So today in America we have a black underclass that is characterized by poverty, a lack of education and extraordinary levels of violence – which is celebrated in rap lyrics – largely a consequence of government policies that made single motherhood a viable career path. 

Although blacks were part of the antebellum South, they did not build America nor western civilization, and the west is not responsible for the state of blacks around the world. As Sowell and Riley chronicle very compellingly, culture matters. Until that reality is recognized and addressed within the black universe, things will never improve.

A Sad Legacy of the Culture of Victimhood and Grift

For over a month we’ve seen videos exposing Hamas’s depravity. Its soldiers’ blatant disregard for human life and the seeming joy with which they carried out their depravity was disheartening.

Sadly, this kind of depravity can be found closer to home, too, where videos abound of black crime across America, with people shot, pushed in front of trains, sucker punched, beaten to a pulp, and even killed by individuals, gangs, or groups of “teens.”

In both cases, the perpetrators have an ostensible enemy at whom their anger is directed. For Hamas, it’s Jews, and for blacks, it’s whites. Apologists for both groups claim it’s the actions of the “oppressor” that caused the “victims” to react. For Hamas, it’s Jews “stealing” Palestinian lands. For blacks, it’s slavery and Jim Crow. In both cases, though, the outsized violence against bystanders demonstrates that those are just convenient justifications for evil people to gain power.

Hamas’s soldiers, while blaming Jews for everything, often target Muslims as well. They also carelessly target their weapons, striking their own people, while hiding soldiers and materials behind women and children in mosques, schools, and hospitals. When Israel retaliates and civilians die, the resulting images make great PR.

In America, even as the grifters at BLM and Antifa claim that white racism is the cause of virtually every evil, which inevitably creates black criminals who abuse whites or rob, plunder, and destroy businesses, the reality is that most of the victims of black criminals are themselves black. But that doesn’t matter to the race hustlers who use lies and deception to keep blacks and naive white liberals angry. Democrat race pimps don’t care that far more black blood is in the street because all they need is one video of a white person acting or reacting against a black person, and they’ve won the lottery, as they did with videos of Rodney King and George Floyd did.

In reality, being an oppressed minority is not necessarily a recipe for failure, as Thomas Sowell explains in Discrimination and Disparities. He discusses the relative success of various minorities around the world, including the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Jews in Eastern Europe, Indians in East Africa, Koreans in America, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and many other groups reviled in the countries in which they live.

The reality is that American blacks and the Palestinians have both had many opportunities to achieve success and usually squandered them away.

First, the Palestinians. Up until the mid-20th century, there was no such thing as Arab Palestinians. In the 2,000 years before the pre-Christian era, the one constant in the land was a Jewish presence, whether as a nation or as a vassal of Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans. After the Romans ended the Jewish nation and created a Palestinian colony, there were the Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks and, eventually, the Ottomans, and then the English.

The one constant was the Jews. Aside from Bedouins and the Druze, who have been there for several hundred years, the Arabs who identify today as Palestinians mostly drifted into the land beginning in the 1830s.

For the century preceding Israel’s establishment, much of the area was sparsely populated with towns and tribes in constant battle. In addition, the land was inhospitable, and agriculture struggled (something that changed only when Zionist Jews brought in modern farming techniques and hard work).

Jews were a majority of the population of Jerusalem as early as at least 1875—and in the late 19th century began purchasing land from the Arabs. By 1948, Jews owned 8% of the land that would become Israel, while 3.3% was in Arab hands, and 17% had been abandoned by Arabs planning on returning after Israel was eliminated. Britain owned the remaining 70%, which it took from the Ottoman Turks after WWI. The local Arabs never owned it. Thus, it’s a lie that Israel stole its land from the Arabs.

In 1924, Britain split the land in two, with British-mandate Palestine going to the Jews and Trans-Jordan (modern-day Jordan) going to the local Arabs. That didn’t stick. In 1948, after the Arabs had already gotten Trans-Jordan, the UN split British-mandate Palestine again, creating the State of Israel, which was liberally interspersed with an Arab state. The Arabs responded by attacking the newly created nation to take it all.

In 1999, Bill Clinton negotiated a treaty between the PLO and Israel that would have given the Palestinians 92% of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and various concessions within Israel proper. The Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, rejected it and instead launched a war against Israel. In 2005, Israel exited Gaza, removing 5,000 of its own citizens, and allowed the area to be self-governing. The citizens elected Hamas.

