Thinking back on the recent one-year anniversary of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, which sparked even more violence, it occurred to me that those people carrying banners and attending rallies proclaiming “Black Lives Matter,” not just in Ferguson, but around the country, have it wrong. Black deaths matter, but there is overwhelming evidence that black lives do not.
Because if black lives matter, how do we explain the skyrocketing rates of black-on-black crime, or black female-headed households, or black dropout rates from school, or black teenage pregnancies, or black incarceration, or black unemployment? If black lives matter, why has so little been done to address this?
In 2014, out of wedlock births in the black community was an astonishing — call it frightening — 72 percent. Small wonder the poverty rate for black female-headed households is around 54 percent.
But the problem isn’t just poverty. Equally, if not more serious, is that so many black female-headed households means there is no male parent to give guidance, discipline and strength. Lacking a paternal role-model, young black males gravitate to gangs where their need for acceptance is met, and their sense of self worth — their need for “respect” — is acknowledged. Gang life is usually violent and crime is rampant. Hence the rate of black-on-black violence, including death, which dwarfs the number of black deaths caused by law enforcement. Partly as a result, of the 2.3 million people incarcerated today, some 1 million of them, nearly 50 percent, are blacks, and according to one study, “one of every three black American males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime.”
Unemployment among young blacks is over 30 percent, which is twice that of young whites, and among the many causes of that high number is lack of an education. On average nationwide, the black dropout rate for high school is around 41 percent, and although blacks only comprise 16 percent of high school enrollment, the rate of blacks expelled from school is near 34 percent. The black dropout rate for college is 58 percent, in part because their horrible public schools do not prepare them for a college curriculum.
And coming full circle, this drop-out and expulsion rate, while partly the result of hopelessness, is also due to a lack of respect for authority, there being so little of it in the female-headed households in which they live, and — full-circle again — this results in a lack of respect for the authority of law enforcement, which leads to altercation, death, jail, and so on.
If black lives matter, we need to identify and address the causes of the above because the more black lives actually do matter, the fewer black deaths will occur.
