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In 2020, every major institution in the United States including social-media platforms, sports leagues, universities, Hollywood, and major corporations pledged their allegiance to the Black Lives Matter movement. Protesters spanned the country, outraged at the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.

It is understandable that the nation was so united in shock and horror after Floyds death, and his tragic case called attention to the need for some sensible police reforms.

But if we truly believe that Black Lives Matter, we cannot and must not focus only on a small percentage of those lives taken (less than half of a percent) during conflicts with the police. And we certainly should not be adopting policies that could lead to even more deaths in the black community.

Last year saw the largest year-to-year increase in homicides ever recorded in US history. The homicide rate in 34 cities was 30 percent higher in 2020 compared to the previous year, according to a Jan. 31 report by the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice.

Victims of these homicides are disproportionately African American. At least 8,600 black lives were lost to homicide in 2020, an increase of more than 1,000 compared to 2019 (7,484). Violent crime is concentrated in primarily low-income, marginalized black communities where the police are underresourced and Democratic leadership has abysmally failed. In Chicago, 80 percent of gun-violence victims in 2020 were black. According to the latest data in New York City, 71percent of shooting victims are black even though black people constitute just 26 percent of the citys population. The tragic reality is one black life was killed less than every hour in America last year.

Meanwhile, politicians and the mainstream media sensationalize and magnify any questionable case involving a black suspect and a white police officer to affirm dogmas about racial oppression (even if the suspect was at fault). They obsessively lament racial disparities in every nook and cranny of American life, but the most egregious disparity in homicide victimization rates is rarely ever mentioned. Why?

Since more than 90percent of black homicide victims are killed by black offenders, the ghost of endemic white supremacy cannot be invoked to push racial grievance narratives. As a result, the media turns a blind eye. Black lives only seem to matter when racism is involved.

And yet, the probability of an African American being killed by a civilian is more than 30 times higher than that of being killed by a member of law enforcement. In Chicagos marginalized neighborhoods last year alone, more than three times as many black children died of homicide than the total number of unarmed black Americans killed by the police in 2020.

Of course, police officers are agents of the state and we must hold them to a higher standard than the average citizen. But a life taken is a life taken. The victims family grieves whether the assailant is a gang member or an officer in blue.

I recently attended a virtual prayer session with Mothers In Charge, a Philadelphia-based organization for families affected by gun violence. Chantay Love Maison, whose brother died after being shot seven times, lamented, This harm is so horrific, that there are no words that could describe it. There is not a scream that is loud enough that will describe the pain a family will go through.

And yet, our society is systematically failing citizens like her, partly because the BLM movement has pushed to defund the police and reduce their presence across the nation. These efforts drove police forces nationwide to significantly reduce traffic stops and arrests in the wake of George Floyds death, Paul Cassell revealed in a recent study. As a result of the drop in proactive policing, homicide rates dramatically rose across major US cities in the summer and fall of 2020.

When police dont maintain order and enforce quality-of-life offenses, when arrested violent offenders arent detained, violent criminals become more violent, Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore PD officer who today teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told me. They have more opportunities to become more violent. This isnt news.

Meanwhile, despite BLMs anti-police narrative, poll after poll shows most black Americans dont support the movements radical ideas. Last summer, a much-publicized Gallup poll found that 81 percent of black Americans favored the same or higher levels of police presence in their neighborhoods. In the aftermath of George Floyds death, a poll in Minneapolis showed that reducing the citys police force was more unpopular among black residents than their white counterparts.

A group of aggrieved black residents have even sued the city of Minneapolis for the lack of police protection in their communities.

We hear gunshots every night, peoples houses being riddled with bullets, Don Samuels, one of the residents involved in the suit, told Time magazine. There is this kind of fantasy component that the police are not necessary and that is a life and death factor.

His story never went viral, however, probably because he saw police as part of the solution rather than the enemy.

Yes, we need police reform. There are too many police abuses in our country, and activists are right to call for better training and other measures to improve this problem.