Since Israel exited Gaza, the world has donated over $10 billion there. Sadly, instead of spending money on building up the infrastructure and industry, Hamas put much of that money into building a “Metro” of tunnels into Israel and buying weapons to attack Israel. Imagine how different Gaza would be had its leaders spent that money building schools and viaducts, training entrepreneurs, or enhancing the agriculture industry.

But alas, they didn’t—their leaders would rather maintain the cult of victimhood as it’s far more profitable. (Just before his death in 2004, Yassir Arafat was said to have had a personal fortune of between $1 and $3 billion – stolen from the gullible Palestinians.) Hamas simply said that Israel was the enemy and was responsible for the Palestinians’ plight and then focused on war. Of course, it didn’t have to be that way. Israel built a thriving nation out of the desert. With global support and money, the Palestinians could have done the same. They chose not to.

Similarly, in the United States, slavery ended in 1865, and Jim Crow was gone by 1965, but that didn’t stop the victim industrial complex from poisoning the minds of many black Americans. For four decades, the Democrat party, the media, and America’s schools have told blacks they can’t succeed because of white racism. (This despite the fact that American blacks have incomes that exceed the average of almost every country on the planet.)

They’ve told blacks that racist whites are waiting to lynch blacks. Since at least 2008, they’ve told blacks that, because of systemic racism, they cannot succeed and aren’t responsible for their conditions or actions. Along the way, grifters like Patrisse Cullors, Ibram X. Kendi, and Barack Obama got rich. When Barack Obama was elected race relations were about the best they’d been in history. Not so much now… Imagine what America would be like today had he been a unifier and tried to empower black entrepreneurship rather than being the race pimp he was.

At home and in Israel, we’re seeing the same thing: People greedy for power and wealth tell specific groups they’re victims incapable of helping themselves, thereby turning them into drones committed to violent struggle. Then, say their alleged oppressors are subhuman beings who deserve what they get. Do all of this, and it’s no surprise that these “victims” embrace a savage mindset without empathy, making them not only willing but enthusiastic about unimaginable and routine cruelty.

While the “oppressors” are the ostensible targets, it doesn’t really matter if innocents get killed, which is exactly what we see. Hamas is sacrificing Palestinians, and blacks are killing blacks along with whites and Asians, all because they believe the lie that they’re victims and their oppressors deserve what they get. Victimhood is a bloody game but, sadly, a profitable one.

It's Not Reparations, It's Revenge...

Democrats frequently talk about reparations for black Americans, compensation for slavery and Jim Crow.  Indeed, House member Cori Bush recently proposed $14 trillion as a good place to start.

Any reparations plan would be extraordinarily complex. First, if reparations are to be paid, to whom would they be paid?  To every one of America’s 45 million blacks? (2020 Census)  Including the 4.5 million blacks who immigrated after Jim Crow was gone?  Should the 33 million black Americans aged 50 or below who have only lived after passage of the Voting and Civil Rights Acts?  How about black families whose ancestors lived in northern states where slavery was largely outlawed before America was a nation and Jim Crow never existed?  How about blacks from states like California and Idaho who had neither slavery nor Jim Crow?  Or those of mixed origins with one black parent?  Is one black grandparent sufficient or would it have to be at least 2 of 4?  Do black families who earn $200,000 a year still qualify for reparations?  How about America’s 1.5 million black millionaires?   

The next question is, if indeed reparations were to be paid, who would pay them? America has approximately 250 million white people. Would all of them have to pay? Even those whose ancestors arrived after passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts or whose ancestors arrived after the Civil War, as many Italians and Irish did? Do the 155 million or so who are 50 or younger and were born after Jim Crow was history? How about those descended from one of the 360,000 white Northern soldiers who lost their lives fighting to end slavery? Or those who live in states that never had slavery or Jim Crow? Do the whites of Wyoming, where the black population is 0.9% pay the same as Louisiana where it’s 31%? 

Once we’ve nailed down who’s going to get reparations and who’s going to pay them, then we have to figure out how much.  For the sake of argument, let’s take Bush’s $14 trillion.  That works out to $311,000 to every black American. Again, for argument’s sake, let’s say that all 250 million of the whites would be responsible for making the reparation.  If required to make that payment, that would involve every single white person (including babies and retirees) to write a check for about $56,000.  That’s unlikely to be feasible given that the average median white household income in the US is $78,000.

