The areas where black life is most under attack are not unique to black people —our culture rejects human dignity completely — but they do impact the black community more than others. If you’re looking for the worst culprit in the war on black life and all human life, law enforcement is not the place to start. They shouldn’t even be your second stop or your third. In the vast majority of cases, law enforcement is not an enemy of black life, but hopefully a protector of it.
The abortion industry is a different story, however. The legalization of fetal homicide undermines the sacredness of life at its very foundation. It devalues life universally. It says that life at its core, in its essence, is not worthy or important. It says that life is valuable only in so far as it is useful to those around it. It proclaims human life disposable, particularly the lives of the poor and the disadvantaged. The abortion industry preaches quite explicitly that life does not matter. That’s its whole sales pitch. When Black Lives Matter shouts “black lives matter,” the abortion industry is the loudest voice shouting back, “No they don’t.” Yet many of the people who think police departments should be abolished also think the abortion industry should be funded. It makes no sense.
Abortion is not a uniquely black issue, but it is a uniquely cataclysmic issue for the black community. Black people only account for 12 percent of the citizenry but they make up almost a third of the abortions. There have been over 16 million black abortions since Roe v Wade, resulting in a 36 percent reduction of the black population. In some cities, black babies are more likely to be aborted than born.
There have been about 1,100 black people killed by cops in the last 10 years. Abortionists wipe out three times as many in less than a week. Police killed about 300 black people in 2015, according to some estimates. Abortionists kill well over twice that amount on an average Tuesday. Still, incredibly, Black Lives Matters supporters are much more likely to accuse police of exterminating black children.
You can care about more than one thing, of course, but the fact remains that BLM and its proponents are almost entirely silent about the actual mass slaughter of black kids. There have been enough black babies executed in abortion clinics to fill 200 football stadiums, but we are still more likely to see a high profile Black Lives Matter supporter passionately defending the abortion industry than criticizing it, before pivoting quickly back to the systematic evils of law enforcement.
It’s OK to focus especially on one sort of issue or another, but if your movement stands for life in one case and then is utterly and completely silent in the other — or worse, it is all of a sudden in favor of devaluing life in these other situations – then your movement is, at best, impotent. At worst it’s fraudulent. When it comes to BLM, I suspect the latter.
There may be a few people who’ve marched in both Black Lives Matter protests and the March For Life, but I have never seen cities across the country swarmed by mostly black citizens angrily denouncing the murder of black babies the way they denounce the much less common killing of black criminal suspects. Indeed, it really appears that, in the eyes of Black Lives Matter, the only black lives that matter are criminal suspects. At least those are the only ones they seem interested in acknowledging.
And it’s not just abortion that’s so conspicuously ignored. As has been pointed out many times, Black Lives Matter has almost nothing to say about the thousands of black people gunned down by other black people in the inner city every year. They have even less to say about the millions of black children abandoned by their black fathers. If your kid’s life matters, Black Lives Matter should say, then go home and be a father to him. Perhaps that will minimize the chances that his face ends up emblazoned on t-shirts at the next Black Lives Matter rally. But no such message is relayed. In fact, that message is uniformly denounced and shouted down.
It doesn’t end there. Prostitution, drug abuse, pornography — all of these evils desecrate the sanctity of black life just as they desecrate the sanctity of all human life. That’s to say nothing of the black musicians and black pop culture icons who glorify black criminality and objectify black women, helping to promote among black youth a total rejection of human dignity. It’s true that some bad apple cops don’t respect human life, but it’s even more true that the culture itself — the whole culture, but especially black culture — disrespects human life. Where is Black Lives Matter on that issue? Why are cops the only villains in the story they tell?
To whatever extent the problem of dehumanization can be found in law enforcement, it must be understood as a symptom, not the cause. It should be no surprise that a culture that hates life would produce cops who don’t respect life.
It’s OK for a movement to be about something specific. Not every movement has to be about everything. Not every protest against a bad thing needs to be a protest against every bad thing. But the movement and the protest should be grounded in principles that can be applied — and are applied — beyond it, especially if the movement marches under a banner like “Black lives matter.” That is a motto that appears, at first blush, to be saying more than, “Cops shouldn’t kill innocent black folks.” If it isn’t trying to say more than that, it should stop using the motto. If it is trying to say more, then it should come out and finally say it.
Black lives matter? Yes, they do. But, sadly, it appears that black lives don’t really matter to Black Lives Matter. And that’s the problem.
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