Best-selling author and Columbia University professor John McWhorter has exposed the major flaws in the Black Lives Matter movement, asserting that the group is “living in the past” and pointing out that America won’t actively engage in the group’s demands as long as they continue to ignore the fact “that black people in poor neighborhoods are in vastly more danger of being killed by young black men than by the occasional bad cop.”
“The problem is not an America blind to racism, or even an America that thinks racism is solely the n-word, cross-burnings, and housing covenants,” McWhorter wrote in The Daily Beast. “The problem is, I hate to say, a progressive ideology on race that confuses performance with action.”
If Black Lives Matter wants to effectuate positive change, McWhorter writes, it will have to “turn its lens to black-on-black homicide rates as well.”
The Losing the Race author cites some recent statistics: “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.”
McWhorter also calls out liberal New York Times writer Charles Blow and Slate’s Jamelle Bouie for their willingness to focus primarily on the “Darren Wilsons and Michael Slagers as black America’s supposed biggest problem regardless of actual homicide statistics.”
These men are members of what McWhorter calls “a certain intelligentsia” of black liberals who attack anyone who asks, “why do so many more black guys kill each other, numerically and proportionally?”
McWhorter also points out the sheer impotence of Black Lives Matter, as a so-called “civil rights” group:
How did we get to the point, after all, when a Hillary Clinton would have to tell the people who say they speak for black America that they must translate their grievances into a plan for political action? The contrast between the efforts of Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership conference and that scene a few weeks ago was chilling. The SCLC had to convince the white establishment to do things; Hillary Clinton had to remind BLM’s representatives that their job was to suggest some things to do, as the activist hectored her about what was or wasn’t in her “heart” about policies her husband supported before people now having sex were even born.
“A movement cannot make a real difference in 2015 by pretending that it’s still 1965,” McWhorter writes.
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