So, if writing a check is out of the question, maybe setting up a payment plan, sort of like a mortgage.  Spreading the $56,0600 out over 15 years at today’s 6.7% interest rate would make for a monthly payment of $494 per white person. That doesn’t seem too unreasonable, but what about unemployed whites or those on government assistance?  Do they pay?  What about white kids too young to work?  Do they pay or do their obligations accrue until they turn 18 or get their first job?  Then of course, who do they make those checks out to?  Do the white people get to choose which black people they pay?  Or do they make the payment to a pool to be distributed by some upstanding organization that represents black people like the NAACP or BLM or the National Action Network? Are the payments tax deductable? Maybe let the IRS collect the money and have the government distribute it. Would the government need to set up a Department of Reparations to keep the money separate from the rest of the government’s funds? Or maybe the government can pay the whole sum up front and bill the white people. Would individual black people have claim on individual white people’s property if they didn’t or couldn’t pay?  Would jails become debtor’s prisons full of people who can’t pay?

Assuming all of that gets figured out, are new black babies entitled to reparations?  If yes, for how long? Will black babies born in 2075 still be eligible for payments and white ones still obligated to pay? Is it in perpetuity or will it only last 100 years?  If new black babies are not eligible, how would mom explain to junior that he doesn’t get the $311,000 his brother did just because he was born 12 months later?  If a black woman is pregnant when the agreement is made, does she collect for only herself or for her baby too? 

At the end of the day reparations are made for some wrong done… but what if the result of that wrong left the progeny of the person wronged better off than had the wrong not been done in the first place.  Is it possible that reparations aren’t really due?

Approximately 400,000 blacks were brought to the United States as slaves. We assume that had they not been sold into slavery they would likely have stayed where they lived. So, one might ask, would the progeny of those slaves have been better off in those home countries than they are here as a result of their ancestors being sold into slavery?  First, let’s look at incomes. We’ll look at the per person median income (PPMI) in the top 10 modern nations encompassing the places from which those blacks were taken. (see nearby chart)

The average among those 10 nations is $950 per year.  This compares to a median income for black Americans of $13,108 per person. ($19,306 average American X .67)

But of course money isn’t everything, right? How about life expectancy?  In those same 10 nations the life expectancies average 61.6, compared to the United States where the average life expectancy of black Americans is 75.1 years. 

	PPMI	Life Expt.
Angola:	$665	62.3
Congo (DR):	$392	62.4
Cameroon:	$1,245	60.9
Nigeria:	$825	52.9
Guinea:	$876	60.7
Sierra Leone:	$765	60.1
Gambia:	$1,383	63.8
Liberia:	$753	61.1
Mauritania:	1,760	64.5
Senegal:	$844	67.6
Average:	$950.80	61.6
Black Americans	$13,108	75.1

So black Americans have incomes that are 13 times higher than individuals living in the nations from which slaves were brought to America. They also have life expectancies that are 14 years, or 22% longer. What’s more, Americans have freedoms found in none of those countries; they also have levels of entertainment, transportation, food, shelter, leisure, medicines, job opportunities and democracy that citizens of those nations can only dream of. 

As such, it appears that black American descendants of slaves are actually far better off because their ancestors left Africa in bondage and landed in the United States.  Indeed, had their ancestors been taken to Brazil, where the largest number of blacks landed, they might not have survived to procreate because death rates were staggeringly high, or to the middle east where the men were castrated and babies born to black slaves were killed at birth, which explains a dearth of blacks in the middle east despite importing more slaves than the Americas. 

But the relevant progeny for this discussion were brought to the United States, and it appears that they are much better off than the descendents of those who were left behind.  If that were not the case, one would expect that blacks unhappy with America would willingly emigrate to the nations from which their ancestors came. But that never quite happens does it? Which begs the question, given that no one alive today was either a slave or owned slaves and most of the progeny of slaves are exponentially better off than they would have been had their ancestors not been taken to America in the first place, exactly why are reparations warranted?

In fact, they’re not, and that’s the point.  It’s not reparations that are being demanded, it’s revenge, which is a completely different thing altogether…

Black Lives Apparently Don't Matter to Democrats Who Use Them As Cannon Fodder in Pursuit of Power

America is being destroyed from within.  The Republic is being demolished by the Swamp, the borg of pernicious politicians, entrenched, politicized bureaucrats, media elites and academics who wield environmentalism and equity as truncheons to obliterate individual freedom, economic opportunity and the rule of law.  The recent episode of hypocrisy onMartha’s Vineyard demonstrates with crystal clarity the universe the elites of the Swamp create as they make laws that apply to peasants but no to the aristocracy.

