News Article: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-police-idUSKCN11R1GSThe Black Lives Matter Movement has gained a lot of popularity in recent years, becoming a protest movement opposed to the disproportional amount of deadly force used by law enforcement officers against unarmed black people. However, over recent months the Black Lives Matter movement has transformed from a small protest group opposed to police brutality into a so-called "liberation movement" designed to tackle all the injustices faced by the black community in the US and worldwide.
However, I don't believe the narrative composed by the movement stands up to stringent argument and interrogation. Below, I have listed some of the common talking points employed by BLM members and provided a list of arguments contradicting their proclamations.
Source: http://blacklivesmatter.com/guiding-principles/Black people represent 14 percent of the US's population, yet they account for 38 percent of all prisoners inside America's prisons.According to the latest available data provided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, black people were responsible for nearly 28 percent of all crime in the US even though they account for less than 15 percent of the entire population. Now, even though 28 percent is still less than 38 percent - when you consider violent crime such as rape, murder and armed robbery - black people account for 38 percent of all violent crime as oppose to whites (and Hispanics) who're responsible for around 60 percent. Even more so, when you look at some of the most serious crimes such as murder, black people account for over 50 percent of America's murders even though their populous doesn't represent more than 15 percent of the country's overall makeup. Black people are more likely to incarcerated by virtue of proportionality because their much more likely to be involved in crime, especially violent - and therefore imprisonable - crimes.
Source: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/tables/table-43Source: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_race.jspBlack people are more likely to be killed by cops than any other group.According to data composed by the Washington Post, the number of black people killed by law enforcement officers was around 26 percent, whereas the number of white people killed by law enforcement officers accounted for around 50 percent of the total number number of deaths at the hands of police force. In a speech by Heather MacDonald - an esteemed journalist and political commentator - she explains that the majority of said victims "were armed or otherwise threatening the officer with potentially lethal force"; a reiteration that most of the deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers were justified and lawful. Even though black people are - proportionally - more likely to be killed by police than whites and Hispanics, when you begin to consider overall crime as unraveled in my previous paragraph, black people are seemingly underrepresented in the number of police shootings. MacDonald goes on to point out that blacks commit "75 percent of police shootings, 70 percent of all robberies and 66 percent of all violent crime" in New York City alone. Even so, according to the Washington Post, police were "significantly slower to shoot armed black suspects" as oppose to white and Hispanic counterparts, even though MacDonald explains that "Such a concentration of criminal violence in minority communities means that officers will be disproportionately confronting armed and often resisting suspects in those communities, raising officers’ own risk of using lethal force".
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/07/14/why-its-impossible-to-calculate-the-percentage-of-police-shootings-that-are-legitimate/?utm_term=.6aa82d5be4df Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2016/04/27/this-study-found-race-matters-in-police-shootings-but-the-results-may-surprise-you/Source: https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Imprimis_April16.pdfSource: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/02/08/black-and-unarmed-behind-the-numbers#.guyCZc4DjSource: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-08/breakdown-us-citizens-killed-cops-2016Black people are more likely to die from police officers' force than white and Hispanic persons. According to the Crime Prevention Research Centre and the Washington Post, a black person's likelihood of dying at the hands of a police officer was calculated at 4 percent, whereas a white or Hispanic person's likelihood of dying at the hands of a police officer was calculated at 12 percent.
Source: http://crimeresearch.org/2014/10/inflammatory-and-misleading-claims-about-black-teens-being-vastly-more-likely-to-be-killed-by-police-than-whites-even-after-adjusting-for-crime-rates/Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/11/arent-more-white-people-than-black-people-killed-by-police-yes-but-no/?utm_term=.2d57bd10083dBlack people are more likely to be killed - and involved in - unarmed shootings from police than any other race group.In the August of 2015, the number of unarmed black people killed by police in contrast to the number of whites and Hispanics killed by police was at a ratio of 7:1, even though that went down to 6:1 by the end of year. However, this ratio does not account for the number of unarmed and unjustified police shootings - and while the latter can never be acceptable - it can certainly be explained. According to MacDonald, the aforementioned ratio fails to take into account scenarios where police officers are being charged at with a knife; where the suspect is trying to get the officer's gun; or where the assailant is endangering the lives of other people. Even though - in all of those cases - the police report would have recorded the suspect as unarmed, the notion that deadly force in these cases were unjustified is nonsense. Black people are more likely to be caught up in excessive police force because they're more likely to be involved with the justice system, as explained in my earlier paragraphs. Unarmed police shootings are also occur most in some of America's most dangerous communities - meaning it's likely a police officer is more vigilant, cautious and nervous when patrolling said communities where black people are often more represented.
