Black Lives Matter. It is a hashtag and a mantra. It is a battle cry in the war on police. But is it more than that? Does it mean anything when the Black Lives Matter (BLM) crowd says, “black lives matter”? The actions of both the activists within the movement and the crowds agitated by their rhetoric do not indicate that black lives matter to BLM.
While the BLM crowd insists that the phrase “Black Lives Matter” includes the silent and implied “Too” as in “Black Lives Matter, Too,” the reality is that it actually includes the silent and implied “Some” as in “Some Black Lives Matter.” Because as one black police officer, Jay Stalien, pointed out, both his experience and his research — begun in an effort to make sense of his experience — convinced him that, because of the hateful narrative of the BLM crowd:
Black Lives do not matter to most black people. Only the lives that make the national news matter to them. Only the lives that are taken at the hands of cops or white people, matter. The other thousands of lives lost, the other black souls that I along with every cop, have seen taken at the hands of other blacks, do not matter. Their deaths are unnoticed, accepted as the “norm”, and swept underneath the rug by the very people who claim and post “black lives matter”.
BLM is employing a common tactic of subversives: divide and conquer. By drawing the battle lines along racial lines, the “leaders” (read “agitators”) of the movement have largely succeeded in blurring the fact that this issue is not about race; it is about culture.
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Racism is wrong precisely because it is a form of collectivism that fails to see individuals and instead sees everyone as part of one racial group or another. Building on that error, it then assumes that some races are inferior and some races are superior. That error has led to racial strife. The truth is that all races, like all individuals, are created equal. The same is not true of cultures.
The Cambridge English Dictionary defines “culture” as “the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time.” So, culture is about behavior, customs, and beliefs, not color. A person born into a particular culture may choose to live by the norms and mores of a higher or lower culture. One can “switch” cultures; one cannot “switch” races. Race and culture — while often seen as related — are separate things.
Any examination of different cultures will reveal — to the honest observer — that some cultures are better than others. Some cultures have built civilization while others have destroyed civilization. Some cultures have fostered a sense of society while others have torn down that sense of society. Some cultures elevate a sense of duty to others over selfish pleasures while others posit that Self is greater than Other. Some cultures consider the mental and spiritual to be more worthy than the merely physical and sensual. Some cultures value human life while others do not.
Of course BLM ignores all of this because it does not fit the narrative of “Black Lives Matter.” To face those facts head on would require BLM to ask some hard questions such as, “Why is crime — including and especially violent crime — higher in black neighborhoods?” and “Why do black young men have such low rates of graduating high school — not to mention college?” and “Why is an intact black family almost an anomaly in the inner city?” There are only three possible answers to these — and similar — questions: (1) The white supremacist claim that black people are genetically inferior to white people, (2) the politically correct claim that black people are being held down by the white man, and (3) the recognition that it has nothing to do with color and everything to do with culture. As this writer illustrated in a previous article, there are “millions of hard-working, educated black people who have prospered and made something of their lives. Among them are millionaires and businesses owners and doctors and lawyers and congressmen and senators and governors and even a president.” These facts remove the illusion of the legitimacy of answers (1) and (2), leaving the fact that the culprit is culture, not color.
This leads to a few additional questions the BLM crowd needs to consider before they block another highway, burn down another business, incite the murder of another police officer, or continue to espouse their ignorant racism against “white folks” — and some black Americans too very much including black police officers.
If “Black Lives Matter” to them:
• Why do they not focus on the root problems of their own black communities?
• Why are they not marching in the streets to encourage black men to marry the women with whom they intend to sire children?
• Why are they not holding protests and demonstrations demanding that those same men become good husbands and fathers, rather than running out on those women and children, leaving them to go from one state of poverty to an even worse state of poverty?
• Why are they not working to create a culture of education and hard work that would raise the people in those neighborhoods out of poverty and violent crime, as it has done for millions of other people of all races?
• Why are they not protesting against Planned Parenthood, which has systematically targeted black neighborhoods for slow — but sure — genocide?
• Why are they not marching on city halls and state capitals demanding tougher penalties for black men who sell drugs to their children, force their women into prostitution, steal from them the little they have, and murder their other black men? Don’t the lives of black Americans killed by criminals also matter? How about blacks who are mugged and raped, and fear for their safety when they go to school or go shopping? Don’t their lives matter too?
Until this is seen as a problem of culture instead of a problem of race, the divide — manufactured by race-baiters and a federal government intent on controlling whites and blacks — will only continue to grow.
This writer would like to suggest a couple of hashtags to replace #BlackLivesMatter. How about #MakeBlackLivesMatter and #CultureNotColor? Because if black lives really mattered to BLM, they would want to encourage black people to count their own lives as valuable and pursue the trappings of a culture that demonstrates that value.
In the absence of that demonstrattion, one is left to believe that Officer Stalien is correct. Only some black lives matter to BLM. As he said in the quote above, “Only the lives that make the national news matter to them. Only the lives that are taken at the hands of cops or white people, matter.” Because those lives serve to promote the narrative, and the narrative serves to avoid addressing the real problem.
That problem is a culture of death that has held too many black Americans hostage for too long.