Columns documenting the machinations of the Swamp are legion, but this is not one of them.  No, this piece is specifically about the destruction of the rule of law that the those elites have unleashed on said peasants, specifically as it relates to violent crime.

This past week New Orleans reclaimed the title of America’s deadliest city after seeing murders jump 141% over the last couple of years.  In New Orleans the murder rate is a staggering 52 per 100,000 people.  That compares to the national average of 6.9, the highest it’s been in a quarter century and the 50 per 100,000 of Venezuela, the most dangerous country in the world.

If New Orleans were an outlier it would be a shame, the fact that it’s not is a tragedy:  New York, Chicago, Portland, LA, San Francisco, Philadelphia and more. Big cities and small, crime is up across the country over the last two years, in most cases, dramatically.

We’ve always had crime in America.  Such is the price of freedom.  But what we are experiencing today is something altogether different.  It’s not just crime.  America can sometimes be a dangerous place.  Everyone knows working the midnight shift at a convenience store carries more risk than working the 9 AM shift at your local library, just as common sense tells you the odds of getting into a fight in a bar on a Saturday night are far higher than they are at church on Sunday morning.   

And just to be clear, this is not Antifa thugs and BLM cultists burning down cities.  Protest, even violent protest has been part of American history since its founding and largely is event driven like Shay’s Rebellion, the Vietnam War protests, or the riots after the killing of MLK or the acquittal of the police in the Rodney King video.

No, this is something different.  It’s one thing to rage against the machine, it’s another to commit violence against citizens, particularly when they are unsuspecting innocents or compliant victims.  And this is the issue today and we see it taking place across the county, from urban jungles like New York City to Midwestern communities like Salt Lake City.

What America’s experiencing today is exponentially worse than the typical crime that America is used to, and the truth is, most of it – but far from all of it – is being perpetuated by young black men, although increasingly, by young black women as well. 

Violence is being taken not only to a new level in terms of its frequency, but in the application as well. It’s not taking place in dark corners or deserted parking lots, but rather right in the middle of regular hustle and bustle of American’s daily lives.  It’s taking place in broad daylight, in full view of video cameras – often with others videoing the carnage to share on social media.  Violent, brutal crime is taking place on main street USA, in schools, drugstores, fast food restaurants, subway platforms, high end retail stores, and of course homes. 

We see large groups of young people blitzing stores and grabbing merchandise off shelves and running out with smiles on their faces.  We see “shoplifters” methodically clear store shelves of merchandise and simply stroll out the door, unconcerned about getting stopped or arrested and often assaulting employees along the way. 

What’s more, there’s an element of violence that seems unprecedented in its scale.  Almost daily we see random innocent people on subways or on stairs or in restaurants getting shoved or kicked or punched. We see fast food workers attacked as customers come over or around counters and spark mayhem.  We see bus drivers attacked and shop owners beaten and cops spit on. Indeed we see countless instances where robbers beat or shoot victims even after they have taken whatever they were after.  We also read daily of innocents of all ages killed in the crossfire while sleeping in their beds, standing in a bar or sitting in their cars. 

There also seems to be a racial element to this new crime wave with black perpetrators targeting a disproportionate number of white or Asian victims… but make no mistake, the single largest group of victims of this crime wave are black citizens. 

The question is, why is all of this this happening?  What is it that has caused an increasing number of black Americans to believe that they can rob and beat and even kill their fellow citizens with impunity? There are no doubt countless contributing factors, from missing fathers to failing schools to social media, but those problems (at least the first two) have existed for quite some time. No, the reason for the sharp jump in violent crime and unhinged behavior on the part of large numbers of primarily young black Americans is the Democrat proposition that everything bad that happens to blacks is a consequence of racism and as such, they’re not responsible for their choices and therefore they should not be held accountable for their actions.

Ronald Reagan once said, “If you want more of something, subsidize it…” and that is exactly what the Democrats have been doing with violent crime.  While they are not yet directly paying criminals to attack their fellow citizens and rob local businesses, they are subsidizing crime nonetheless.   