Source: http://www.dailywire.com/news/7264/5-statistics-you-need-know-about-cops-killing-aaron-bandler#Police are targeting black people because of their race.According to Roland G. Fryer Jr., an economics professor at the University of Harvard, in a study comprising of more than 1000 police departments in Texas, California and New York, he found that there was no evidence of a racial bias in the manner by which officers fired their guns. The study also concluded that police officers were much more likely to shoot white suspects. More so, he also concluded that an equal number of whites and blacks were carrying guns at the time of their being shot. Incidentally, a cop is three times more likely to be killed by a black person than a black person is to be killed by a cop; and black and Hispanic officers are 3.3 times more likely to use deadly force than white police officers.
Source: http://tribunist.com/news/harvard-study-on-police-shootings-and-race-offers-shocking-conclusion/Source: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399.pdfSource: http://townhall.com/columnists/larryelder/2016/08/18/when-the-suspect-is-an-armed-black-man--and-the-cop-is-black-n2206637Black people are less likely to go to university than their white and Hispanic counterparts.According to the Nation's Report Card, black people perform collectively worse than their white, Hispanic and Asian counterparts when it comes to their GPA scores. Although whites and Asians achieve an average GPA of 2.88 and 3.09 respectively, blacks only manage to achieve - on average - a GPA of 2.47. Moreover, according to the ACT, blacks are also more likely to do worse in the their SAT scores as well. According to the data, whites achieved an aggregate average of 1576 as oppose to blacks who only achieved an average of 1277. In both the SAT and the GPA, blacks were the lowest performing group. Nevertheless, data from the AAMC shows that black applicants were much more likely to get a place at medical school with a lower GPA than their white and Asian counterparts.
Source: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/03/sat-scores-drop-and-racial-gaps-remain-largeSource: http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/hsts_2009/race_gpa.asp?tab_id=tab2&subtab_id=Tab_1Source: https://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/157998/factstablea24.htmlBlack people are more likely to suffer from poverty and low-income.Yes, but this is neither a result of systemic racism nor governmental oppression. According to a report conducted by the Census Bureau, it concluded that one only has to do three things if they want to escape poverty: finish school, work and don't have children before marriage. Given this data, it becomes more explainable why black Americans are more likely to live a life of ensued poverty because many of the aforementioned are scarce in the black community. According to the ACT, 64 percent of black households were single-parent as oppose to 40, 29 and 17 percents for Hispanic, white and Asian households respectively. This is significant because according to a report concluded by Mark Barajas at the Western Michigan University, children who grow up to a single parent are more likely to perform worse academically. More so, according to Prospect, children brought up to a single parent are twice as likely to dropout of highschool (and therefore not graduate), 2.5 times more likely to become teenage mothers (and therefore having children before marriage) and 1.4 times more likely to be idle (and therefore out of work).
Source: http://www.actrochester.org/children-youth/family-support/single-parent-families/single-parent-families-by-race-ethnicity/chartsSource: http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1044&context=hilltopreviewSource: http://prospect.org/article/consequences-single-motherhoodSource: http://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/terence-p-jeffrey/escape-poverty-graduate-work-get-married-have-kidsThe Black Lives Matter movement has become so fixated on proclaiming every disadvantage faced by the black community as systemic racism, they have lost focus on the more cogent and overt inhibitions which do lead to the ensued impoverishment of the black community by appeasing a bandwagon and narrative which doesn't necessarily exist. On the contrary, of course racism does exist - and where it's pertinent, it should be denounced wholeheartedly. However, the unwillingness to discuss obvious barriers impeding the success of blacks in the US will not improve the lives for black people.
Recommended Read: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/263460/black-lives-matter-movement-built-lies-john-perazzo