But the greatest threat to black lives isnt the police. If we truly cared about black lives, we need to get serious about fighting the scourge of violence that has killed so many black Americans, while being given such scarce attention from our ideologically driven media and political elite.

Rav Arora is a writer based in Vancouver, Canada, who specializes in topics of race, criminal justice and culture. His writing has also been featured in Foreign Policy Magazine, Quillette and The Globe and Mail. Twitter: @Ravarora1

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These black lives didn't seem to matter in 2020

I can't say I expected it to happen, but somehow it feels inevitable: Kyle Rittenhouse has endorsed Black Lives Matter. "I support the BLM movement," the culture-war lightning rod declared on Fox News last night. Rittenhouse, whose politics before his trial seemed to be those of a back-the-blue conservative, added that "there's a lot of prosecutorial misconduct, not just in my case but in other cases. It's just amazing to see how much a prosecutor can take advantage of someone."

Rittenhouse, of course, is the teen who went to Kenosha, Wisconsin, during the unrest there last year, where he shot three people, killing two of them; he faced homicide charges, argued that he had acted in self-defense, became a cause clbre on the political right, and last week was acquitted. Since he made those comments about Black Lives Matter, my social media feeds have been filled with both liberals and conservatives questioning his sincerity. And they could be right: It's not hard to think of reasons why Rittenhouse would be trying to reinvent his public image right now. It might not seem like a great P.R. strategy to alienate your most devoted fans while your most devoted foes continue to hate you, but that doesn't mean it's not a P.R. strategy.

But he could be telling the truth too. The guy just spent a year churning through the criminal justice system, and that's been known to change a person's perspective. And it's easy to forget just how fluid people's goals and loyalties were in the spring and summer of 2020especially early on, when the George Floyd movement was spilling across the boundaries on our conventional political maps.

For example: There was a time when a majority of rank-and-file Republicans supported the protests.

Officer Derek Chauvin killed Floyd on May 25, 2020. Not long afterward, in the first week of June, a Washington Post poll showed 53 percent of Republicans endorsing the protests sparked by the murder. A Pew poll conducted around the same time asked the different but related question of how people felt about the Black Lives Matter movement. BLM did not get a GOP majority, but it wasn't a blowout either: 40 percent expressed their support.

This was after some of the marches had turned into riots. That Post poll even brought that up, asking if people saw the protests as predominantly peaceful or violent. The responses were split down the middle, with 44 percent saying peaceful and 42 percent saying violent. This wasn't a purely partisan gap: 65 percent of Republicans went with "violent," a clear majority but nowhere near unanimity. (I should add that calling the protests violent didn't always mean blaming the protesters. In the same poll, 66 percent of the country assigned responsibility for the violence to neither protesters nor police, but to "other people acting irresponsibly.") And the Post poll wasn't out on a limb by itself. A roughly simultaneous survey by Data for Progress had 44 percent of Republicans declaring that most of the protesters were peaceful.

The protests even had some support from people who armed themselves to repel rioters. That summer saw many temporary, informal, local groupscall them pop-up militiasmustering to defend homes and businesses against arsonists and looters (or, in some cases, against wild rumors that arsonists and looters were about to be bused in to town). In Kenosha, the most famous of these was the Kenosha Guard, which put out a call for "patriots willing to take up arms and defend our city tonight from the evil thugs." And Kevin Mathewson, the man who launched the Kenosha Guard, reportedly participated in a June 2 "Kneel for Nine" event to protest Floyd's death. "People were upset about George Floyd and what happened to him," he told The New York Times. "I was one of those folks."