On the one hand George Soros backed Democrat prosecutors from coast to coast are demonstrating their pro criminal empowerment bonafides by refusing to seek bail for most arrestees, refusing to prosecute countless misdemeanors and simultaneously undercharging countless violent crimes as said misdemeanors. While on the other hand you have Democrats effectively decriminalizing an entire swath of crimes or eliminating bail for almost every offense.  Indeed, the lunatics running Illinois have just passed a law that eliminates bail for virtually every offense below 1^st degree murder and prohibits police from arresting or removing trespassers caught in the act of burglarizing a home or business.  That means that if someone breaks into your house in the middle of the night and you call the police, if you’re lucky enough given the Democrat “Defund the police movement” that they respond while the trespasser is still there, they are literally not allowed to remove them from your home…

All of this is happening exactly when America’s cultural and political elites are telling young black Americans that the system is rigged against them, that they’re incapable of succeeding when playing by the rules, that most white people hate them and if they break the law there are no consequences to be had.  That is literally a recipe for the collapse of society. 

Today in Democrat run America, it’s only the rights of criminals that matter, never the victims… and the fact is that most of the victims of this American renaissance of violence are, in fact, black Americans, the very people Democrats pretend to care about.  Democrats have leveraged the fictions of “systemic racism” and millions of “white supremacists” running around to accumulate power, and Americans of all races are paying the price.  But this is exactly what happens when politicians pursue policies of balkanization and victimization, setting groups of Americans against one another for the purposes of gaining power.  The Democrats thrive, their grifter partners thrive and America’s citizens suffer. 

America was founded on the principle that all men were created equal in the eyes of God and in the laws of man. While the execution of those truths have been imperfect from the beginning, it has consistently improved for over 200 years, bringing Americans freedom and prosperity unmatched in human history, and that includes black Americans, who make up fully 8% of American millionaires.  Democrats, in half a generation have undone 200 years of progress and created a violent cage match between demographics in the public square, and the result has been a body blow to civil society, mayhem in cities, and blood on the streets, and most of it black.  But somehow black America continues to vote Democrat in Stalin like numbers. Perhaps they should reconsider…

The Driving While Black Meme And Other Fictions Fueling The Burning of Cities

Ever since the protests of the killing of George Floyd began, the phrases “America is a racist nation”, “Institutional Racism” and “White Privilege” seem to have become ubiquitous. The sad thing – among so many others about all of this – is that these seem to be considered the end all and be all for some who are engaged in the debate. The reality that cops are 18 times more likely to be killed by a black man than they are to kill an unarmed black man… Doesn’t matter. Institutional racism! The fact that the poorest 20% of Americans are more prosperous than the average European… So what! America is a racist nation. That blacks make 8% of America's millionaires… Obviously white privilege.

We’ve been hearing for at least the last 30 years that America needs to have a conversation about race. But how are we supposed to have such a conversation when one side is not interested in facts? How are we supposed to address real problems if rather than focus on facts and data one side only wants to focus on anecdotal evidence? For example, cops and race. one can certainly appreciate that different people have different experiences with cops. Race is no doubt one of many factors that impact how those experiences play out. But everything else does too. Everything from height to girth to behavior to dress to politeness to language and countless other variables, verbal and non verbal all play a role. Race may even be one of the major factors, but it is far from the only one or even likely the primary one. Most – though not all – of the videos we see where someone is hurt or even killed by cops, whether the person is black or white, involves some level of conflict such as resisting arrest, ignoring warnings or things of that nature. Cops can and do make mistakes, but most interactions not only don’t end up with someone dead on the sidewalk, they don’t even end up with an arrest.

Not sure about that? Here’s the data. According to the FBI, in 2015 of 250 million Americans, 53 million of them had contact with police, one half of those initiated by police the other half by citizens. Of police initiated contacts 11.2% of whites had some interaction with police, while 11.3% of blacks did. The numbers remain consistent whether the person earned $24,000 or less a year or $75,000 or more a year.

We’ve often heard about the phenomena of the extraordinary perils of “Driving while Black”. The data don’t support that charge either. The percentage of white drivers who experienced a traffic stop: 8.6%. The percentage of black drivers: 9.8%. The percentage of stopped white drivers to receive a ticket: 46.4%; black drivers: 49.9%. The percentage of white drivers who were arrested as the result of a traffic stop: .3%. The percentage of black drivers who were arrested as the result of traffic stops: .5%. What these numbers mean is that out of 1,000 white drivers, 86 could be expected to be stopped by police and 3 could expect to be arrested. Of a similar number of black drivers, 98 could expect to be stopped by police and 5 could expect to be arrested. Further, of those traffic stops, 96.1% of whites believed that police had a legitimate reason for stopping them while 94.5% of blacks did. Finally, FBI data from 2008 show that of those who had contact with police, the average number of times a white person interacted with police was 1.7 times while for blacks it was 1.6 times.

