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Allan is 68 years old and a self-proclaimed Marxist. Both of his parents were surgeons from New York, and he attended private schools all his life. He graduated from Harvard and Princeton with degrees in philosophy and French literature. Although he and I are on opposite ends of the political spectrum, I still enjoy the sharpness of Allans mind and his compassionate spirit; but I resist, as best as I can, his extreme pessimism. He believes mankind is going to be felled soon by an apocalyptic revolutionary blow, courtesy of the international working class. Until such time comes, however, he will remain in a state of despair about the United States.

Jason, black men are being killed in this country, he said.

Oh, I know that, I said. They are being exterminated. I went on: We both live in Chicago, where they are being massacred on a weekly and daily basis, but who is killing them? Huh? Are white cops going in and slaughtering them? Are white people from the suburbs gunning them down? Is the military going in and killing these black men?

If the cops kill them, he said, what incentive do they have to obey the law and?

Listen, I told him, the spate of killings of unarmed black men by police officers in recent years is tragic and a disgrace. It is, I believe, the work of a small minority of rogue police officers, or ordinary officers weighed down by a form of statistical reasoninggiven the disproportionate homicide rates among black menthat breeds a pervasive fear of blacks among the general population. This is sad, and it is a blight against the humanity of all persons.

With that concession in place, I continued: However, against the heroic commitment of the entire police force in this country, and given the enormous contribution that police officersblack, white, and Hispanicare making every day by going into black and Hispanic communities overrun by murderous street gangs and protecting the lives of innocent residents living in these tragic neighborhoods, we need to keep things in perspective here. Police officers, when all is said and done, overworked as they are, underpaid as they are, and given the poor public image that they suffer, are doing a good job of trying to protect black lives in the inner cities of this country, where thugs and hooligans think neighborhoods are either extensions of their living rooms, or their own private fiefdoms where they can do as they please.

Allan shifted in his chair. He asked what I thought about racial profiling. Here, I agreed with him that the practice is unjust because it arbitrarily targets members of a law-abiding majority at any given time. Because law enforcement agents have a coercive monopoly on the use of force against virtually helpless citizens, profiling is a legally problematic affair that, given the broad discretionary powers of the officers who exercise it, can lead to disastrous consequences. But there is still some possibility for rationality in the exercise of racial profiling itself. That is, an officer who has made an error of judgment in singling out a person for suspicious activity based on race could revise his actions before stripping the person of his or her dignity. The act of profiling by police officers, while embarrassing and painful to an innocent person, is not irrevocably harmful.

I explained to Allan that there was a more deadly and insidious form of racial profiling that was taking place in our nation. Yet this profiling fails to provoke the righteous indignation of those who care for universal justice. I was speaking of the racial profiling done by blacks against other blacks, which manifests itself in black-on-black crime. Black men, in particular, target other black people as prey to be annihilated.

This form of racial profiling is worse than police racial profiling, and not because it is an in-group phenomenon. Rather, its because the deadly intent of its perpetrators leaves a trail of tragic, irrevocable consequences. It is neither white authority nor white apathy that so threatens the lives of so many black Americans. The average white person has not created policies or instituted systemic forms of oppression that force the hands of criminals on the streets.

When some black folks complain that white people dont value black lives, I often ask: What exactly do you mean? In fact, too many black Americans are reluctant to hold other black people accountable for the horrific crimes they are committing against one another. Members of Black Lives Matter want white people to esteem black lives and value the humanity of black people when they themselves cant condemn and express moral outrage at those who maim and kill black children in the course of gang warfare, senseless street violence, and drive-by shootings. Why do white people have a larger moral responsibility to care about black people than black people have to care about their own lives? And why are blacks in need of special white nurturance?

Compared with the recent spate of police killings of unarmed black men, black-on-black crime is tantamount to a national-security disaster. The moral hysteria raised by a few incidents of police brutality in the face of this larger national tragedy is reckless hyperbole. It hides from the nation a deep malaise at work in the psyche of some in the black community: a form of self-hatred that manifests itself in a homicidal rage not fundamentally against white people, but against other black people.

Allan, like others on the left, places the blame for this black self-hatred on so-called white privilege. In our lunch conversation, he veered into a case for reparations for blacks based on this privilege and the ways in which unfair discrimination against black Americans is sociologically responsible for what I consider pathologies in some black communities. In the end, we agreed to disagree, as we do on most things.

Our conversation, however, had left my mind racing with thoughts about the moral hypocrisy of Black Lives Matter. As I sat at my desk late that evening and looked out my window as the street grew dark, I thought about two other transgressive and unpardonable sins of the Black Lives Matter movement. The first has to do with its outrageous position on Israel; the second pertains to its immoral demands regarding the education of black Americans.

The leadersof Black Lives Matter have written a profoundly anti-Israel (and anti-American) manifesto in which they accuse Israel of genocide and apartheid. The manifesto endorses the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and takes the view that the United States justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliances with Israel. This, according to Black Lives Matter, makes the U.S. complicit in a supposedly genocidal massacre of the Palestinian people.

Israel is the only country I know of that grants citizenship and land rights to its avowed enemies. Whats more, Israel offered a Palestinian state to both Yassir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas and was not only repeatedly turned down but repaid with the second intifada and the indiscriminate murder of Israeli citizens. Palestinian intransigence is forged in the conviction that no deal will be made so long as Jewsany Jewsoccupy the land of Israel. In 2005, Israel unilaterally handed over its territory in Gaza to the terrorist government Hamas and was, and still is, rewarded by a daily showering of rockets into Israeli land.

With its accusations against Israeli Jews, Black Lives Matter suggests that in their support of Israel, such Jews are complicit in the unproven crimes of genocide and apartheid. We must remember that even amid the daily onslaughts of war and terror that Palestinians inflict on Jews, the Israelis, in a spirit of almost irrational altruism, take great pains to limit civilian casualties and to ensure that those caught in a war they did not personally initiate are spared as much harm as possible.