If you have trouble taking Rittenhouse's statement at face value, you might be skeptical about Mathewson's sincerity too. Or maybe you just think we should draw a distinction between how he felt on June 2 and how he felt when Kenosha was exploding nearly three months later. OK: Then let's look at some pop-up crews that were active that first week in Juneand who presumably weren't driven by white paranoia, since they weren't white themselves. On June 4, Gustavo Arellano filed a dispatch in the Los Angeles Times about "a scene repeated in barrios across Southern California," where Mexican Americans, some of them armed with wrenches or pit bulls, lined up as protesters passed by. "Residents stood outside their homes and shops to support the message," Arellano wrote, "but also to offer one of their own: Don't mess with us." Pop-up security teams also appeared in Minneapolis' minority neighborhoods, and some of them were explicitly aligned with the George Floyd movement. "They support the protests against police brutality but not the destruction," NPR reported of a group called Security De La Lake. They didn't see this as a contradiction, in part because they suspected that racist agents provocateurs were actually responsible for the violence.

I'm not arguing that this was typical of the pop-up crews, any more than I'd want to suggest that they were all like those small-town conspiracists convinced that George Soros was about to bus in an antifa army. The point is how barren the more formulaic narratives about that summer's conflicts are. Groups like the Kenosha Guard were generally comprised of "guys in the neighborhood," Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League told NPR last year. His sense was that they "tend to be right-wing" but were "not typically extremists, although there's nothing that could exclude some extremists being among them."

The protesters were not typically "extremists" either, if we must use that word. If they were, there must be a lot of extremists out there: Literally millions of people participated in literally thousands of demonstrations against racism and abusive policing in the summer of 2020. The phrase "mostly peaceful" has become a caustic joke on the right, but most of these protests were in fact peaceful. And the ones that did see violence were more likely to see a little of it than a lot of it; sporadic skirmishes were more common than blocks aflame. Riots certainly did break out in several cities, and in onePortland, Oregonthey became persistent. But the George Floyd movement as a whole really was mostly peaceful, even if you also saw CNN using that phrase in a stupid way.

Republican opinion shifted by the end of the summer. And by the time Joe Biden was president, a lot of that early ideological fluidity seemed forgotten. The moment when the positions really hardened, I suspect, was the Capitol riot. One Republican rhetorical tack was to accuse Democrats of hypocrisy, claiming that they had tolerated the Floyd riots; and this was easier to do if you conflated statements of support for peaceful protests with support for the fires that sometimes followed. Sedition-hunting liberals, meanwhile, started seeing all sorts of flashpoints as either precursors or echoes of January 6. This too left little room for nuanced distinctions.

And so Rittenhouse was embraced as a hero by the sort of people who think Black Lives Matter is a subversive menace, and he was denounced as a subversive menace himself by many Americans on the other side of the aisle. (Outgoing New York Mayor Bill de Blasio reacted to the Rittenhouse verdict by calling for "stronger laws to stop violent extremism.") The one thing they seem to agree on is that there's a vast subversive menace out there, and that the nation's policing apparatus needs to be stronger to combat itthe exact opposite of what protesters were demanding last year. If Rittenhouse's remarks about Black Lives Matter and prosecutors can help break that spell, then I welcome his comments, whether or not they're sincere.

More:
Republicans for BLM and Other Things You Don't Remember About the Summer of 2020 - Reason

Theres barely a week goes by when our greatest wartime leader isnt slated as a racist and a tyrant by people who have no idea what he achieved and no understanding of history or of the times in which he lived.

This was a man who defeated fascism and who had the guts to take on Hitler at a time when many in our own government wanted to appease him.

But Churchill refused and because of his courage, his steadfastness we won the war.

Poll after poll shows that, despite his flaws and yes, he had some Churchill is, and always will be, a national hero. Yet Lefties are forever trying to make us all ashamed of him because they refuse to see history in context or understand the nuances of it.

It emerged this week that the latest attack on him happened at a Remembrance Day Service at the Imperial War museum.

Yep, you read that right. A bunch of teens from a youth music group were allowed to perform a vile rap song about racism, white privilege and Churchill immediately after a two-minute silence to commemorate our war dead.

Its beyond belief that at a service to commemorate those who died for our freedoms some idiot woke boss at the museum gave the go-ahead for those teenagers to insult the man whose leadership made those freedoms possible.

