Prominent black conservatives are seeing how the mainstream media are using the death of George Floyd — to portray America as racist, to vilify all police officers, to force the mantle of victimhood onto black Americans — and they are calling foul.
Notable figures including Candace Owens, Rob Smith, Terrence K. Williams, and Keith and Kevin Hodge are rejecting the roles that Democrat politicians and establishment journalists have assigned to black Americans in the wake of the protests and violent riots that have paralyzed major cities during the last seven days.
For their decision to speak out, they are being called “Uncle Tom’s,” “coons,” and white supremacists by left-wingers.
In a viral video posted on Thursday, Candace Owens rejected the widely assumed notion that black deaths at the hands of the police is systemic and widespread. She said:
A police officer is 18 and a half times more likely to be killed by a black person than the other way around. Do some police officers do the wrong thing? Yes. They’re always going to exist because they’re human beings. And sometimes human beings suck…society is not perfectible.
The notion of systemic police racism is something that many on the left accept unquestioningly as an article of faith. But statistics don’t necessarily support their claim.
A Harvard University study in 2016 poured through more than 1,000 shootings in ten police departments in California, Florida, and Texas. “On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we are unable to detect any racial differences in either the raw data or when accounting for controls,” researchers concluded.
The paper did find racial disparities when it came to non-lethal police interactions, including pushing and putting hands on an individual.
A 2019 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found that black police were more likely to kill black civilians, just as white police are more prone to kill white civilians. The research was conducted by academics from Michigan State University and the University of Maryland.
The study concluded:
We find no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers. Instead, race-specific crime strongly predicts civilian race. This suggests that increasing diversity among officers by itself is unlikely to reduce racial disparity in police shootings.”
Police shot and killed 1,004 people in 2019 — with blacks accounting for 23 percent of those deaths. That percentage has held steady since at least 2017.
While that may seem disproportionately high when compared to America’s overall black population, which stands at 13 percent, it is low when compared to the black crime rate, which is a better indicator of police contact, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article from Heather MacDonald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Blacks committed approximately 60 percent of robberies and 53 percent of homicides in 2018, the most recent year for which figures are available.
Candace Owens also rejected the left’s elevation of George Floyd to martyr status. “Nobody thinks he should have died during this arrest but what I find despicable is that everyone is pretending this man lived a heroic lifestyle when he didn’t,” she said in the 17-minute video.
Racial tensions have boiled over since George Floyd’s death last month while in Minneapolis police custody.
Numerous #BlackLivesMatter protests have overwhelmed cities across the country, with many turning violent and resulting in extensive property damage and even deaths, including David Dorn, a retired captain for the St. Louis Police, who was black.
The violence has angered black conservatives, who are faulting #BlackLivesMatter organizers for failing to control or condemn the mayhem. Breitbart News reported on one Washington, D.C. resident who expressed her disgust with the movement during a protest on Sunday.
“Black Lives Matter is a joke. You are the racists,” said Nestride Yumga, an American citizen originally from Africa.
“Go to Chicago. They don’t have schools, and they die every day. They don’t matter [to you] because you can’t get attention from that,” she told protesters.
Terrence K. Williams has also taken the #BlackLivesMatter movement to task for its selective outrage over Floyd’s death. The pro-Trump actor and a comedian has accused the movement and black leaders like Al Sharpton of largely ignoring the lives of young black children killed due to gun violence.
“Every single one of these babies were shot and killed,” he said in an impassioned social media video posted to Twitter and Instagram. “Nobody protested for these babies. Nobody burned down a building. Nobody rioted for these babies. And they deserve their names to be on the news.”
Black conservatives are also rejecting the dominant narrative that America is a racist society in which black people are perpetual victims. If anything, the hate is coming from the other side.
“Black kids are taught only that America is racist,” Rob Smith, the Iraq War veteran and political commentator, tweeted this week. “Once that’s internalized, they see no problem burning America to the ground.”
He noted that black conservatives are called “coon,” “Uncle Tom,” and even “house n**r” because they don’t worship at the “altar of liberalism.”
Many of today’s most vocal black conservatives on social media have thoroughly absorbed the ideas of Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, who have been writing for decades about the damaging effects left-wing ideology can have on black Americans.
Through their own personal experiences, they realized that Democrat politicians want to keep racial animosity alive in order to control the black vote.
“Racism is not dead. But it is on life support,” Thomas Sowell once said. It is “kept alive mainly by the people who use it for an excuse or to keep minority communities fearful or resentful enough to turn out as a voting bloc on election day.”
Even before #BlackLivesMatter, Sowell warned black Americans that black votes matter to Democrats more than black lives. “Racial harmony would be a political disaster for such politicians,” he said.
Voicing such opinions is of course a recipe for political ostracism, according to Shelby Steele, the author of the influential book White Guilt: How Blacks & Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.
“Black identity since the ’60s has been a totalitarian identity. It’s enforced,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle when the book was released in 2006. “And if you don’t subscribe to the party line, then you are a betrayer and a dissident, and you are treated as dissidents were treated in the Soviet Union.”
The Hodge Twins — the social media stars Keith and Kevin Hodge — recently echoed Shelby Steele’s observation that black communities tend to defend their worst members. While white Americans will usually condemn criminals among them, Steele argued that black Americans will instead rush to portray black felons as victims.
“White communities hold their communities to a higher standard than blacks,” the Hodge twins said in a recent video.
The twins also blasted #BlackLivesMatter as a “leftist lie.” “All lives matter. That should be obvious. All lives do matter,” they said.
Follow David Ng on Twitter @HeyItsDavidNg. Have a tip? Contact me at dng@breitbart.com
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