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Our nation is beset by a wave of violence, murder,
rape, destruction of stores, businesses, and even homes. Looting is rampant in our
inner cities where store windows and doors are broken down allowing thugs and
thieves to enter without resistance. How can this be happening?!!
Much of the mayhem is being aggravated by the
Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization which aids and abets such
destructiveness. Liberals among us ascribe all this chaos to racism, poverty,
lack of opportunity for black citizens, poor education, and limitation of
health and medical care for the poor (and mostly black) residents of inner-city
neighborhoods. But…we need to examine those presuppositions to see if they
really are the root causes.
In the first half of the 20th Century,
the Black poverty rate was significantly higher than it is today. Black
incarceration and crime rates were significantly lower than they would become
in later decades. The Black homicide rate fell by 18% in the 1940’s and another
20% in the 1950’s. While this was going on, the Black poverty rate also
declined by 40% over the same period. Black incomes grew faster than the
incomes of Whites. Safer neighborhoods facilitated upward economic mobility.
In the second half of the 20th Century, those
trends reversed. In the 1960’s violent crime rates doubled and continued to
increase sharply until the early 1990’s when better policing and increasing
incarceration brought crime down. Between 1990 and 2016 the homicide rate rose
40% among black men.
In 2013, the Black Lives Matter organization was
established and today, 40 chapters of the organization exist worldwide. This
organization was established after the killing of Travon Martin. Martin was
killed by George Zimmerman, a man of mixed race, as he was attempting to defend
a gated community in Sanford, Florida. Martin was a 17-year-old Black, who was
unarmed and visiting his relatives in the neighborhood. When an altercation
occurred between the two, Zimmerman was injured; but he fired his gun and
killed Martin. Later, Zimmerman was acquitted of wrongdoing because he was
considered to have been acting in self-defense.
The Black Lives Matter organization has been
active in disrupting the American society lately with its open advocacy of
dangerous and violent protest activities. Mark Levin, a conservative radio host
has said that anyone “embracing or promoting BLM should be made aware of
exactly what it stands for. Violence.
Anarchy, Marxism. And it has a convicted
terrorist on the board of its fundraising group.”
Hawk Newsome, the president of Greater New York
Black Lives Matter, threatened to "burn down this system" if
"the country doesn't give us what we want" in an interview on 24 June
2020 with FOX News host Martha MacCallum. In my opinion, this kind of statement
amounts to treason against the stability of our nation. The group is also a
strong voice in favor of homosexual, trans-sexual lifestyles. (If anyone
reading this blog post does not believe these accusations against BLM, I would
recommend you look at their website and click on “What We Believe.”) But…you
may ask, “Where did this disruptive rhetoric and behavior come from?”
The Black Lives Matter movement would have
everyone believe that all Black persons hate the police and want the Federal
Government to disappear, because it does not give them the perks it wants.
Jason Riley, a Black columnist for the Wall Street Journal has said that groups
like BLM are “out of stem with most Blacks, let alone most of the country.”
(WSJ op-ed 6-25-20) In 2015, after Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson,
Missouri, a majority of Blacks said police treated them fairly. Thirty-eight
percent of Blacks at that time said they wanted a greater police presence in
their local communities. Eighteen percent of Whites wanted that. Last year a
Gallop survey asked Blacks and Hispanics in low income neighborhoods about
policing and found that they are not averse to law enforcement. Fifty-nine
percent of both races said they would like more police to spend time in their
neighborhoods than they currently did. Fifty percent of Whites responded that
way.
Police shootings have fallen precipitously since
the 1970’s. Now 95% of black homicides do not come from law enforcement
officers. Jason Riley states that police action against blacks does not come
from racial bias it comes from criminal behavior.
In the late 19th Century and early 20th
Century, two great leaders of the Black community were influential in promoting
constructive behavior in society: They were both former slaves, Booker T.
Washington, and Frederick Douglass. These men advocated peaceful opposition to
discriminatory behavior against Blacks. Washington was especially noted for his
lifting up of Blacks into higher levels of education and entrepreneurship.
Douglas advocated Black participation in the established politics of his day.
Both of these men and their followers sought peaceful participation in America
through assimilation into the U.S. population. (It may be noted that other
ethnic groups have found fulfillment of these desires through peaceful means
and assimilation, e.g., Jews, Irish, and Asians.)
Martin Luther King, Jr (1929-1968) was known for
his advocacy of peaceful protests in Albany, GA and Birmingham, AL and for his
famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. As
the years passed, Dr. King became more oppositional and he became known for his
opposition to capitalism, poverty, and the Viet Nam War. In those latter years
of his life, he was under investigation by the FBI for his supposed communist
ties. Before he was finally assassinated in 1968, he was planning a national
occupation of Washington, D.C. by the poor and Black population.