These numbers tell a vastly different story than the one being told on the streets and in the media. These numbers indicate that most Americans, regardless of color have no contact with police during any given year, and even if they did, they face a tiny chance of being arrested. The differences in being stopped by police while driving, getting a ticket or getting arrested as a result of said stops varies only slightly between races. The number of multiple contacts between police and citizens is almost identical between races and is slightly lower for blacks.

Of course any conversation on race police would include other data like the fact that black males make up 6% of the population but represent 53% of known homicide offenders and commit about 60% of robberies.  And a wider conversation would include factors such as income and wealth gaps would be part of any such discussion as well as the impact education and unwed motherhood have on poverty rates. But it's the relationship between race and police that are animating the events of today.

As such, the overarching question is, do these numbers tell a story of a nation policed by an army of inherently racist storm troopers where blacks are oppressed by virtue of the color of their skin? No they don’t. Differences in the data do exist, but they are staggeringly small… but differences exist everywhere between people of different sexes, heights, weights, skin tone, amount of acne, hair and simple beauty. Not to mention religion, education, income as well as less distinct things like assertiveness, shyness, personality and level of politeness… The cornucopia of characteristics that impact our daily lives is almost infinite and race is but one of them, and a small one at that.

At the end of the day the data indicate that there is no significant bias on the part of police contacts with citizens based on race. Certainly nothing sufficient to warrant the burning of cities and neighborhoods across the country. Given that, one has to ask, what else might be going on here?  That something else is the media’s hatred for Donald Trump and BLM and the rest of the victim industrial complex’s desire for power. For them, burning the country to the ground is just another means to their ends of extinguishing individual liberty, crushing capitalism and most of all, getting rid of Donald Trump.  That's the real story that the data tell.

Do Black Lives Matter? No, Apparently, Not Unless They're Good For The Race Pimp Business.

For the last two years the phrase “Black Lives Matter” has been a rallying cry for those who suggest black lives don’t in fact matter to whites or to the police. In seeking to make sure that no one misses the point, across the nation citizens just trying to go through their everyday lives have been subjected to restaurant sit ins, manufactured traffic jams and various other protests. As annoying as those activities are, the movement has become entwined with a more sinister trend, delegitimization of police.

From Barack Obama’s “The police acted stupidly” to Bill de Blasio’s suggestion that the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” program was racist to Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby’s invoking the thug mantra “No Justice, No Peace” as she indicted six police officers for the death of Freddy Gray, black Americans have been endlessly warned that the police are the enemy. They have been told that the police are racist and that the criminal justice system will provide them with no justice at all.

The consequences of this indictment of the police and the criminal justice system are exactly what you would expect. Police have been targeted, literally and lethally, across the country. From getting shot while sitting in their patrol cars, to getting attacked with axes as they stand on the street, to being swarmed as they try and make arrests, police today have targets on their backs like never before. Such is the obvious outcome from government officials and race pimps telling blacks that the police are the enemy.

That, however, is not the only outcome that was predictable as the false narrative behind the Black Lives Matter movement took hold. There is another, even more sinister tragedy that gives lie to the words themselves: skyrocketing crime and the flowing of black blood in the streets in places like Ferguson, New York and Baltimore. And, most of that blood is shed neither at the hands of whites or the police, but usually at the hands of other blacks.

As police have their authority and legitimacy challenged, the citizens of the neighborhoods they police have become targets and victims. Murder rates have jumped in NYC under de Blasio as police feel neutered. In Baltimore, as police have become fearful of doing their jobs, black citizens are paying the price as shootings and murders skyrocket and anarchy reigns.

Conservatives don’t typically suggest that every cop is a Boy Scout. The killings of Walter Scott and Akai Gurley are certainly troubling and rightly raise flags. And there are still many questions that remain about the circumstances of Freddie Gray’s death. But, thankfully, those deaths are news because they are so rare. Of the tens of millions interactions police have with black Americans each year, only a tiny fraction of them result in wrongful bloodshed or inappropriate behavior. Indeed, most of those interactions are with blacks who have been victims of crime or who are citizens seeking help from police.

