It’s not all Black and
White
Compiling this article from a brilliant thread out on Twitter by Amir
Pars @AmirPars_
I will lose many
friends over what I'm about to say. I will possibly be called a racist or even
a white supremacist (even though I'm a brown man, who's been beaten to a pulp
by neo-Nazis wearing steel toed boots). But maybe, just maybe, the fact that I
am getting 100% of my information from the black scholars in the
picture - The Great Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, Shelby Steele, John McWorther,
Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster and Thomas Chatterton Williams, allows me some
room for thought?
I’ve been watching the
narrative play universally over the heinous killing of George Floyd, and the
complete and utter lack of facts about African Americans in The US has been
infuriating. Unfortunately, anyone who doesn’t submit to the dominant narrative
will be called a heretic, a racist, a whites supremacist etc. Still, I can’t
stop myself.
1. Black Lives Matter
don’t care about black people. Want evidence? Name me a single time - just once
- when they’ve protested against black people being killed by other black
people? Whether in America or elsewhere? Why is this relevant? Because the biggest cause of death for black
men aged 15-45 in USA is... other black men. Compare to white people, where
it’s traffic accidents for the younger portion and heart attacks for those over
35. Or how about the black lives in Sudan, East Timor, Libya? Why do we only ever hear from BLM when it’s a
white person killing a black person?
2. Speaking of which -
imagine if white people started doing the reverse. Imagine every time a white
person was killed by a black person, there’d be protests, riots, looting and
social media campaigns. First thing to notice
is that it would be more frequent, because African Americans kill more white
people in the US than white people kill African Americans. Now what? Should we really start applying the race card
every time there’s a murder involving more than one pigmentation? Where will it
end?
3. Police killings.
The video of the murder
of George Floyd is so visceral, by showing the casual evil with which officer
Derek Chauvin kills George
Floyd. People are rightly outraged, and no one can honestly defend the officer,
who rightly has been arrested and hopefully will spend his remaining years
behind bars (although the prosecutor has been idiotic in moving the case from
2nd degree to first degree murder - a burden of proof they will most likely fail to provide). But... The only reason people are up in arms
about these is that the social media and MSM attention focuses
disproportionately on these incidents when the victim is black and the officer
isn't. Don't believe me? Let me
prove it:
You've all heard of Tamir
Rice - a 12 year old black boy who was murdered when brandishing a toy gun. It
was all over the news, there were riots and marches, hashtags and universal
condemnation all over the media.
But how many of you
have heard of Daniel Shaver?
A white man who was
showing his friends a scoped air rife used to exterminate birds who entered his
store, and was killed for this?
You may remember the
case of Sam DuBose, a black man who was shot dead for driving his car away from
from the police. The exact same thing happened to before that to Andrew Thomas,
a white man driving away from the police. None of you have heard of him.
Alton Sterling was a
black man shot dead by the police when reaching into his pocket for his wallet
- a travesty. The same thing happened to a white guy named Dylan Noble.
Sterling made national headlines, none of us heard a word about Noble. Loren
Simpson was a white teenager who was shot dead by the police in eerily similar
circumstances as George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin.
You've not heard of the
former, but demanded justice for the latter. You've not heard of James Boyd,
Alfred Redwine, Brandon Stanley or Mary Hawkes.
But you've heard of
Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.
Because the only times
police killings make the news is when the victim is black and the officer
isn't.
Here are the FBI, NCJRS
and BJS statistics:
For every 10, 000 black
people arrested for violent crime, 3 are killed by the police.
For every 10, 000 white
people arrested for violent crime, 4 are killed by the police.
In 2019, 49 unarmed
people were killed by the police. 9 were black. 19 were white.
The likelihood for a
black person being shot by the police is as high as being struck by lightning.
Yet, we are seeing
riots, every single post on Instagram and Twitter is in support of Black Lives
Matter and denunciation of police in America...
4. "Systemic
Racism" / "Institutionalised racism".
Sound good, don't they?
Such powerful words and completely inaccurate. First, let's see what the claims
being made are: Both insinuate built-in racism within various official
institutions (police, law, governments etc). Yet, when they are challenged, by
asking the proponents to provide *evidence* for these, nothing is provided.
Name one single law that is targeting exclusively black people. Just one. There
isn't one.
If the police is
"systematically" anti-black, explain how it is possible that 20% of
the Police Force in America is black (African Americans in America constitute
roughly 14% of the population, meaning that blacks are *overrepresented* within
the police force!)?
Now, imagine how
incredibly racist it is to say that the 100, 000 plus black police officers are
too stupid to know that they are working inside and within a racist
institution? That really is racism. And none of them have come out and said
anything???
None of them have gone
on 60 Minutes and said "We are being trained to be racists"?
Seriously?
How about governments?
Well, let's leave aside the fact that America just had a two-term black
president (whose second name was Hussein, by the way).
Some of America's worst
run cities have black mayors, black governors and majority black councils. Look
at two of the worst cities in America to be black in: Baltimore and Chicago.
Why is it that a place where the people in power are black can be *worse* for
the African American than cities that aren't run by black politicians? This is
a knock-down argument.
5. Disparity- People
often look at the economic disparities between blacks and whites, and claim it
to be evidence for institutionalised racism. It says something about the power
of a narrative, when it has been debunked decades ago - by BLACK ECONOMISTS
(like The Great Thomas Sowell) - yet the myth persists.
First of all, at no
point in human history has any two groups of people had the same level of wealth
or income as each other. It would be an absolute miracle to expect that people
with different backgrounds, cultures, histories, values and ethics to have the
same level of wealth. This is even true within so called races - compare for
example Black Americans (generational) vs Black Immigrants particularly the
ones from West Indies (Jamaica, Barbados etc.).
You couldn't tell these
people apart, just by looking at them, and whatever racism is in place for one
group must by definition be applied for the second group. But what they have is
completely different values and work ethics (the Jamaicans arriving in the US
does so commonly to achieve greater heights than what he or she can in their
home country). Whatever level of systemic racism exists, they are subjected to
it as much as the African American.
Yet, already in the
1970's (!!!), when racism was far more prevalent than it is today, Black
Americans from the West Indies were earning 58% more than the Black American
whose generations go back centuries in the United States. How could that be, if
there's supposed to be such a thing as "systemic racism"?
Disparities are only
proof of disparities. Just because Group X doesn't have the same as Group Y,
doesn't mean that it's explained by racism.
(the thread can be found here https://twitter.com/AmirPars_/status/1268898468766134279?s=20
)