I imagine there are some people out there who don’t like BLM because it’s black people making noise. But what disturbs a great many—and I highly suspect many more—people about the philosophical underpinnings of BLM is that black people in poor neighborhoods are in vastly more danger of being killed by young black men than by the occasional bad cop.
“Our demand is simple: Stop killing us,” the movement says—while people nationwide look on and see, especially during the summers, tragic epidemics of black-on-black homicides and maimings in one city after another. But America wonders: what about “Let’s stop killing each other”?
This year alone, in Chicago almost 80 percent of the people killed have been black. In Baltimore the figure is 216 black people versus 11 white, in Philadelphia 200 black people versus 44 white. Most by other black people.
Some object that most people of any color are killed by someone of their own race, but it’s the proportions that are important—why do so many more black guys kill each other, numerically and proportionally? This is dismaying—we want to fix it. Yet the good-thinking dialogue on “race” in America has classified it as behind the curve to dwell on this issue.
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