Black Lives Matter is not only being unjust toward Israel; its anti-Israel stance betrays Jews in America, to whom blacks in this country are enormously indebted. If there are any unsung heroes of the civil-rights movement, it is those Jews who played an enormous but largely unacknowledged role in the liberation of blacks from racial oppression. American Jews undertook monumental efforts to found and fund some of the most important civil-rights organizations in the U.S. These include the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), theSouthern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC),and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1909, Henry Moscowitz joined W.E.B. Du Bois and other civil-rights leaders to create the NAACP. The vice chairman of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now the Union for Reform Judaism), Kivie Kaplan, served as the national president of the NAACP from 1966 to 1975. Arnie Aronson worked with A. Philip Randolph and Roy Wilkins to found the Leadership Conference. From 1910 to 1940, there were more than 2,000 primary and secondary schools and 20 black colleges (including Howard, Dillard, and Fisk Universities) established in whole or in part by contributions from Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. At the height of enrollment at the so-called Rosenwald schools, nearly 40 percent of Southern blacks were educated at one of these institutions. During the civil-rights movement, Jewish activists represented a disproportionate number of whites involved in the struggle for black emancipation. Jews made up half of the young people who participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. Leaders of the Jewish Reform Movement were arrested with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964, after mounting a challenge to racial segregation in public accommodations. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were drafted in the conference room of the Religious Action Center (RAC) of Reform Judaism, under the aegis of the Leadership Conference, which for decades was in the RACs building.

The hard, cold, and unsentimental fact of the matter is that without Jewish financial backing and moral contributions, there may never have been a civil-rights movement. What I consider to be our countrys heroic Third Founding (the Second Founding being Lincolns speech at Gettysburg), which culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Acts, would have at least been severely postponed.

Charged by God with a duty to repair the world and to remedy injustice wherever they find it, the Jews have maintained a civilization for more than 3,000 years. They carried their duty into the 20th century by playing a pivotal role in widening the pantheon of the human community in America. The Jews tweaked the moral consciences of their fellow Americans and entreated them to consider blacks and all persons of color as possessing dignity and moral worth equal to that of any other human being. The anti-Israeli platform of Black Lives Matters has understandably alienated some progressive Jews in America who had initially aligned themselves with the movement. And it has alienated this black American as well.

There is anothermorally irresponsible claim made by the Black Lives Matter movementa claim that should offend any self-respecting black American citizen. I refer to the movements demand that the United States provide free college education to blacks. On what grounds is this organization making such a demand? Why free college education for blacks but not for poor whites or for Latino, Asian, or Native-American college students? What special sociopolitical conditions exist for blacks that do not hold for other ethnic or racial groups such that blacks deserve to be exempt from paying college tuition?

Could it be that the spokespersons for the movement are failing here to recognize another cultural pathology blacks face? I have in mind the problem of single-parent familiesin which 70 percent of African-American children now live. This is a financially untenable situation for a massive swath of black America. And it is certainly an issue over which blacks have control. This crisis is not a consequence or inheritance of slavery or Jim Crow. Indeed the Jim Crow period saw significantly lower single-parent birth rates among blacks. The downward spiral of the black family, the marked absence of fathers, cannot be the responsibility of white Americans. Nor should white Americans ever be asked what they intend to do about that problem, as the problem is not theirs. What we have here is a widespread failure among black Americans to exercise free will in a judicious and wise mannera failure to appreciate that free will comes with a moral obligation to be fiscally mature. The question that the Black Lives Matter movement should be addressing here is as follows: What do you intend to do about these problems and issues, which are endemic to your communities?

Realizing, of course, that not every single parent can afford to send her children to college, perhaps the movement is simply attempting to pass that responsibility on to society. This leads us to some significant philosophical questions: Are the procreative choices that we make in life the responsibility of others, or are they our own? Is it a form of child neglect to bring more children into the world than you can afford to support? When you have children, is it fair to expect your neighbors to bear the financial responsibility of raising them when they may have decided not to have any, or to have just one, or two, or just the exact number that their budget can accommodate over the course of a lifetime? If someone has sacrificed and planned his life carefully and has already incurred debt by sending his own children to school, by what moral right would anyone dare tell him that because of racial disparities he is obligated to finance the college education of someone elses child?

Those on the far left will say that free college for blacks is a social good. I have heard this repeatedly, and I have often asked for clarification. By social good, people often mean the public interest. When asked to define the public interest, leftists tend to fumble and speak convolutedly about assorted moral conundrums. But society is nothing more than the sum of each individual. Therefore, any reference to the public good would logically first have to refer to the good that each individual person can do. How do we know what that good is? One of the glorious achievements of this country is that here we get to choose a conception of the good for ourselves. For some, it is having a family; for others, it is pursuing a career or devoting ones life to a specialized hobby, service to others, travelingyou name it. There are as many conceptions of the good as there are persons to imagine them. And in the United States of America, the state has no business imposing its conceptionor any conceptionof the good on you or deciding a priori what your conception of the good is. It leaves you free to choose for yourself so long as you do not violate the individual rights of others. If a notion of the public good is foisted on you, it means that a group of people has decided that its interests and conception of the good should override your conscience. This is an act akin to tyranny, as it takes away your capacity to decide for yourself.

The cardinal sin of asking for anything for free in this life is that you abnegate your responsibility not just for maintaining your existence but, more important, for achieving your humanity. For we achieve our humanity in several ways. One is by exchanging goods and services with others. We affirm the worth of the other, and we respect the other by rewarding him or her for such services, and, in so doing, our agency is implicated in affirming our self-worth and dignity in the beautiful act of reciprocity. In reciprocity, there is a recognition of equality among us as individuals.

