“And while King has claimed that he suffered a ‘brutal’ beating that left him clinging to life, the police report characterized King’s injuries as ‘minor,’” Ross reported.
Left-wingers, especially on campus, are fond of faking hate crimes to boost their own public profiles and bolster support for their political causes. But King was doing far more than that—he was using his position as one of the unelected figureheads of Black Lives Matter to drum up sympathy, and ultimately line his own pockets.107 In an America where victimhood is a currency, it’s highly profitable to be oppressed.
King’s story is mirrored by that of Rachel Dolezal (aka Nkechi Amare Diallo), who built a career in the NAACP by pretending to be black. After she was exposed, Dolezal claimed she “identified as black.” Months before the Dolezal story broke, I joked that after transgender people, the next frontier of left-wing identity politics would be transracial. I didn’t expect to be proven right so soon.
Unlike Shaun King, Dolezal did not attempt to convince anyone that she was ethnically black. She might have succeeded had she done so. But she didn’t, and as such she attracted huge volumes of hatred from BLM in return for her honesty. I felt sorry for her, more than anything. Her case is ridiculous, and I was happy to ridicule it, but it’s also sad.
Sad, but not surprising. The Left has made victimhood prestigious, profitable, and in some respects almost revered. Even with all the legitimate problems faced by black people in America, it makes sense that some people would pretend to be members of the race to reap all the attendant rewards.
With all the benefits that come with victimhood, it’s little wonder that so many wealthy and powerful people do so much to sustain the political edifice that supports it. The Black Lives Matter movement, indisputably the primary vehicle for black victimhood today, is a campaign propped up by hundreds of millions in donations of grants, including $33 million from progressive billionaire George Soros.
The point of these donations is strictly to advance the cause of identity politics and racial division. It can often seem as though BLM isn’t so much a black civil rights movement as an anti-white hate group.
Black Lives Matter does nothing to serve the black community or black lives.
Worse, it does extraordinary damage to both.
THE POLICE PROTECT BLACK LIVES
There is a malicious, violent force in America that seems to kill only black people and ignore whites. Its presence can be felt in every city. In some areas, this threat means black people cannot walk the streets without fear of being shot.
This force isn’t the police. It is inner city gangs, who are primarily black themselves. The numbers are indisputable, and yet just for printing them in this book, I’ll be deemed a racist. Between 1980 and 2008, blacks made up 52.5% of homicide offenders, despite making up just 12.2% of the population. In the same survey, it was found that 93% of black homicide victims were killed by other black people.108 Black Lives Matter focuses exclusively on deaths caused by the police, yet these are far eclipsed by the black deaths caused by other black people.
In 2014, there were 238 black deaths at the hands of police, a number sensationally reported by Raw Story as “more black deaths than on 9/11.” But in the same year, there were 6,095 black victims of homicide—more homicide victims than any other race, and double the 9/11 death toll for all races. And virtually all those black homicide victims died at the hands of other black people.
The dramatic gap between deaths at the hands of police and deaths at the hands of other black people raises the question of why Black Lives Matter focuses its energies exclusively on the police, and so-called “white racism.”
Like the men’s health gap, the black murder gap is very real, and simply isn’t discussed by black activists. I suspect it’s a matter of tribalism, or ingroup/outgroup psychology, a common occurrence in politics. Like feminists who blame their everyday grievances on an invisible “patriarchy,” or Wi-Fi-enabled Waffen-SS wannabes who think Jews are responsible for everything bad, or Democrats who blame the Russians for Hillary losing the election to Daddy. It’s very easy to dodge responsibility if you have a boogeyman to lump the blame on.
Leftism, which combines tribal identity politics with a disdain for personal responsibility, is the ultimate political expression of this destructive instinct to blame other people for your problems, instead of undergoing the difficult process of self-reflection.
BLM isn’t just ignoring the murder gap—they’re making it worse. Whenever Black Lives Matter torches another (usually) black neighborhood, police are left with no option other than withdrawing from proactive policing until tensions cool. That means fewer patrols in black neighborhoods and fewer stop-and-searches of black people, which would save black lives.
It can be almost impossible to reason against Black Lives Matter-inspired action, peaceful or otherwise, regardless of whether it makes sense or not. But I’ll try anyway.
In 2015, after Black Lives Matter rioted in Baltimore, the city suffered its deadliest year in history, with 344 homicide deaths in 2015. Progressives at Raw Story were wringing their hands over 238 black deaths caused by police officers across the entire country the year before. Baltimore’s black deaths passed that number by 106—in just one American city.
At first, the Left vociferously denied that there was a spike in violent crime across America caused by the rolling back of proactive policing in response to Black Lives Matter. Those of us with common sense knew otherwise, and we called it “The Ferguson Effect.” Eventually, the evidence grew so compelling (10 heavily black cities saw a homicide surge of over 60%109) that even Vox admitted the problem was now “too clear to ignore” and grudgingly conceded that the Ferguson Effect was “narrowly correct, at least in some cities.”110
Black Lives Matter claims that police hurt black people. It is true: police shootings disproportionately affect black people—they make up 26% of police shooting victims, despite making up roughly 13% of the population.111 But as has been tirelessly pointed out by every conservative journalist who covers this topic, they are also vastly overrepresented in crime statistics.