But when police become the enemy, they cease to be able to provide the basic service they are intended for… fighting crime and preserving the peace. As crime victims are disproportionately black, when police become less effective, blacks disproportionately pay the price. To put that in perspective, following the April riots in Baltimore, where Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake told police to stand down so that rioters could have space to “destroy”, May saw an unprecedented jump in violent crime, with shootings up 72% from the previous year and murders reaching 43, more than any month since August, 1972. And most of those victims were black... and the hands of other blacks… but those lives don’t seem to matter to the liberals and the race pimps who are using the extraordinarily rare deaths of black men at the hands of police to decimate the entire criminal justice system.

While we’re told that “Black Lives Matter” what apparently is really the case is that only some black lives matter… those who give liberals and race pimps a platform upon which to enrich themselves or increase their power. The black lives of men, women and children who die at the hands of black criminals emboldened by the neutering of the police… not so much. And unfortunately, the latter outnumber the former exponentially.

From the Charlie Hebdo attack to your local street corner: Multiculturalism as a fount of bloodshed

There has been much commentary about the events in France over the last week. One of the major causes for the motivation behind the home grown terrorists who struck the offices of Charlie Hebdo is the fact that in many places in France, France is something of a foreign country. There are hundreds of “no-go” zones in the country where French police won’t go and French law has been supplanted by Sharia law. It is from these areas of largely disaffected, often unemployed youth on the government dole where much of this homegrown hatred emanates. These young people feel disconnected from the larger society, have little or no vested interest in the success of the larger society and often times are vocally disdainful of it.

In a very similar way, the United States is covered with neighborhoods where youth unemployment is sky high, where families spend generations on the government dole, and where there is little allegiance to the nation as a whole or the larger society. In France many of the young Muslims call themselves Muslims or Algerians and they rarely call themselves French. In the United States the hyphenated American such as African-American or Hispanic-American has replaced the designation of American for many.

While in the United States there may not be a religious component of that separation, there certainly is one similarly powerful: the cry of racism. The rallying cry of racism as the cause of the problems in various black and Hispanic neighborhoods around the country function in exactly the same way that radical Islam ideology does in France and other European nations. It drives separation. It drives anger. It drives a devaluation of the lives of others.

The separation is no accident. From Oakland’s effort some years ago to allow Ebonics in schools to Cinco de Mayo celebrations where the American flag is prohibited to college admission standards that vary by race to schools that teach American history is nothing but a chronicle of hate, prejudice and thievery against minorities and the poor; it’s little surprise that many young minorities feel like disconnected from the American Dream and larger society as a whole.

The anger is palpable. From race riots of the 1960’s to the Rodney King riots in 1992 to the recent riots in Ferguson, MO that inspired demonstrations across the country, many minority communities seem to be built on a tinderbox just waiting for spark. Extraordinary unemployment rates act as the tinder filling those boxes. In each case the spark was provided by the killing or striking of a black person by white cops. The resulting anger and destruction not only destroyed the neighborhoods of the rioters, but exacerbated the feeling of separation from the larger community as a whole. In the most recent case that anger resulted in demonstrations around the country and in New York with protesters chanting “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now!” Soon thereafter they got their wish.

The devaluation of lives is heartbreaking. While Islamic terrorists killed 17 people in Paris last week, across the United States, in minority communities from Boston to San Diego young men are killing one another by the dozens every single week of the year. And those are only the thousands who die. Citizens of all sorts are assaulted, threatened and forced to try to live a normal lives in those struggling neighborhoods where drugs and crime and staggering unemployment are the norm rather than the exception.

Whether radical Islamic terrorists who seek to stifle free speech and murder infidels or a thug on an American street corner who is willing to shoot someone in cold blood because they wear a different color or have something coveted, both are products of a failed policy of multiculturalism. In France the left shut their eyes as Muslim communities separated from France and became isolated islands of radicalism. In the United States the left, through their destruction of America’s schools, their overregulation of job creating businesses, their demonizing of the police and through their distilling American history down to a chronicle of discrimination against blacks, Hispanics and Indians, have created a large swath of the population that has little comprehension of what the American Dream is, few tools with which to pursue it if they did, and most dishearteningly, little vested interest in the success of the country as a whole. In either case, liberalism and multiculturalism are the founts from which much bloodshed has been spilled. For anyone paying attention this should be no surprise.