The demand for a free education, along with the demand for race-based reparations by Black Lives Matter and others, is symptomatic of another problem in race relations. There are those on the left who see self-reliance, initiative, and a commitment to ones own life as, at best, hopelessly naive. This skepticism doesnt apply to their own livesoh, no, they have gotten where they are by the exercise of their own virtues. But the state apparatus and its system are so corrupt and stacked against blacks, they believe, that while the application of those virtues will always be possible for a Condoleezza Rice or a Colin Powell or an Oprah Winfrey, its not an option for most blacks in America. Such people see grit, honor, hard work, and self-reliance as white ideals that are being imposed on others. Those traits reinforce whiteness, in their minds, and there is a gnawing resentment of those blacks who wish to appropriate such virtues for themselves. They cease being black in the minds of some on the far left. A sizable number of well-meaning but, in the end, racist progressives need black people to be black. Its the darndest thing, but an African colleague of mine, dressed in a formal Chanel suit, was met with disappointment by her department chair. Why, she was asked, didnt she wear something more ethnic like an African dress, and how come she was losing her accent?

Some on the activist left heed the call of black dependence with glee because it places them in a permanent position of power as part of a managerial class lording it over a needy set of entitled subjects whose interests they represent. The neediness and dependence of their charges simply reinforce how independent, privileged, and powerful those in the managerial class are in relation to their socioeconomic inferiors.

Finally, when you demand anything for free, you are claiming a status of such impoverishment that you hold yourself up as an object of pity. But, unlike compassion and mercy, pity is not characteristically American. Pity denotes contemptuous sorrow for the misery or distress of another person. And the contempt one feels is linked to a moral vice the other harbors: an unwillingness to exercise ones agency in the relief of that suffering. To present oneself as a lifelong socioeconomic supplicant is morally repugnant because it requires that one become an active participant in ones own infantilization. It permits that ones own agency be expropriated by others, and it requires the surrender of ones capabilities.

Such ideas assume a malevolence about the American polis that is untenable and empirically false. Its only natural, therefore, that many Americans reject this type of victimhood. No doors are closed forever to anyone in this great country of ours. If your ethos and character disposition are set for achievement, if your will is wedded to a resilience and tenacity, and you rid yourself of the idea that you are entitled to the financial earnings of other people, you will find a way to make it here. On the other hand, the kind of dependency that Black Lives Matter promotes lays the groundwork for personal failure.

My friend Allanwould disagree angrily with all this. But I thank him just the same for helping me clarify my thoughts on Black Lives Matter, a movement that stands to set back the moral progress of our nation and the progress of American blacks. Id also note that perhaps I dont see hopelessness at every turn or find despair in every corner of America because I ignore those who preach helplessness where opportunity abounds. And I reject their nurturance of scapegoating and dependency. Israel is good. So, too, is America. And the achievements of both countries demonstrate, above all, the virtues of self-realization and persistence. Til we lunch again.

This essay is adapted from Jason D. Hills forthcoming book We Have Overcome: An Immigrants Letter to the American People, which will be published by Bombardier Books in July and is available for pre-publication sale on Amazon.

Original post:
My Black Lives Matter' Problem - Commentary Magazine

Activists with Black Lives Matter protests halted a political rally in Seattle where Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was scheduled to speak on Saturday afternoon.

Were shutting this event down now, said an activist who suddenly leapt on stage. She approached the microphone where Sanders had just begun speaking, thankingattendees for welcoming him to one of most progressive cities in the United States of America.An event organizer attempted to stop the activist, and a heated exchange ensued as the crowd booed.

RELATED:Ben Carson: Of course all lives matter

Eventually, activist Marissa Johnson was allowed to speak. I was going to tell Bernie how racist this city is, even with all of these progressives, but youve already done that for me. Thank you, she said as some in the crowd called for her arrest.

Melissa Harris-Perry, 8/1/15, 10:37 AM ET

Melissa Harris-Perry and her panel discuss how presidential candidates are reacting to the Black Lives Matter movement and how - if at all - their engagement is evolving.

Johnson then asked for a four-and-half-minute moment of silence to honor Michael Brown Jr., the black teenager who was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, a year ago.As the crowd grew more agitated, Johnson added that Sanders says he cares about grassroots movements, but, The biggest grassroots movement in this country right now is Black Lives Matter.

Sanders stood by silently the entire time.Eventually, organizers decided to end the event and the Vermont senator did not return to the microphone.

I am disappointed that two people disrupted a rally attended by thousands at which I was invited to speak about fighting to protect Social Security and Medicare, Sanders said in a statement. I was especially disappointed because on criminal justice reform and the need to fight racism, there is no other candidate for president who will fight harder than me.

The face-off represented the second time in the past month that Sanders has been confronted by Black Lives Matter activists in a high-profile setting. At the liberal Netroots Nation conference in Phoenix in late July, Sanders seemed irritated after women with the movement interrupted his speech.

RELATED:Sanders and OMalley blast DNC over debate schedule

In both cases, activists seemed eager not only to convey a message to Sanders, but to progressives in general. The rally in Seattle, which also featured local Democratic officials, drew thousands and was supposed to champion Social Security and Medicare.

Bernie, you were confronted at Netroots by black women, Johnson said, adding that he has not yet presented a criminal justice reform package like fellow Democratic candidate Martin OMalley. She went on, entreating the crowd: Join us now in holding Bernie Sanders accountable for his actions.

Sanders has made efforts to address issues important to black voters since the Netroots protest. Late last month, he was warmly received in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at a conference of the Southern Christian Leadership, the group Martin Luther King Jr. once headed. And while he has not formally rolled out a criminal justice package, he publicly acknowledged the names of black people killed by police and has begun speaking more about the issue in rallies.

The senators home state of Vermont is 95% white and has fewer than 7,500 black residents.

While OMalley was also confronted at Netroots and worked hard repair relations, front-runner Hillary Clinton has yet to face a direct confrontation, even as she has made efforts to reach out to the black community.

Read the rest here:
Bernie Sanders event shut down by Black Lives Matter ...

Alicia Garza was in a bar in Oakland, California, drinking bourbon when the verdict came in. It was July 2013 and she had been following the trial of George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Florida, who had shot dead a 17-year-old African-American by the name of Trayvon Martin in February of the preceding year. Martin had been unarmed, on his way back from a 7/11 convenience store where he had just bought himself an iced tea and a bag of Skittles.

There had, of course, been shootings of young black men before. But this one had a particular resonance. Garza had a younger brother of a similar height and build to Martin. She felt it could just as easily have been him.

