Invoice Otis
First a query: If Martin Luther King had been alive at present, would he be extra more likely to agree with the anthem that black lives matter, or with the view that each one lives matter?
I don’t suppose it’s a detailed query. The entire level of the civil rights motion was equality. And within the days of Dr. King, nobody thought “equality” meant “equality of outcomes” — which is what the gossamer phrase “fairness” is attempting to place over on us at present (albeit sometimes within the disguise of deliberately opaque tutorial gibberish). “Equality” meant equal standing earlier than the legislation, and an equal probability at success and residing a peaceable life.
Is that what black individuals are getting now, within the period of progressive prosecutors and prison justice reform?
I lately noticed a chart that offers the reply in a single metropolis, Chicago, with as liberal a mayor and metropolis administration as there may be to be discovered. Right here it’s:
It is a tragedy and a shame. The final two years’ surge in homicide has grossly disproportionately burdened black folks, whereas the white homicide fee has remained about what it was earlier than (and far, a lot decrease than the black homicide fee).
The primary obligation of presidency is to guard the lives and bodily security of its residents. The story in Chicago might be worse than most, however related if barely much less ghastly tales are being informed in Philadelphia, Baltimore and different “progressive” strongholds from coast to coast. Black individuals are far much less protected than they’d been. General on this nation, blacks are about 12% or 13% of the inhabitants, however 54% of the homicide victims.
This is able to be reprehensible beneath any circumstances, however is especially reprehensible as a result of we all know easy methods to do higher, and solely lately — for a whole technology up till eight years in the past — we had been in actual fact doing higher, a lot better. The homicide fee was minimize by greater than half from 1991 to 2014, and blacks had been the first beneficiaries of this large enchancment. See the statistics compiled here (that are unhealthy sufficient even whereas lacking the startling will increase in homicide in 2020 and 2021).
What had been we doing within the period of declining homicide that we’ve stopped doing now? Hiring extra police relatively than defunding them; supporting the police relatively than participating in grandstanding prosecutions (see, e.g., the Freddy Gray indictments); participating in additional proactive policing relatively than bake gross sales and kumbaya hand-holding; and understanding that incarceration for violent criminals is the reply not the issue.
If we’re to provide black folks a good shake, an equal probability not merely at dignity however at life itself — in different phrases, if we’re to imagine that black lives really do matter as a matter of sober, on-the-ground prison justice coverage relatively than woke sloganeering — we already know the reply. Within the identify of the real humanity we rejoice on Martin Luther King Day, it’s time to revive it.