How dare they! And how dare the Imperial War Museum. Of course, the museum has since apologised, but that means nothing the damage has been done.

Heads should roll over this. Many people at the service walked out in disgust and even museum staff were shocked because they had no idea what was coming.

So who allowed it? Who green-lighted this vile insult not just to Churchill but to our war dead. And why havent they had the guts to own up?

A Remembrance Day Service is not the time or the place to callChurchill a racist.

Dont these idiots who trash him and other historical figures understand that you cannot apply 21 st century values and beliefs to the behaviour of people who lived and died in different times? Churchill was born in 1874 when Queen Victoria still had 27 years left on the throne.

You cant put right the wrongs of the past by trying to erase history and by heaping abuse on the people who made it. History has to be learned from.

Yes, Churchill made comments about people of colour that wouldnt be acceptable today, but he made even more denigrating remarks about Europeans that would be equally unacceptable.

The fact is that throughout his life he fought to protect the non-white people in British territories. He considered it his duty to improve the lot of the empires native peoples. So yes, black lives DID matter to Winston Churchill.

But of course actual facts dont matter to the Wokerati. Their minds areso closed they dont understand that you cant rip historical figures out of their context and expect them to have the views and values on race that exist today. The whole point about history is that we evolve and Britain has.

Yes, there is always a debate to be had on how history has unfolded the rights and wrongs of it but a Remembrance Day service isnt the place to do it.

But of course, asking these people to rationally debate history would expose the fact they know little or nothing about it. So they take to the streets instead to deface statues and trash reputations, completely failing to understand that what people thought, and how they acted a hundred years ago, wont be erased by their violence.

And neither will Churchills courage, his heroism or our respect for what he did!

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Black lives DID matter to Churchill whatever the Wokerati claim, says CAROLE MALONE - Daily Express

R&Bs newest voice, Jac Ross, has soul-stirring vocals that tell struggle and success stories. The Live Oak, Florida native, has a rich heritage for music and continues to wow listeners with his warm, melodic tone.

In an exclusive interview with Baller Alert, Ross tells us about the impact of his song, going on tour for the first time, and more.

In a short time, the Darkchild Record/ Island Records signee has impacted the Black Community. In 2020, the artist released the powerful single Its Ok to be Black. Ross originally wrote the song for his 4-year-old daughter, and the track later became the backdrop to the NBAs Black Lives Matter campaign.

The singer said he expects the song to remain as one of the anthems of our community for a very long time. Im honored that the black community chose a song by me, said Ross. I have great expectations of that song for the future of African Americans.

Ross mentioned that The Stand by Myself Tour would begin in Boston, Massachusetts, on February 8th. This is his first time going on tour. Im super excited about this tour Ive put a lot of literal tears and late-nights in for this opportunity, said Ross. The songwriter said all good things that happen in his career are expected because hes put in the time, energy, and effort.

New York City is a place Ross is looking forward to performing in during his tour. Right before the pandemic, I was supposed to have a huge show there, and it never got to happen, he said. Im ready to go to New York and give them what they want.

Artists like Adele, Given, Silk Sonic and Jazmine Sullivan were named as some of the singers Ross is looking to collaborate with in the future. Theres so much great talent out there. Those are just a few names, said Ross. He said there are many more artists hes looking to collaborate with soon.

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Jac Ross Talks Working With the NBA's Black Lives Matter Campaign, Upcoming Tour, Dream Collaborators and More (Video) - balleralert.com

By the time he was 30, Ashley Banjo had spent nearly a decade in the public eye. Having pipped Susan Boyle to the Britains Got Talent (BGT) title with his dance group Diversity in 2009, he completed seven UK arena tours before transitioning back to television, with a slew of judging gigs on television dance shows, including Dancing on Ice, Got to Dance and Dance Dance Dance.

Nothing, however, could have prepared him for the backlash that followed Diversitys appearance on BGT last September. The performance featured backing dancers in riot gear and the image of a white man standing on Banjos neck, a reference to the murder in Minneapolis of George Floyd, and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests that followed.