In the bar, Garza, her husband and her two friends had been checking their phones for updates from the trial. The jury had been deliberating for 16 hours on Zimmermans fate. When the verdict was announced, she learned of it first through Facebook: not guilty of second degree murder and acquitted of manslaughter.

Everything went quiet, everything and everyone, Garza says now. And then people started to leave en masse. The one thing I remember from that evening, other than crying myself to sleep that night, was the way in which as a black person, I felt incredibly vulnerable, incredibly exposed and incredibly enraged. Seeing these black people leaving the bar, and it was like we couldnt look at each other. We were carrying this burden around with us every day: of racism and white supremacy. It was a verdict that said: black people are not safe in America.

Garza logged on to Facebook. She wrote an impassioned online message, essentially a love note to black people, and posted it on her page. It ended with: Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.

Garzas close friend, Patrisse Cullors, read the post in a motel room 300 miles away from Oakland that same night. Cullors, also a community organiser working in prison reform, started sharing Garzas words with her friends online. She used a hashtag each time she reposted: #blacklivesmatter. The following day, Garza and Cullors spoke about how they could organise a campaign around these sentiments.

A call to action, says Garza. To make sure we are creating a world where black lives actually do matter.

They reached out to Opal Tometi, another activist they knew in the field of immigrant rights. The three women started by setting up Tumblr and Twitter accounts and encouraging users to share stories of why #blacklivesmatter. Garza made protest signs with block capital letters and put them in the window of a local shoe shop. Cullors led a march down Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills with a banner emblazoned with the same hashtag. The slogan started gaining traction.

Then, on 9 August 2014, a little over a year after Zimmerman was allowed to walk free from court, 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Officer Darren Wilson had fired 12 rounds. Brown had been unarmed.

Protests broke out the day after Browns shooting. There was some unrest and looting. Cars were vandalised, commercial properties broken into. Police officers in riot gear took to the streets. Watching the drama unfold on TV, Garza had that same sickening feeling shed had when she heard of Trayvon Martins death. Along with Cullors and Tometi, she organised a freedom ride to Ferguson under the auspices of the #blacklivesmatter campaign. More than 500 people signed up from 18 different cities across America. When they reached Ferguson, Garza was astonished to see her own phrase mirrored back at her on protest banners and shouted in unison by people she had never met.

When a grand jury announced Darren Wilson would face no indictment in the matter of Browns death, a group of protesters chanting Black lives matter shut down a local shopping mall. Later, after a spate of further deaths of unarmed black men, the phrase started appearing on T-shirts and mugs and badges. In December, Hillary Clinton used the phrase in a speech delivered at a human rights gala. It was referred to in television programmes an episode of Law & Order; the finale of Empire. By January 2015, the American Dialect Society had declared #blacklivesmatter as their word of the year.

In June, following the shooting of nine people by a suspected white supremacist in a church in Charleston, the activist Bree Newsome climbed the flagpole outside the statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina and removed the Confederate flag. Her actions were tweeted and retweeted under the hashtag #blacklivesmatter. At a subsequent eulogy for the victims of the church shooting, President Barack Obama paid tribute to black churches for being a place where children were taught that they matter. There are now over 26 Black Lives Matter chapters across the United States. From one heartfelt Facebook post, it has spawned a new civil rights movement.

Garza has been astonished by the response. This wasnt something that we you know She pauses. We didnt have a strategic plan.

Black America is in a state of protest. The 21st-century civil rights movement, exemplified by the action taken by Garza and those like her, is democratic in its aims and agile in its responses. It is fuelled by grief and fury, by righteous rage against injustice and institutionalised racism and by frustration at the endemic brutality of the state against those it deems unworthy.

In almost every area of society, black Americans remain disadvantaged. Education? Forty-two percent of black children are educated in high-poverty schools. Employment? The unemployment rate for black high-school dropouts is 47% (for white high-school dropouts it is 26%). Housing? Although black people make up just 13.2% of the US population, they account for 37% of the homeless. Voters rights? One in every 13 African Americans of voting age is disenfranchised because of a felony conviction a rate more than four times greater than the rest of the US population. In fact, African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million jail population and are incarcerated nearly six times as often as white people.

Despite the election of Americas first black president in 2008, those profound structural fissures remain. But although the challenges might be similar, the new civil rights movement is tackling them in new ways compared to the 20th-century movement. The most notable difference is that, in 2015, there are no leaders in the conventional sense: no Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, no single charismatic voice that claims to speak for the many. Several people I interview insist this is a strength: they make the bleak point that, historically, single leaders of civil rights movements have almost always been assassinated. They have also been male.

We have a lot of leaders, insists Garza, just not where you might be looking for them. If youre only looking for the straight black man who is a preacher, youre not going to find it.

Instead, the new civil rights movement combines localised power structures with an inclusive ethos that consciously incorporates women, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer activists. DeRay Mckesson, one of the most high-profile activists with a Twitter following of 176,000, is a gay man. Garza identifies as queer (her husband is transgender).

The new movement is powerful yet diffuse, linked not by physical closeness or even necessarily by political consensus, but by the mobilising force of social media. A hashtag on Twitter can link the disparate fates of unarmed black men shot down by white police in a way that transcends geographical boundaries and time zones. A shared post on Facebook can organise a protest in a matter of minutes. Documentary photos and videos can be distributed on Tumblr pages and Periscope feeds, through Instagrams and Vines. Power lies in a single image. Previously unseen events become unignorable.

Events like the arrest of a 43-year-old man named Eric Garner, who was placed in a chokehold for 15 to 19 seconds by a white police officer on the sidewalk of Staten Island, New York, in July 2014. Garner can be heard on mobile phone video footage saying, I cant breathe a total of 11 times and was pronounced dead in hospital an hour later. The video went viral. I cant breathe became a totemic phrase for protesters. The basketball player LeBron James wore a T-shirt with the words emblazoned across the front and was praised by President Obama for the act.