Another prominent actor in the saga of Black
oppositional activity was W.E.B Dubois (1868-1963). DuBois was an outspoken
advocate for Black people the world over. He was a Socialist, and he eventually
founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
His many writings have encouraged integration of educational, political, and
corporate entities for the advancement of Blacks. DuBois argued that the Black
man deserved equal rights with the White man under the Fourteenth Amendment,
and he should fight for them. On the other hand, the writings of Booker T.
Washington have emphasized the development of economic and cultural
improvements in order to gain the same goal.
In more modern times, Black people have most
strongly advocated more violent forms of protest, modeled after the leadership
of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Still, voices of moderate Black leaders like
Shelby Steele, a professor of sociology at UC Berkeley and W. Julius Wilson at
Chicago have spoken out in favor of more peaceful and constructive changes.
William Julius Wilson (born 1935) disputed the
liberal stance that the “black underclass” owed its existence to entrenched
racial discrimination; he also disagreed with the conservative view that
African American poverty was due to cultural deficiencies and welfare
dependency. Instead, Wilson implicated sweeping changes in the global economy
that pulled low-skilled manufacturing jobs out of the inner city, the flight
from the inner city of its most successful residents, and the lingering effects
of past discrimination. He believed the problems of the underclass could be
alleviated only by “race neutral” programs such as universal health care and
government-financed jobs. Wilson observed the structural reasons for the plight
of Blacks in America’s large cities. These structural reasons include the
limited availability of economic and social opportunities and the extremely
high crime rates among young black men from ghetto neighborhoods. In addition to
those problems, Blacks face cultural problems, such as the tendencies for black
men to be nonparticipators in black families. Wilson never advocated violence
as a source of relief for the problems in urban America.
In spite of Wilson’s admonitions, governmental
programs, most notably the measures taken by the LBJ administration have failed
miserably to raise the Black poverty rate or to do anything good to the
deteriorating Black families in our midst. At this time 75% of Black babies are
born out of wedlock; and this speaks volumes about why Black people today do
not know how to deal constructively with social problems. The American Black
simply has not had a father figure to teach him how to behave.
Other Black observers of the urban scene today who
have strongly advocated against violence on the streets have been Shelby
Steele, a sociologist from the University of California, Berkeley and Jason
Riley, an editorialist for the Wall Street Journal. Charles Murray has also
spoken of his agreement in this matter; Murray thinks the difficulty being
caused by chaos in the cities hearkens back to broken cultural factors in the
Black population. Broken homes, sexual
promiscuity, irresponsibility in social dealing, will do nothing except damage
our society. It is my own opinion that the neglect of children (born and
unborn) is also an important factor in delivering violent and unproductive
citizens to our society.
The essence of what I am saying can be gleaned in
more complete form by reading the book by Jason Riley, “Please Stop Helping
Us.” Riley makes the cogent argument that administrative/governmental programs
do little for the problem of urban poverty. The only thing that holds any real
hope of changing things for the better in American cities is improvement in the
economic/business fields. Americans of all races need to get back to work, quit
relying on government aid, and build trusting and faithful families with
fathers who take an active interest in socializing their children.
Now, for a personal note from my own experience in
trying to dope out the problem of urban violence. Several commentators have
noted that one reason the police have difficulty controlling violence in the
cities is that Blacks and others in low income neighborhoods is that the
residents are reluctant to “snitch” on their neighbors for fear of retribution
from the criminals. Several years ago, when Nancy and I were attending an
inner-city church in Detroit, there was a poor Black man in that church who was
unemployed and continually asking for prayer that he might find a job. When he
failed to find a job, Nancy and I went out and found employment for him. We
went to his apartment building to give him the good news, but the neighbors
mistook me for a police agent and would not help us find his apartment. That
kind of noncooperation never helps law enforcement.
So where does this polemic on violence in America
lead us. I believe that the basic problem was elucidated by Mollie Hemingway on
FOX news when she pointed out that the underlying problem in the violence and
spirit of rebellion in American is the deteriorating family, especially the
black family where 75% of Black babies are born out of wedlock. The problem of
deteriorating families is not limited to Black families; Whites are culpable,
too. Fathers are not the only people absent from the family scene. Many working
mothers need to stay home and raise the next generation. Personally, I think that there is another,
even more pertinent cause of the difficulty, i.e., the general lack of faith in
Christ by our population as a whole. This problem is not limited to the Black
population; it is shared by Americans of all races and ethnic groups. We need
to get back to true Christian orientation if we are ever going to solve our
cultural and behavioral problems.
each another’s burdens bear,
to your church a pattern give,
showing how believers live.
Ed and Nancy Manring
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