Black Lives Matter describe themselves as “trained Marxists” — but, here’s the thing: even Marx’n’Engels argued that any ideology should be judged by its results, not its intentions (oh, the historical irony!). On that metric, then, BLM is not just an egregious failure, it’s an evil ideology that has made black lives in the US immeasurably worse.
The proof is in the simultaneous eruption, once the great and the good turned sharply against the police during the mostly peaceful protests, in not just black-on-black shootings, but also in black traffic fatalities. It turns out that cops being made afraid to pull over black reckless drivers and jaywalkers leads more blacks to drive badly and/or pack a pistol.
The murder of retired black policeman David Dorn by BLM rioters, or the killings of multiple little black girls at BLM rallies, are just the horrifying tip of the iceberg of black tragedy unleashed by BLM and its attendant “Defund the Police” movement.
Here’s a graph I drew up of the monthly per-capita rate of deaths by homicide from 2014 to 2020. I set the non-Hispanic white average of 2010–2014 to one so that you can easily see the racial ratios. Try to pick out when the “racial reckoning” that is being celebrated today began:
As you can see, according to the Centers for Disease Control’s WONDER database that tracks the causes of death written on all the death certificates in the country, the chance of an individual black dying violently at the hands of another human being was about 7 to 8 times the chance of a white dying by homicide back in relatively peaceful 2014 […]
But then the Black Lives Matter movement began to win local victories over police departments, first in the St. Louis area, and then Baltimore, Chicago, and so forth. In the last two years of the Obama administration, the Ferguson Effect drove the black rate up to 8 to 10 times the white rate.
Lest BLM apologists try to blame this on “white supremacy”, remember that almost all murder is intra-racial (that is: blacks tend to murder other blacks, whites other whites, etc.). Certainly, there is some racial breakout, but even that leans heavily black, who are far more likely to murder whites than vice-versa.
Moreover, the rise during the Obama years flatlined during the Trump years. If the MAGA crowd really were a bunch of murderous white supremacists, they kept quiet about it while their man was in the White House.
Then the press and politicians went berserk in late May 2020, egging on rioters and depressing law enforcement. The Floyd Effect drove black homicides to skyrocket, peaking in July 2020 at over 15 times the white rate in 2010–2014, and remaining at an unprecedented ratio for the rest of the year.
Hispanic and white deaths by homicide also were unusually high in the second half of 2020, but not the murders of Asians (despite the Narrative that Trump’s March 2020 comments about the “Chinese virus” unleashed a frenzy of violence against Asians).
Of course, the press refuse to sully the sacred name of Floyd, so they blame the murder explosion of 2020 on Covid. This is not entirely unfounded: as part of their Covid policies, Democrat states began turning thousands of assorted murderers and psychos loose from prisons and wards.
Still, in March 2020, blacks were 8.7 times more likely to die by homicide than whites in 2010–2014, then 10.2 times in April, both in the normal range since the Great Awokening. With the huge eruption in violence in late May following Floyd’s death, the ratio hit 12.6 (the first time the black death-by-homicide rate exceeded 12 since 9/11), followed by 14.4 in June, a record 15.5 in July, and remained above 13 for the rest of the year.
As a million thinkpieces are saying today, something changed in May 2020.
How is the US tracking today? The CDC hasn’t released 2021 data yet, but it seems likely that, rather than a 2020 spike, the country has reached a new post-2020 plateau. A new normal, if you will.
But it’s not just homicides that have exploded in the post-Floyd era. While black homicide rates have long exceeded white, traffic fatalities were the reverse.
Whites drive more miles per capita, and the most problem-prone whites tend to live where they need to drive a long way to get anywhere, while the most troublesome blacks tend to live in the inner city and take public transit […]
But blacks pulled slightly ahead during the Ferguson Effect. Then in June 2020, the black rate exploded and stayed extreme for the rest of the year. As I pointed out last June, in the seven months following George Floyd’s demise, black road fatalities were 36 percent higher than in the same period of 2019, compared with a 9 percent increase among the rest of the population.
Takimag
Still, at least “racist” cops aren’t pulling black people over for traffic infringements any more.