Events like a pool party in McKinney, Texas in June where a white police officer threw a 14-year-old black girl to the ground, pinning her down for several minutes, before pulling a gun on two teenage boys. A bystander filmed the fracas, posted it on YouTube where it was viewed almost 500,000 times before being picked up by all the major news channels. The officer was suspended and later resigned.

Events like this were happening before as many activists say, theres a Mike Brown in every town but it is only now that technological advances and digital savvy have ensured the dots are joined.

Social medias significance is that it is recognising different incidents that might have gone unnoticed and sewing them together as a coherent whole, says Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media and the author of Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection. And that means were forced to recognise very serious structural issues.

Social networking sites are used disproportionately by young, black Americans 96% of African-American internet users aged 18-29 use a social network of some kind. Forty per cent of the same group say they use Twitter 12% more than the comparable figure for young white people. According to Todd Wolfson, the author of Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left, the new civil rights movement has important precursors in grassroots uprisings such as the Arab spring and Occupy: The Cyber Left is about flattening hierarchies, flattening governance processes, combined with using the logic of social networks for deep consensus building.

Kwame Rose, a 21-year-old civil rights protester from Baltimore, agrees: Social media plays a big part in everything. I find out information, I put it on Twitter, it starts trending the more people talk about it and then the institutions start feeling the pressure.

It is no coincidence that the majority of these new digital activists are in their 20s internet natives, brought up in the online age, versed in the politics of revolution. Mckesson composes his speeches in tweets to ensure the soundbites can be shared in 140 characters. One community organiser I speak to says with a straight face that a youth activist means up to the age of 35. When I ask another about her attitude towards violence, she replies coolly: What is violence? Is violence denying people proper access to food, housing and healthcare? If youre referring to rioting, I guess its a reaction to the system in which we live. The state is violent.

Although #blacklivesmatter was the original call to action, it is only one tributary in a larger, fast-flowing river. Other organisations have sprung from a shared sense of unease, such as the Coalition Against Police Violence, which is run by two female activists, or the Black Youth Project 100, which has chapters across the country and campaigns against the use of racially motivated force, or the Florida-based Dream Defenders, which has mobilised communities against racial profiling and state oppression, and which started before Black Lives Matter. These activists communicate and link up online, minting a solidarity through social media that gives their separate voices mass focus and power.

As a result, says Steven Pargett, the communications director for Dream Defenders: There are fewer gatekeepers, in terms of being able to tell our own stories. He points out that during the protests in Ferguson, activists could take to Twitter to highlight the contradictions between police reports and eyewitness accounts. So while the TV networks were reporting on incidents of rioting and looting, real-time tweets from protesters on the ground claimed that the police had been firing tear gas and rubber bullets into groups of peaceful protesters.

In April, a similar thing happened in Baltimore. There were protests in the city following the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, who fell into a coma while in police care and later died of spinal injuries; the full autopsy has yet to be released. On the evening of 28 April, Kwame Rose was watching the coverage on television. He was riled up by what he saw: inflammatory language, talk of riots and no mention of the community initiative that had taken place earlier that day to try and clean up the streets.

When the media started saying tensions were high, they were lying, he tells me over Skype, peering out from beneath a pristine black baseball cap.

At 9.30pm, he went out with a group of organisers to help get people off the streets in time for the curfew. They asked some police to drop their riot gear and hold hands in prayer. It was, says Rose, very calm. Then he stumbled across a TV crew from Fox News. They were there to film the mustachioed talkshow host Geraldo Rivera who was attempting to interview a state senator among the crowds. Rose confronted Rivera about Fox Newss biased account of what was happening.

Youre not here reporting about the boarded-up homes and the homeless people, he said, in an impassioned, impromptu speech caught on video. Youre not reporting about the poverty levels up and down North Avenue youre here for the black riots. Youre not here for the death of Freddie Gray.

The clip was shared on Twitter. When Rose woke up on Wednesday morning, the video had been picked up by the World Star Hip Hop aggregating blog.

Thats a big thing, Rose says now, shaking his head. At the time, he had a job as the doorman of a big hotel chain. When he got to work that day, his general manager told him the film was all over the TV. He lost his job as a result of the attention.

When Kwame was growing up, his father, Big Rose, had taught him about civil rights history. Now, Kwame realised, he was fighting the same fight. He quotes James Baldwin by way of explanation: To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.

I see whats being done and Im mad about it, he says. Its an attack on black masculinity. You see it all the time [in the mainstream media]. When Dylan Roof [the suspect in the Charleston church shooting] was arrested, you see all these baby pictures of him. We are the same age. After the Rivera video, I was called every other name than the one my parents gave me. Dylan Roof was a lost child. Mike Brown, at 18, was a troubled black man.

Indeed, when Brown was gunned down, the photo initially used by some of the rightwing media was one taken from below, throwing his face into half-shadow, showing him glowering at the camera making a V sign. It was widely interpreted by conservative pundits as a gang-related gesture. There were other pictures available, including one of Brown as a chubby-cheeked teenager in headphones and a Varsity jacket. Thousands of people took to Twitter to post contrasting images of themselves, posing the question as to which would be chosen if they became the subject of a news report under the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown

This was a way of saying Hey, mainstream media, youre doing something really bad! Heres this pattern, what are you going to do about it? says Ethan Zuckerman from MIT. Whats interesting is it didnt get talked about to me. But the newspapers moved away from this problematic image [of Michael Brown].

It was a perfect example of new civil rights activism: online pressure brought to bear on a single potent issue with high visibility. Similar action ensured the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse in the wake of the Charleston church shooting. Because so many of the new generation of activists are young and smart and technologically engaged, there is a restless, inventive energy to their campaigns, which can be started with little more than an iPhone. With the dissemination of information online, there is greater accountability. The mainstream has fewer places to hide.

Since Brown was killed in the street in Ferguson, several other unarmed African Americans have been the victims of fatal violence at the hands of the police Tamir Rice in Ohio, Tony Robinson in Wisconsin and Walter Scott in South Carolina, to name only a few. Online activism has ensured we know the victims names and that they are linked in our collective mind.

