7 thoughts on “Ethics Heroes: 64% Of African-Americans. There Is Hope!”

1. So when do the “All Lives Matter” people start disrupting speeches at “Black Lives Matter” rallies?

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   • Great idea. You organize, and I’ll be there.

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2. Are you TRYING to willfully misunderstand this movement? To me it is SUCH an obvious misreading.

   When you make the same mistake as Huckabee, it ought to be a wake-up call.

   Nobody is seriously proposing the existential statement that black lives do, or ought to, matter MORE than other people’s lives.

   What the BLM movement IS proposing is that black lives SHOULD matter just as much as other people’s lives, AND that we live in a world where they manifestly, existentially DON’T.

   It’s an argument for equality in an unequal world. Nothing more, nothing less, and nothing new about it either– it’s exactly the point that civil rights advocates have been making since the days of MLK.

   I do not see how you and Huckabee can in good conscience spin “Black lives matter” into “Black lives matter more.” That is NOT the slogan or the group’s name.

   It is grammatically, logically and politically a way of changing the subject from “this minority group deserves equal treatment” to “everyone deserves equal treatment.” Yes, of course they do–and what pray tell does that remotely have to do with any ill-treated group which was the intended subject in the original formulation?
   It strikes me as arguing in bad faith.

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   • I’ve explained what was matter with the movement. It’s racist, the 21st version of “Black Power.” It implies that black lives don’t matter as much as white lives to whites and police in the US, and that position is based in part on the acquittals of George Zimmerman and the non-indictments of the officers in the Garner case (which I disagree with) and Officer Wilson (who should not have been indicted), as well as the emerging false issue of “mass incarceration.”

     I also wrote a post in the Smith case where I stated that I could understand why demonstrators would take “all lives matter” as a rebuke. That was before I had to listen to and read the BLM cant and rhetoric.

     Thus this:

     I still believe that made sense in December, but “Black Lives Matter” means something very different now, after six police officers were charged with murder to quell a Baltimore mob after Freddie Gray’s death, and after President Obama decided that the merciless shooting of a young white woman in San Francisco by an illegal immigrant wasn’t worthy of the same attention he has given other deaths when it was a black life that had been lost.

     Now “Black Lives Matter” means and is intended to mean that black lives should matter more than white lives, since whites are responsible for the ills of Black America. “Black Lives Matter” makes the demand that police officers shouldn’t try to arrest resisting black suspects, or defend themselves when threatened by them. It means that the law will work differently when a black individual is killed by a police officer, and that the rules of probable cause, due process and reasonable doubt will be suspended to ensure “justice”—for African Americans. If that means wrongly destroying the careers and lives of white police officers, well, too bad. They don’t matter.

     I defended Smith’s president because it was obvious that she was completely aligned with the students she had offended, who were—wrongly, like her—citing the deaths of Mike Brown and Eric Garner as examples of black men marked for death by brutal police officers. I defended her because she really wasn’t aware that “all lives matter” was then being used by those who wanted to demean the genuine and valid concerns of the African American community that police forces were excessively callous and violent when black suspects were involved. O’Malley, however, wasn’t speaking at an anti-police brutality rally, and is not running for President of Africa-America. He must believe that black and white lives are equal in value, and that the same standards of law and ethics should apply to both in exactly the same manner.

     No candidate for the Presidency should apologize for saying “Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter,” nor should any speaker, anywhere, ever, apologize to a crowd that employs the “heckler’s veto” to silence him or her. Someone once said of Hubert Humphrey that he was a decent man who, by the manner of his seeking the Presidency proved himself unworthy of it. That description now applies to Martin O’Malley as well.

     “Black Lives Matter” is no longer worthy of respect, if it ever was. It is divisive and racially prejudiced on its face: res ipsa loquitur. Those using it continue to attach the phrase to the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, meaning that it is now code for wearing protest hoodies and shouting “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!”

     It is a simple-minded bumper-sticker, hashtag phrase that avoids the complexities of a complex issue by reducing it to three words and pretending that this is all that needs to be said to win a debate. “Black Lives Matter” is the “Better Red Than Dead” of 2015; it is another “Bush Lied And People Died”: misleading, simplistic and lazy. “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” was a lie; “Black Lives Matter” is deceit: in the context in which it is used, it is a statement of fact that is meant to suggest that in the United States, black lives don’t matter to whites, to the government, to policy-makers, the courts and, of course, police.

     What followed was one of EA’s best debates, 100 comments. You weren’t involved for some reason, but my friend urbanregor made a spirited and perceptive defense of BLM. If you haven’t, you should read those threads. I remember thinking it was in your wheelhouse, and worrying that you had been hit by a bus or snagged by a Roc.

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     • Don’t know how I missed it. I’ll read up and be back in a day or so

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   • And you ignoring pertinent facts because they go against your narrative hits me as arguing in bad faith. We had this conversation a while back: You don’t get to pretend that a group is all about black equality when it consistently and constantly exhibits racial behavior designed to disenfranchise anyone that isn’t black, even if only on the micro level. Their bad behavior ranges from tit-for-tat to black supremacy, and your willful blindness will not change that.

     This is EXACTLY the same problem as feminism has, and you’d figure a hundred years later they might have figured it out: True equality cannot come out of a movement named and designed as a special interest group.

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3. I’m hoping the BLM movement (not Bureau of Land Management) has the staying power of the vaunted but now seemingly moribund Occupy Movement. And whatever came of the Rachel Dolzel problem Shaun King was apparently having? The question seemed fairly germane to perhaps the two thirds of black people who aren’t all that wild about Black Lives Matter.

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