To date, it has racked up more than 30,000 complaints to the media regulator Ofcom, earning a spot as one of the top five most complained about moments in UK TV history.

People were very quick to label it the Black Lives Matter performance but I wasnt trying to make a political statement, says Banjo, 33. I wasnt trying to cause reform or change policy, I was just bringing the conversation to a place that is natural for me: a stage. Without the BLM element, he says, it wouldnt have been too political or too sad, or not right for light entertainment. What was wrong is that I brought in Black Lives Matter.

In doing so, he pushed his troupe into unfamiliar, politically charged terrain, and unleashed a torrent of online threats and abuse. As the face of the operation, Banjo became a particular target. On social media, he says, racial slurs were just sitting there untamed in stark contrast to the platforms crackdown on Covid-19 misinformation or women who even hint at showing a nipple.

Banjo holds less resentment against people who expressed disapproval respectfully, including those who complained to Ofcom. Listen, theres a lot of ignorance but I dont think the 30,000 people are racist, he says. Thats such a sweeping generalisation. Probably a lot of those people are racist. But theres a lot of people who felt uncomfortable, or who didnt even see it and complained because their mate in the pub was complaining. Ive had personal conversations with people who have apologised when they realised where they might have gone wrong.

He also received encouragement from a few people he wouldnt normally hear from following the BGT performance: Elton John contacted him, as did the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. They called when everything was going on, just to check in and offer their support. [Meghan and Harry] understood racism in Britain and what it felt like to have a certain level of backlash In the sea of negativity, it was a huge help.

I meet Banjo on a boat, moored outside an east London studio, where he is being photographed. Weary after a day of trying on outfits, he is now wearing the biggest item of clothing I have ever seen: a fluffy, grey fleece that drowns his heavyweight boxer physique. His dad actually was a heavyweight boxer: Its much harder to dance when youre big, says Banjo, who is 6ft 6in. I was naturally born to be a boxer but dad wasnt having it he said I could put my face to better use.

Banjo was born in Leytonstone, east London, but grew up in Essex. His Nigerian father, Funso, originally moved to Scotland to attend boarding school before settling in Forest Gate, while his mother, Dani, a dance teacher, was born and raised in Ilford. I was in a buggy in the corner of the studio from when I was born, he says. I was a little kid seeing my mum at the front, putting everyone through stretches, being the sergeant major. She has always been that figure in my life, he says of the woman who not only trained him as a dancer, but is still his manager.

At 14, Banjo started teaching dance himself. We were an old-school circus family, he beams. He met his wife, Francesca Abbott, two years later, teaching at his familys Rainham studio. She also now works for Diversity Dance, the management company behind the troupe. As a 20-year-old, knowing that if your ideas arent good enough, your brother, your mum, your wife dont eat, thats a life-shaping responsibility, he says. It was also a responsibility he felt most intensely during the pandemic. Unable to tour, and with a one-year-old and a newborn baby to look after, he says he fell into a dark hole. You cant see any of your family, your businesses and jobs are crumbling around you. It was tough.

As a child, he attended private school in Billericay, Essex, where he was academically successful and also head boy. But, he says, he grew up straddling two worlds: being the only Black kid [at school] before spending his evenings at the dance school where everybodys making ends meet you mix that with being mixed-race, he says. My mums white, my nans white, my wifes white, one of my kids has blue eyes, blond hair. You dont like to think about it because they are my family, but we are not the same.

At school, he experienced his fair share of bullying (I was a young, mixed-race boy who danced and didnt play football) but because he was so much bigger than everyone else, the intimidation was never physical. He remembers an incident where a white pupil approached him bragging about beating up Black and Asian people at the weekend, like as a hobby. If he ever wanted to react violently, his boxer fathers warnings would ring loud in his ears: People might think he was like, Give him the right hook but my dad was the opposite. He always taught us to turn the other cheek.