Until now, deaths like these were viewed as a chronic problem, endured by local communities yet largely hidden from broader public consciousness. But the rise of a new generation of digital activists such as Garza, Mckesson, Rose and others, has created a sense of emergency in America. Fatalities at the hands of police are now front-page news. They can no longer be ignored.

Samuel Sinyangwes earliest experience of racism was at elementary school. He grew up in Orlando, Florida in a predominantly white community and he remembers being beaten up by an older kid and being called the N-word in the playground. He had soccer practice just down the road from where Trayvon Martin was shot.

I used to go to that same 7/11 [as Martin] every day for a packet of Starburst, he says, talking from his home in San Francisco. It could have been me. It really could have been anyone who looked like me.

When the Ferguson protests erupted, Sinyangwe felt a similar sense of injustice at the fate of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin as many of those who took to the streets. But, he says, there was no comprehensive data available on police shootings so we couldnt get into the place of having a solutions-driven conversation.

Sinyangwe, a 25-year-old Stanford graduate, data scientist and policy analyst, had the necessary skills-set to fill the gap. He had been following DeRay McKessons live-tweeting from Ferguson (Tear gas feels like extreme peppermint tingling and Really bad car accident. Looting across from it. Pray for me) and tweeted him. The two of them spoke on the phone. Along with fellow activist, Johnetta Elzie an important presence in the movement they set up Mapping Police Violence. The aim was to collate all the necessary statistical information on police killings nationwide, with a particular emphasis on black deaths at the hands of police.

It was a gargantuan task. Sinyangwe set about sourcing the core data from the three largest crowdsourced databases on police killings in the country and then comparing these to social media, police and local newspaper reports in order to identify the race of 91 percent of all victims. Within four months, the site went live.

The results were shocking. Sinyangwes work claimed that at least 1,149 people were killed by police in 2014, and that 304 of these 26% were black. Black people were nearly three times as likely as white people to be killed by police in 2014 and at least 101 of them were unarmed, according to Sinyangwes record. In March 2015, 36 black people were killed by police one every 21 hours, and a 71 percent hike in numbers from the previous month.

(When the Guardian launched The Counted, a long-term investigative project, providing the most comprehensive database of officer involved deaths in the US ever published, which includes deaths in police custody and victims hit by vehicles, they found the tally for the same month to be 37 black Americans with 113 deaths across all ethnicities.)

Compiling the data was, says Sinyangwe, deeply depressing. For one of the pages on the site, he posted individual photos of unarmed victims killed by police in 2014, along with their stories. All of that is incredibly heavy and sobering, he says. Youre reading these stories of people who were chased down for riding a bike in the street. However, its work that needs to be done.

We have been holding a mirror up to the nation. And weve shown what has been going on for a very long time: that we are being brutalised. That the state is being violent against us The nation is now aware of the problem. Whether we can agree on a solution or not is another question but at least they acknowledge something is going on and thats a great first step.

But what happens after that first step? Zuckerman warns that although social media can give the illusion of empowerment, it also runs the risk of diverting attention away from the knottier problems of longer-lasting policy change.

Were at a moment where trust in our major institutions is at an all-time low, he says. When you start losing trust in those institutions, you start losing your ability to change things. Social media is a place where people feel they can move the wheel, and theyre right they can change the representation of a gun victim in mainstream media. They can build momentum around removing the Confederate flag. But the fear is that it might be harder to make these much bigger structural changes in education or wage policy or to have a conversation about our gun culture.

Some fear that certain actions are little more than publicity-seeking. When DeRay Mckesson recently visited South Carolina in the wake of the Charleston shooting, wearing the bright blue Patagonia body-warmer he wears to protests, several residents took to Twitter to express their anxiety that his presence would stir up unrest and created the #GoHomeDeray hashtag.

Oprah Winfrey, too, publicly aired her concern in an interview with People magazine at the beginning of the year. Its wonderful to march and to protest, she said. What Im looking for is some kind of leadership to come out of this to say: This is what we want. This is what has to change. On Twitter, she was condemned as being out of touch.

It is perhaps inevitable, as a movement gains in ground and size, that divisions will appear, that its focus will become messier. Alicia Garza talks of how #BlackLivesMatter has been appropriated by other, well meaning groups who have tried to adapt the message to state that All Lives Matter.

The reality, of course, is that they do, Garza says, but we live in a world where some lives matter more than others. All Lives Matter effectively neutralises the fact that its black people who are fighting for their lives right now.

And then there are the inter-generational tensions. Some younger activists are wary of being dubbed the new civil rights movement because such a label undermines the traumatic nature of what is being faced in the present moment by black Americans and also because the new movement has not yet had the chance to mature, making any comparison unbalanced. Some resent the reverence accorded men such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Harry Belafonte, who, in their eyes, represent a bygone era and who turn up in cities to hold press conferences only after the hard protest work has been done on the ground. They fear that the peaceful protests advocated by these elder statesman have little impact; that change will only be achieved by more assertive action.

Last December, there was a march organised by Sharptons National Action Network in Washington DC. Johnetta Elzie was one of several younger campaigners who climbed on to the stage, yelling into the microphone We started this! In the crowd, someone else held up a sign stating in vivid green letters: We, the youth, did not elect Al Sharpton our spokesperson. Have a seat.

When I speak to Jesse Jackson, he is sanguine about such incidents.

Well some of them [the younger generation of campaigners] are respectful and some of them arent, he says, talking over a crackling phone line just after attending the funeral service for the Charleston Nine. But youre not protected from racism by age or by class. The fact is, theres no hiding place. Weve got to work together.

Theres been nothing more dynamic in America over the last 12 months than these mass marches. Theres a backlash. This is a mammoth backlash and it needs to happen.

And there is evidence of real change if you look for it: charges were filed against six Baltimore police officers in May relating to the death of Freddie Gray and it is likely that police reform will be an unavoidable subject in the forthcoming presidential campaign. But Freddie Gray is still dead. So are many more black people who died in police custody this year. Thats the real issue.

