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It Depends On What You Mean By “Black”
Having just come home to Maine from attending the funerals for three slain police officers in Baton Rouge, I was again mystified as to why “Blue Lives Matter” and “Black Lives Matter” aren’t understood to refer to overlapping groups. Surely anyone who lives in an even moderately diverse city—or watches television— would notice that not all law enforcement officers are white?
In Dallas, surrounded by police officers of every hue and addressed by the remarkable Chief Brown, it seemed obvious enough to me that Micah Johnson, who only wanted to murder white officers, failed in this, at least; he managed to kill three white ones along with one Mexican-American and one Taiwanese-American.
Less picky, the Baton Rouge cop-killer murdered Corporal Montrell Jackson, who was just as black as the man, Alton Sterling, that his murderer wished to avenge.
It struck me that the failure of what gets referred to as “both sides” to communicate is rooted in semantics; when police officers and other ordinary Americans use the word “black” they do not mean what Black Lives Matter activists mean by the word.
An ordinary American looks around and sees a black president with a black family living in the White House. There’s a black attorney general, black government officials in major cities, and black police officers patrolling their neighborhoods. Ordinary American veterans served in the military alongside black people, often under the command of black officers. Ordinary Americans very often can boast (if they bother to boast about something so…ordinary) spouses, children and other family members of different races. Meanwhile, to ordinary Americans, the travails of black people living in poverty don’t look all that different from the struggles of their poor white neighbors.
So naturally, the ordinary American’s response to “Black Lives Matter” is to say what seems perfectly and inoffensively obvious: “All Lives Matter.”
The ordinary, older American sees Chief Brown, or Montrell Jackson or the president, and thinks “wow, cool! Things have changed.” As the president himself will sometimes admit, things have changed …but not enough. Just look at Ferguson, Baltimore, the death of Alton Sterling at the hands of white officers in Baton Rouge.
Given that Corporal Montrell Jackson and others like him are available, why would the likes of Alton Sterling (a documented domestic violence offender and sexual abuser armed with an illegal firearm) be anointed the very model of authentic blackness?
Because—silly ordinary Americans!— “blackness” isn’t about having black (or dark brown) skin. Blackness means being different from whiteness, with most of the characteristics ordinary Americans think of as being ordinary and American defined as “white.”
When a black person takes on those characteristics, they become less representative of “blackness.” (Hence the especially vicious vituperation heaped upon the heads of black police officers during #BLM protests.) This distinction was articulated in an essay on the website Everyday Feminism:
“Under white supremacy… those who most fully represent Blackness (the poor, queer, femme, disabled and women among the community) have nothing to celebrate.”
“If your activism prioritizes (some) people gaining rights over destroying the system, or doesn’t consider that part at all, it will never be activism that benefits the Blackest and poorest of us.” Everyday Feminism
Get that? Those who “most fully represent” Blackness are sexual minorities, impoverished, disabled or female (though my guess is that Michelle, or Oprah, don’t count either).
By this definition, Montrell Jackson is not black, and neither are Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Clarence Thomas or most of the many black police officers who joined me in honoring the dead in Dallas and Baton Rouge (nor, for that matter, those who traveled to Maine twenty years ago to honor my late husband).
In a startling variation on Martin Luther King’s formula, black people are indeed not to be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. If their character is demonstrably good, if they have made fine, intelligent choices and virtuous use of the life God gave to them, they are less black… or maybe not black at all.
How extraordinary. How idiotic.
Published in General
As a former police officer, who happens to be White, not that I had anything to do with selecting my skin color before my birth, I would have no problem serving under a police chief like David Brown of Dallas. I met many people as a police officer and my test of who I would invite into my home was based upon what was in their heart and head.
I would be honored to have David Brown, or Corporal Montrell Jackson in my home, and doubly honored to have them sit at my dinner table. David Duke and Al Sharpton, and those like them will never cross the threshold of my home. They probably wouldn’t make past the sidewalk.
I have no statistics, but would be very interested to read them if you have any links.
An Hispanic/ Latino is white when he attacks and kills a black man. If that same white Hispanic is shot while being apprehended by the police, he turns into a brown man. A man , whose mother is a white woman from Kansas and father is a black African from Kenya is raised as a Muslim by his stepfather, becomes a very cool hip Christian black man when he is elected President. Speak about jive! We are all being conned. And the primary con creating divisiveness and separateness becomes, right from the start, the polarity of choosing the colors white and black as descriptors. No human has black skin and neither do any have white skin. We are all various shades of creme to dark brown skin color on the outside and inside…no different at all.
This is a home run.
Several of my close friends were Wake County (NC) deputy sheriffs who served under Sheriff John Baker, who was black and a Democrat. When he came up for re-election, I asked my friends if he did a good job. They told me he did, even though there was criticism throughout his career.
As I remember, he ran unopposed, but I voted for him anyway. He was the only Democrat I have ever voted for.
The only other Democrat I ever would have voted for was former Georgia Governor and Senator Zell Miller. Even though he voted not to convict Bill Clinton after his impeachment, his disapproval of Presidential candidates John Forbes Kerry and Barack Hussein Obama told me he was the last conservative Democrat to hold national office.