Banjo says he formed Diversity by accident. In the mid-2000s, the only boy dancing on screen was Billy Elliot and so, feeling embarrassed, he and the other boys at his Rainham dance school would retreat into a backroom to practise their own cool routines. Two years later, they won BGT. It was all organic; Ive never held an audition, he says.

But in 2009, inexperience wasnt the only thing between them and the BGT title: Susan Boyle had already been in The Simpsons, he explains. She was world-famous at that point, which took the pressure off. Diversity, however, won the public vote, leaving a young Banjo to face the disappointed media scrum waiting to greet Boyle. There was press there from around the world: America, Asia it was her crowning moment. From the beginning, the first question was: Why you? But I remember sitting there, thinking: This is going to change my life completely. Banjo took time off from his degree (in physics and biology) to compete on BGT and, 12 years later, has yet to return to it. In a way, I hope I dont but I would also love the chance to finish my degree, he says.

Last summer, Banjo returned to BGT as a judge when Simon Cowell broke his back after falling off an electric bike. The competition is sometimes viewed as one of the softer reality shows, with only three performances demanded of participants in total, but Banjo acknowledges that many of the issues around the exploitation of vulnerable contestants and the lack of psychological support available, both on set and after filming, remain. Youre still exposing ordinary people to the public Diversity have been blessed. Its very rare that big groups win those things; normally, youre on your own. It sounds so dramatic, but it can honestly destroy you. Thats the only way to describe it.

Did he feel any trepidation about working for Cowell, given the recent allegations of bullying and racism on the set of Americas Got Talent, which NBC has denied? Personally, no, he says. Im a sceptic of woke culture to the point where its cancel culture and the speed of allegation is 100 times quicker than the speed of investigation. Its very dangerous to be able to point a finger and change someones life.

His latest project is an hour-long ITV documentary, Ashley Banjo: Britain in Black and White. There will be a lot of assumptions, but I didnt want to poke the hornets nest, he says. Indeed, the show is not quite the journey into the dark heart of British prejudices that you might expect. Rather, he was driven to make the programme after people saying to me, Ive never really thought about racism before or I didnt really know it existed.Im learning too, but I have a platform which means that I can do it with people watching, he says.

His commitment to promoting Black history is also something of a personal crusade: I want to get to a point when it is no longer [considered] Black history, he says. I want this to be stuff that people just learn. In the documentary, this, specifically, is the New Cross fire in 1981, in which 13 young people died in a house fire at a 16th birthday party. No one has ever been charged in connection with the fire, but the slogan 13 dead, nothing said became a rallying cry for political action in part due to the work of activists such as the writer and editor Leila Hassan Howe. Meeting Leila was one of the most educational, eye-opening experiences of my life, says Banjo. The sheer hate was so overt back in the day, to the point where people were being murdered in fires. Were only talking about a generation ago; it cant just evaporate.

Its Banjos name in the title, but the documentary is almost a two-hander with the historian David Olusoga, whose production company, Uplands TV, was involved in making it. I wanted to educate and inspire, says Banjo. But I wanted to come from a place of knowledge and historical context, not finger-pointing and assumption, which is why he was keen to share the screen with the academic.

We wanted to do something about now, and about how the past and the present have combined in this moment were living through, says Olusoga. This is Ashleys story but it was also a moment that millions of people followed and were affected by ... Ashley understands the unique place he occupies in British culture. I think a lot of people are going to see a different side to him in this film.

It clearly irks Banjo that his contentious appearance on BGT has become known as the BLM performance. Weve never given it a title, but I would call it The Great Realisation because thats what happened to me personally. If he had known how much backlash the piece would provoke, would he have tempered his approach? I still would have done it, he says. But I would have been scared.

I didnt intend to be an activist, but somehow here I am, he says. Ive learned to believe in my own choices.

Ashley Banjo: Britain in Black and White, 19 October at 9pm on ITV and ITVHub.

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Ashley Banjo on Black Lives Matter, backlash and reality TV: Im a sceptic of cancel culture - The Guardian