Archive for the ‘Black Lives Matter’ Category

How Americans view the Black Lives Matter movement | Pew …

The Black Lives Matter movement, which came to national prominence in the wake of the 2014 police shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri, continues to gain attention following other incidents involving the deaths of black Americans during encounters with the police. A recent Pew Research Center survey conducted Feb. 29-May 8, 2016, found that general awareness of Black Lives Matter is widespread among black and white U.S. adults, but attitudes about the movement vary considerably between groups.

Here are some key findings about Americans views of the Black Lives Matter movement:

1Roughly four-in-ten Americans support the Black Lives Matter movement. All told, 43% support the movement, including 18% who strongly support it. About one-in-five Americans (22%) oppose the movement, and a sizable share (30%) said they have not heard anything about the Black Lives Matter movement or did not offer an opinion.

Support for Black Lives Matter is particularly high among blacks: 65% support the movement, including 41% who strongly support it; 12% of blacks say that they oppose the movement. Among whites, 40% express support, while 28% say they oppose Black Lives Matter.

2Among whites, Democrats and those younger than 30 are particularly supportive of Black Lives Matter. White Democrats are about as likely as blacks to express at least some support for the Black Lives Matter movement about two-thirds (64%) do, compared with 42% of white independents and 20% of white Republicans.

Among white adults younger than 30, six-in-ten say they support the Black Lives Matter movement at least somewhat. About half (46%) of whites ages 30 to 49, and even fewer among those ages 50 to 64 (37%) and those 65 and older (26%), express support for the movement. It is worth noting, however, that about three-in-ten whites ages 50 and older (28%) say they havent heard anything at all about Black Lives Matter.

3About a third of Americans familiar with Black Lives Matter say they dont understand the goals of the movement. Roughly two-thirds (64%) of those who have heard at least a little about Black Lives Matter say they understand the movements goals very or fairly well. Still, about a third (36%) of those who have heard about Black Lives Matter say they dont understand its goals too well or at all. Blacks who have heard at least a little about Black Lives Matter are far more likely than whites who have some general awareness of the movement to say they understand its goals very well (42% vs. 16%). About four-in-ten whites who have heard of Black Lives Matter (38%) say they dont understand the movements goals particularly well.

4Blacks are more likely than whites to say the Black Lives Matter movement will be effective in the long run. About six-in-ten blacks (59%) believe that Black Lives Matter will ultimately be effective in bringing about racial equality. Whites are about evenly divided: 34% say the Black Lives Matter movement will be effective in helping blacks achieve equality, while 39% say the movement wont be effective; another 26% either werent familiar with the movement or didnt provide an opinion. Among blacks, skepticism about the effectiveness of Black Lives Matter may reflect broader skepticism about the future of racial equality in the U.S. Our survey found that fully 43% of blacks doubt that the U.S. will ever make the changes needed for blacks to have equal rights with whites. Some 11% of whites feel this way.

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How Americans view the Black Lives Matter movement | Pew ...

These black lives didn’t seem to matter in 2020

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

Republicans for BLM and Other Things You Don’t Remember About the Summer of 2020 – Reason

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.

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

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

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

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

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