Back in Oakland, Alicia Garza is reflecting on how much has happened since her original Facebook post, which became the hashtag that launched a thousand protests. Progress has been made, she says, and yet there is so much further left to travel.

I have to be honest, she says. I feel like I live in a constant state of rage and I think a lot of black people do Its more than depressing to me. It makes me angry, particularly when people try to deny its happening.

When she was younger, Garza wanted to be an architect. She liked the idea of figuring out how to create something from nothing. And, in truth, she and her two friends have ended up doing just that. Not by building a house, but by building a movement from the foundations up.

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#BlackLivesMatter: the birth of a new civil rights ...

Black Lives Matter needs to be listed as a domestic terrorist group that incites and perpetuates mass violence on the streets of America, not to mention condones the sky-highhomicide ratesinflicted uponblack communities by other blacks. The following reasons explain both the danger of Black Lives Matter attention-seekers and why they are aptly described as domestic terrorists:

Much rarer white-on-black attacks are racist, but black-on-black crime is habitually tolerated and condoned by Black Lives Matter.

The overwhelming proportion of black victims of violence, those felled by other blacks, are pawnsto besacrificed by Black Lives Matter. Proper freedom fighters and justice campaigners fight for what is good and for the people they claim to represent. Yet Black Lives Matters operatives happily throw the vast majority of blacks killed by guns and knives under the proverbial bus.

90%+ percent of all black victims of homicideare killed by other blacks. Of the remaining black victims, only the smallest fraction are killed legallyin self or community-defense by police, let alone killed illegally by white police. The propensity to murder blacks is squarely concentrated in black communities themselves, but Black Lives Matter refuses to stand up for thevast majority of allthose violently killed and maimed within the African-American population.

And it gets worse. Breitbart poignantly pointed out that it would take 40 years for the number of blacks killed by police to match the number of blacks killed by other blacksin 2012. And police deaths represent an overall number that does not consider whether the use of lethal force was legitimate or illegitimate (its usually the former). Meanwhile, while they riot and abuse innocent people over the death of adult, mostly criminally-inclined men, Black Lives Matter terrorists forget the huge numbers of children murdered within black communities, notably in black-on-black violence hotspots like Chicago. Children like Tyshawn Lee:

Instead of going after people like Tyshawns killer and the widespreadmentality that motivated him (in this case, revenge on Tyshawns father), Black Lives Matter thugs go after police, who almost always kill on justified grounds.

Just like the Islamist terrorists betting on 72 virgins in Paradise in return for blowing themselves up, Black Lives Matters activists come in with a preconceived idea that they refuse to reconsider in light of verifiable facts. Although we atReturn Of Kings disagree with his other findings, the recent work of black Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer confirms that there is no bias against African-Americans when it comes to police shooting deaths.In fact,whites are more likely to be shot by police when they have not previously attacked police than blacks.

Even before Fryers results were released, the facts and stories available could be deeply correlated with the notion that blacks are not fundamentally targeted in police shootings. Not that Black Lives Matters would give a damn about them. For a start, accounts of shooting deaths involving unarmed whites are routinely swept under the carpet.

Caucasian Dylan Noble, a 19-year-old, was gunned down by Fresno, California police before either Alton Sterling or Philando Castile were in Louisiana and Minnesota respectively. Yet full coverage of his death has largely been relegated to non-liberal internet publications perenniallyignoredby big corporate advertisingdollars, such asBreitbart, or second-place metropolitan newspapers inthe vein of TheNew York Post. CNN,The New York Times,Salon and other biased outlets are deliberately ignoring victims like Noble to maximize the attention being thrown at gangbangers like Sterling and Castile.

The situation is even more damning for Black Lives Matter terrorists when actual statistics are used. Just as blacks in a nearly 30-year period committed over half of all homicides, being just 13% of the population, blacks have more negative interactions with the police. Disproportionate numbers of black police shootings, relative to the total African-Americanpopulation, only occur because blacks are more likely to commit serious crimes and pose a threat to the community in the first place. The publicizing of fake or even genuine individual examples of police shooting unarmed blacks simply cannot account for the greater criminality evident in black communities, criminalityrequiring significant police intervention.

Alton Sterling showing the stock standard victim of police racism. Note the lack of good parenting skills, non-criminal persona, and non-provocative behavior.

Fact: Michael Brown was a thug and had violently robbed a convenience store prior to his murder.Fact: Alton Sterling was a convicted sex offender. Fact: Philando Castile was a Crip gang member. Black lives matter to the point where Black Lives Matter can only usually bring up examples of black men with serious criminal inclinations and/or convictions to make their point. Why the paucity of law-abiding, self-respecting black men being gunned down by police?

The inability of BLM terrorists to conjure up credible poster boys to further their police racism agenda has been a constantfeature of their crooked, terroristic campaign. It shows no sign of abating, either. Enabled by an obsequious media, these race hustlers have had to selectively present the images of departed saints like Brown, Sterling and Castile, only using the nicest, rather than representative, photographs and anecdotesof them to frame their stories.

Peaceful, huh?

Part of the reason why BLM terrorists have largely moved on from Michael Brown and similar poster boys is because of the memory of the Ferguson, Missouri riots. Local black man dies after committing a robbery and nocharges are laid? Lets riot! Liberal mediums such as the BBC were unable to avoid covering what were violent, indefensible rampages. Thousands were exposed to risk of death or injury, or had their property or livelihoods stolen, just to satiate the atavistic, impulsive urges of Black Lives Matter supporters.

The violence did not stop, however, when the attention shifted from Ferguson. And, in the end, numerous other incidents have isolated and marginalized all views that oppose Black Lives Matter precepts. A plurality of 44% of people (probably a conservative figure) believe that African-Americans receive equal treatment under the law. Where are these people? Obviously most of them feel silenced by the pathological violence of BLM and its supporters. Violence like this in Baltimore:

Furthermore, Black Lives Matter apologists have not only called for the deaths of police in their marches, they have also done so repeatedly online, where these threats and intentions are most easily observed and documented by the public. One need not wonder much why officers were recently gunned down in Dallas in light given these kinds of deplorable BLM attitudes.

