BLM

It seems that as the Democratic party moves further and further left, it adopts memes that are based not on hard facts, but on emotions driven by a narrative that fits its hard-left ideology. Over the past few years, the "systemic racism" meme has gained widespread traction with progressive politicians and their trained hamsters in the media.

As a consequence, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has been embraced by both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. It exemplifies the "systemic racism" narrative and exhibits a level of hypocrisy that is breathtaking. In urban areas across the country, African American children and other innocents due are murdered daily becuase of black-on-black violence. This tragic reality gets barely a mention by BLM. Sure, there is some hand-wringing in the media, but you generally don't see BLM or any other progressive activist blocking traffic to protest black-on-black violence. However, the rare shooting of a black person by a white police office evokes wails of outrage (even before the facts are known) and 24-7 media coverage.

Kimberly Strassel comments:

Apparently the Black Lives Matter movement has convinced Democrats and progressives that there is an epidemic of racist white police officers killing young black men. Such rhetoric is going to heat up as Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders court minority voters before the Feb. 27 South Carolina primary.

But what if the Black Lives Matter movement is based on fiction? Not just the fictional account of the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., but the utter misrepresentation of police shootings generally.

To judge from Black Lives Matter protesters and their media and political allies, you would think that killer cops pose the biggest threat to young black men today. But this perception, like almost everything else that many people think they know about fatal police shootings, is wrong.

The Washington Post has been gathering data on fatal police shootings over the past year and a half to correct acknowledged deficiencies in federal tallies. The emerging data should open many eyes.

For starters, fatal police shootings make up a much larger proportion of white and Hispanic homicide deaths than black homicide deaths. According to the Post database, in 2015 officers killed 662 whites and Hispanics, and 258 blacks. (The overwhelming majority of all those police-shooting victims were attacking the officer, often with a gun.) Using the 2014 homicide numbers as an approximation of 2015’s, those 662 white and Hispanic victims of police shootings would make up 12% of all white and Hispanic homicide deaths. That is three times the proportion of black deaths that result from police shootings.

The lower proportion of black deaths due to police shootings can be attributed to the lamentable black-on-black homicide rate. There were 6,095 black homicide deaths in 2014—the most recent year for which such data are available—compared with 5,397 homicide deaths for whites and Hispanics combined. Almost all of those black homicide victims had black killers.

Police officers—of all races—are also disproportionately endangered by black assailants. Over the past decade, according to FBI data, 40% of cop killers have been black. Officers are killed by blacks at a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate at which blacks are killed by police.

But accurate data collected by a respected left-leaning publication seem to have no influence on those who promote the systemic racism narrative. Their goal is to divide the nation for political advantage.

Sadly, a group like Black Lives Matter might actually do some good if it focused its energies not on a narrative that is not supported by the facts, but rather on the reality of urban life. If the BLM "activists" worked to promote a culture that strives to strengthen the urban family, discourage child rearing by single mothers, promote education, encourage entry into the trades, reduce the number of gang members, establish incentives to build small businesses in urban areas, and dozens of other worthwhile goals, they would provide enormous benefit to the African American community. But those things are difficult, they take time, and effort, and long-term commitment. It's so much easier to rant about "white privilege" and block traffic.