'Black Lives Matter' Lies Costing Lives

In Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make it Harder for Blacks to Succeed, author Jason Riley tells the politically incorrect truth about how Big Government harms blacks. Frederick Douglass had the answer all those years ago. What can you do for the negro? Nothing. Leave him alone and let him live his life. Don’t try to help him or harm him.

But since liberal politicians offer little more than racial resentment, envy, and covetousness to get votes, they can’t leave the negro alone. From lowering academic and professional standards for blacks to blaming personal failures on “racism,” liberals keep the strife at a high pitch. But rational Americans can no longer afford to keep quiet. The new “Black Lives Matter” movement, based on lies, is costing lives.

“The great lie of the summer has been the Black Lives Matter movement,” Riley wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “It was founded on one falsehood—that a Ferguson, Mo., police officer shot a black suspect who was trying to surrender—and it is perpetuated by another: that trigger-happy cops are filling our morgues with young black men.”

Riley notes the obvious. Michael Brown is dead because he was a criminal robbing a store and assaulting a cop. That an anti-cop movement was built on this is incredible. And embarrassing.

“The reality is that the Michael Browns are a much bigger threat to black lives than are the police.” Liberals of all races scapegoat the police and whites, holding them to a higher standard than they hold the black men committing the crimes. “The Black Lives Matter narrative may be demonstrably false, but it’s also politically expedient.”

Who suffers the most? Poor blacks stuck in neighborhoods terrorized by thugs.

“As the Black Lives Matter movement has spread, murder rates have climbed in cities across the country, from New Orleans to Baltimore to St. Louis and Chicago. The Washington, D.C., homicide rate is 43% higher than it was a year ago. By the end of August, Milwaukee and New Haven, Conn., both had already seen more murders than in all of 2014.”

But who cares about the poor black victims? Collateral damage along the road to elected office. Riley brings up the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report — a warning — about the growing number of female-headed households among blacks. With family instability comes trouble.

“But the left has no interest in discussing ghetto pathology,” Riley wrote. “Summer movies like ‘Straight Outta Compton’ are too busy glorifying it, and summer books like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘Between the World and Me’ are too busy intellectualizing it. The Black Lives Matter crowd has become an appendage of the civil-rights industry, which uses the black underclass to push an agenda that invariably leaves the supposed beneficiaries worse off.”

Photo credit: “Black Lives Matter protest” by The All-Nite Images – https://www.flickr.com/photos/otto-yamamoto/15305646874/. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.