It is time for everyone to do their bit and challenge the lies and calls to violence that are at the heart of the Black Lives Matter terrorist organization. The White House has declined to proscribe BLM as a terrorist entity, but as more people are exposed directly and indirectly to its deliberate destruction, the forces opposed to it will only grow.

Presently, the best way to counter the Black Lives Matter disease is to ensure that Donald Trump is elected the 45th President of the United States of America.

If you like this article and are concerned about the future of the Western world, check out Roosh's book Free Speech Isn't Free. It gives an inside look to how the globalist establishment is attempting to marginalize masculine men with a leftist agenda that promotes censorship, feminism, and sterility. It also shares key knowledge and tools that you can use to defend yourself against social justice attacks. Click here to learn more about the book. Your support will help maintain our operation.

Read More:If Black Lives Matter, Blacks Need To Stop Killing Each Other

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4 Reasons Why Black Lives Matter Protestors Are Domestic ...

This past Tuesday, Breitbarts Milo Yiannopoulos was slated to speak at Chicagos DePaul University as part of his Dangerous Faggot Tour. Unfortunately, angry SJWs and #BlackLivesMatter activists invaded the event and shut it down, threatening Milo with violence and attacking and harassing attendees (yours truly being one of them). Their success was enabled by the DePaul administrations refusal to allow security and police to eject the disrupters from Milos speech, as well as the political connections of one of the rioters.

For the past year, Milo has been touring the U.S., giving talks at college campuses where he espouses his conservative, anti-PC ideas. The Dangerous Faggot Tour has been met with consternation and outrage across the nation, as hypersensitive left-wing crybabies throw hissy fits at the thought of someone to the right of Karl Marx being in their vicinity. Students have been driven to tears by Milos speeches at universities from Pitt to Michigan, and one particularly upsetand obeseprotester at his UMass Amherst talk was dubbed Trigglypuff by the Internet due to her epic meltdown.

The cancellation of Milos DePaul talk is the first time that his whiny, triggered enemies have succeeded in shutting one of his events down. However, while the petty partisans of #BlackLivesMatter may have won a battle, their success in depriving a gay man of his First Amendment rightsas well as DePauls support and encouragement of themhave hurt them in the overall war. Much in the same way that the leftist-instigated riot at Donald Trumps Chicago rally helped propel him to victory, Milos loss in the Windy City benefits opponents of the left.

I attended Milos speech with some of my friends, and it began normally enough, with the man himself being introduced by the DePaul College Republicans. However, 15 minutes into the speech, a pair of black riotersone male, one femalestormed the stage and took control of the mics. Theyve since been identified as church minister Edward Ward and DePaul student Kayla Johnson; the latters mother is the Chicago Police Departments Director of Administration. Additionally, the protest was organized by S.T.R.O.N.G., a radical black leftist group:

For the next half-hour, Ward, Johnson, and a few other accomplices took over the room, blowing whistles and heckling the audience with chants of FEEL THE BERN! and DUMP THE TRUMP! while the audience jeered them back. One of the event organizers called both DePaul security and the Chicago police, both of whom refused to eject the protesters, having been ordered by school administrators to hang back (and the latter probably influenced by Johnsons mommy being a high-ranking public official).

The polices inaction was even more insulting considering that several days before, DePaul had attempted to shake down the College Republicans for more money for security. They were forced to pony up an extra $1,000 for increased security under threat of cancellation, which Breitbart paid for. Said security did nothing as a pair of leftist radicals hijacked an event that had been paid for and physically threatened Milo on multiple occasions.

After attempting to wrest control back from the protesters, Milo announced that he would be heading over to the presidents office to get some answers as to why security werent doing their jobs. Both his fans and hecklers followed him outside, where a horde of social justice warriors had assembled, chanting RACIST, SEXIST, ANTI-GAY, MILO GO AWAY! and other hackneyed slogans:

We followed Milo down the street, as he occasionally climbed onto a bench or terrace to guide us. Along the way, I watched leftists physically attack Milos fans. One of my friends also reported that the SJWs were stealing Trump hats from people who were wearing them:

A few minutes later, one of the protesters, a fat redhead (UPDATE: the woman has since been identified, see the update at the end of this article), assaulted me and tried to steal my phone after I jokingly told her she needed to drop a few pounds (the second clip in this montage was provided by Daniel Duerst):

After we reached the next building, Milo vanished. I later found out that hed tried to reenter the room where his speech was supposed to be taking place, but was denied by Rico Tyler, the Associate Vice President of Diversity, Empowerment and Inclusion. Afterwards, fearing for his safety, Milo left the scene in a car. After returning to the student union, my friends and I left for a nearby bar.

Following the end of the event, Milos fans and free speech activists took to the Internet, leaving negative reviews of DePaul on the colleges Facebook page and contacting the schools donors. DePaul President Dennis Holtschneider issued a half-hearted apology the day after in which he sided with the protesters and effectively told Milo he was asking for it. While none of the leftist protesters were arrested, Chicago police arrested conservative journalist Jeremy Segal (aka Rebel Pundit) at the behest of one of the schools administrators. Both Breitbart and the College Republicans are demanding to be refunded for the money they spent on the event.

Put simply, the leftist attack on Milo was a massive disaster, both for the protesters and DePaul University itself. Free speech activists have been working overtime to expose the corruption at the heart of American leftism, and with leftist rioters having attacked a Trump rally in Albuquerque on the same night as Milos speech, America is getting to see what these ambassadors of peace and tolerance are truly like.

The woman who assaulted me has been identified as Katie OReilly, a DePaul student, left-wing activist and contributor to feminist site Feministing.

I have filed charges against OReilly with the Chicago Police Department and will be obtaining a warrant for her arrest tomorrow. Anyone with more information about her is encouraged to contact them or me.

Read More: University Of Manchester Bans Breitbarts Milo Yiannopoulos From Debate On Censorship

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Black Lives Matter Protesters Shut Down Milo Yiannopoulos ...