Yes.
What an impressive man.
I did not know, until several days after the Dallas tragedy and subsequent funerals that early in his career, he was the first responder to reports of “officer down,” only to find that the fatally-injured cop was his former partner. I did not know that his younger brother was killed in a drug deal gone bad, in 1991. I did not know that his son, who had a drug record of his own, and had supposedly cleaned himself up by the time his father became police chief in 2010, shortly thereafter shot a cop to death and was himself killed by officers returning fire.
Brown credits his strong mother, the manager of the apartment complex where the family lived (his father did landscaping jobs) for much of his success. He grew up as a loner, and was voted “most intellectual” and “most likely to succeed” by his high school class.
A tough American Dream story, proving that all things are possible, but not all things are easy, and a testament to the power of human grit.
It’s an election year.
My basic point is that if you go back far enough everyone has a historical beef with some other group. The point is to get over it, that was then this is now, times change people change, playing the victim card over and over again for something that happened in the past really does not help move society forward in a postive way. Rush had a good analogy of this. Take a married couple where the husband cheats on the wife. He apologizes and they agree to stay in the marriage and he does his part to prove to her that he can be trusted. Now what if every time they argue, she brings it up, even though he has done what he can to make amends and prove he can be trusted but that doesn’t matter she still brings it up, over and over and over again. What do you think that does to the relationship?
Great piece, Kate.
Great article and I completely agree. Read the Black Lives Matter web site. They’re Marxists. They have no demands or policy goals because their only goal is to foment revolution.
One of my colleagues is black and came to the US in her early teens from Jamaica. I asked her once if growing up in a majority-black society was noticeably different than socializing with black people here in the US, and she replied that it was, but couldn’t put her finger on the difference. When she married some years ago, she married a man from Nigeria – another majority black society. Both are strivers who started with very little and now run their own law firm together. Most notably, I think, neither of them grew up with the self-defeating notion that authentic “blackness” is inconsistent with conventional paths to success.
I guess that by BLM standards my colleague and her husband aren’t authentically “black”. What nonsense.
You are right, Mate De.
It’s a little insulting that in the city where I live, the civic authorities lower the flag to half-staff in remembrance of the Armenian Genocide. (We have the largest population of ethnic Armenians outside of Yerevan.) I feel for the Armenians – their history is tragic – BUT my ancestors also faced murderous oppression, and we don’t lower the flag to commemorate the tragedies that motivated them to flee to the US, such as the slaughter of French Huguenots in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Masssacre, or Protestant Dutch in the Spanish Wars in the Netherlands, or the oppression of Scots after the Battle of Culloden, or government sanctioned mass starvation in Ireland.
Perhaps the flag-lowering custom will die out in time, as the Armenian-Americans become plain old Americans.
U.S. religious groups and their political leanings
Done!
I’ll look for it…
[edit] Oops. Switched tabs.
Black lives don’t matter to Black Lives Matter.
If they did then BLM’s highest priority would be stopping the greatest threat to black lives, black-on-black crime.
Since that is not the case, BLM’s true motivation and/or goal must be something else.
The something else is the chip-on-the-shoulder-against-the-world psychology and culture (because culture and the psyche make each other up) of permanent victimhood, in which the entire world is nothing more than one big carnival freak show of victimization of the powerless “little guy” at the hands of the powerful “the man.”
Kate is right. The “Black” in “Black Lives Matter” is really just a euphemism for victims that has nothing to do with skin color. Likewise, all cops, regardless of their actual skin color, are merely metaphors for “the man.”
The psychology is described by Sowell as the unconstrained vision, by Haidt as the one-foundation moral matrix, by Herman in “The Cave and the Light” as Platonism, by Levin in “The Great Debate” as the left.
Left-wing hegemony over the education-industrial complex drills this psychology, this culture, into our kids heads from kindergarten through grad school. It favors falsehoods over truths in service of the narrative: https://theindependentwhig.com/2015/08/09/falsehoods-and-truths/
Since the problem starts in kindergarten it is there that the solution must also start: https://theindependentwhig.com/imagine-update-32815/
I missed this, but I think that there’s a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, the Armenian Genocide was a bigger deal than all of those combined. St. Bart’s took 5-30k, the Dutch revolt took maybe another hundred, Culloden adds less than a thousand (my wife used to work in Scottish local history museums, and her part of Scotland, like most parts of Scotland, saw more oppression from the Jacobites before their pillaging was ended than they saw from those opposed to the Jacobites after the pillaging was done). There was no government sanctioned mass starvation in Ireland, but the Potato Famine was the central motivation behind the mass Irish emigration to the US. If you’re under the impression that no town ever holds a day to celebrate Irish culture in America, I believe that you may be living in an unusual town. Even that killed fewer than the Armenian Genocide, and was too distant for meaningful numbers of living people to have had relatives who suffered under it.
I don’t think that St. Patrick’s day is going to die out any time soon, although many Irish-Americans have become plain old Americans. Eventually, though, one gets used to the wonderful tapestry that is American cultural life and learns to enjoy the traditions of a whole bunch of different people.