Yitzhak Goldstein, Professor Errant
1To understand Black Lives Matter, it is necessary to distinguish between the organization by that name and the general movement operating under the same banner. Three Marxist lesbians formed the Organization following the Trayvon Martin case in 2014. Their goal is abolition of Judeo-Christian based Western society and violent over throw of all its institutions. In addition, they contend the white race is attempting to exterminate the black race with police their instrument of execution. I plan a future expose on them but for now, my focus is on the broader Black Lives Matter Movement (BLMM).
Liberal media mouthpieces, aware of the revolutionary, violent, and communist nature of BLM, are quick to point out that most protesters marching under its name are not necessarily members of BLM or aware of its extreme goals. They worry connection between BLM and the protest movement will damage the latter’s cause. However, a close examination of the movement’s beliefs and ideology may prove equally problematic. What do they believe?
In general, to varying degrees, the Black Lives Matter Movement [BLMM] assert systemic white racism besets America. This means racism permeates America’s institutions from government, the family, church, education, its economic system, cultural norms, to its criminal justice system. So pervasive is this racism, it is intertwined with and inseparable from these institutions. The nature of white racism is structural meaning built automatically into each institution from the ground up. White privilege means Caucasians, by virtue of their skin color, have automatic societal acceptance and access to opportunities denied others. BLMM asserts this explains why whites achieve success and prosperity at higher rates than blacks do. White Supremacy means Caucasians construct culture and mechanisms to protect and preserve their dominance against challenges. This renders non-whites permanent second-class citizens unable to enjoy the Declaration of Independence’s promise of equality. For “proof”, BLMM points to the inordinately high percentage of blacks in poverty and prison claiming those behind bars are political prisoners, not criminals. Political for challenging the status quo. Because the police are the bodyguard for white supremacy, BLMM exhibits special hatred toward black officers.
Two inescapable questions come to mind. First, if the white race has so constructed America’s institutions to preserve its hegemonic dominance, how is it brown and black immigrants from East and Southwest Asia, the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, and Africa scale these barriers achieving economic success equivalent to whites? Second, considering that black mayors, city councils, police chiefs, and boards of education have controlled black dominant cities for decades, how are white people to blame? To ask such questions invites shrieks of outrage and accusations of racism. You will be “cancelled”. BLMM addresses these discrepancies by insisting pathologies afflicting black dominant cities; poverty, unemployment, high school dropout rates, children born out of wedlock, drug use, domestic violence, and violent crime are the direct legacy of slavery. Former conditions of servitude, Jim Crow, and structural racism, lock blacks into inescapable economic inferiority leaving them few avenues to survive other than crime. It is the white man’s fault. If this is so obvious and demonstrable, why then do Caucasians deny their culpability? BLMM says it is because white people are inherently racist. It is a part of white people’s nature as if a component of their DNA. Inherent racism blinds them not only to the plight of blacks, which they see as the norm, but also to their role in creating and perpetuating problems endemic to the black condition. This blindness renders any white observation or opinion on race illegitimate. The white race must accept and purge its collective guilt.
Black author Taleeb Starkes also notes what he calls the Racial Grievance Industry (RGI), blames black poverty, and crime on the legacy of racism in cities long ruled by blacks. This is for political reasons. If black leaders accept responsibility, no longer can they blame white society. Blame and accepted guilt allow them to extract from whites economic tribute and political advantage.2 Starkes refers to the notion the legacy of slavery damns whites to eternal responsibility for problems plaguing black cities the “Theory of Exploitivity”. It promotes not only perpetual white guilt, but also argues all conflicts between the races stem from blacks attempting to confront white racism. It is a one-way street.3 Riots are a form of political expression their condemnation therefore racist. Since 1965, the federal government has spent trillions in black cities on poverty and education programs yet little has changed.4
For BLMM and its groveling self-flagellating white sycophants, “Racism is the end-all-be-all-explanation” for everything that is wrong in the black community. Therefore, “no fact finding mission is necessary”. Whites must accept total blame and responsibility for all problems in black communities without question or equivocation. Because whites are guilty, what is there to argue about? Any study or investigation into the root causes of black societal problems, whose starting point does not begin with presumption of white guilt and responsibility, is racist and invalid.5 Discussions of racial issues by whites must begin with their confession of guilt and blame. Pointing to studies revealing fatherless homes play a role in black crime, Baltimore’s riots for example, is a non-starter because it does not begin with the presumption white racism is always the cause.6 The white race must also purge its collective guilt. Part of that process is to dismantle all institutions, symbols, and vestiges of racism and slavery. Purging must include culture, holidays, language, historical documents, statues, and so forth.
For years, I have advocated a name change for the nation’s capital. Not to denigrate the man who was first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen (George Washington for those who went to public school), but to separate his name from the disgrace on the Potomac. The federal government’s functions today bear no resemblance to the Constitution. Heretofore, my voice has gone unheard, but now, from a new corner, comes a voice demanding this change. George Washington’s family owned slaves so his name must go. Supporters of BLMM, including white members of Congress attempting to exorcise their inner-slave master, bandy names about like a badminton shuttlecock. Leaks suggest in the running was domestic terrorist and murderer John Brown, who attacked the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry Virginia, (16-18 October 1859) to spark a slave rebellion and mass murder of whites. Then someone scrounged up a history book and discovered Brown was white. He is out of the running. Next the People’s Committee to Rename the Capital turned to Black Panther leaders Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis. Black and communists, would they not do? Newton, Seale, and Cleaver were male and Davis is heterosexual. Cross their names off the list. It seems this leaves only Maya Angelou.
In their Bolshevik-style redo of America, BLMM and its Communist ally, Pantifa7 want to replace the National Anthem as well. Rumor has it Soviet Russia’s anthem was proposed but once again the same problem reared its ugly head. White guys wrote it and pasty-skinned ones at that. Claims they are considering communist Zimbabwe’s national anthem remain unsubstantiated. BLMM has engaged in violence, riots, looting, and thuggery knowing that as long as they cloak it all in racial terms, cowed white liberals will do nothing. Worse, liberal professors, actors, actresses, and media personalities race to the airwaves to support these crimes as a way to purge their racism and white guilt. Like sharks tasting blood, BLMM asks, why stop now? To flex their political muscle, they need to make examples of people.
After committing the counterrevolutionary crime of expressing patriotism and pride in the flag of his country, New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees became that example. Black teammates and professional jocks in other sports descended upon Brees in furious rage over his racist crime. Caving in and submitting to reeducation, Brees recanted and apologized for his insensitive crime of being proud of family members who fought against the Nazis in WWII. Not wanting to suffer the same fate, Hollywood and corporations quickly and cravenly rushed to throw their necks into BLMMs guillotine. Legos deemed its toys featuring police stations, officers, and patrol cars so vile and racist, corporate cowards quickly yanked them from their product line. A & E Channel immediately canceled its popular Live PD TV show as if, like Brees and Legos, they are all inherently guilty of George Floyd’s indefensible death. When the people Americans depend on for courage and leadership, men and women of character, surrender without a fight, what chance is there people of lesser spine will stand for the truth? The decisions we make, when those decisions are difficult, define who and what we are. Dominos continued to fall.
Quaker Oats could not expunge Aunt Jemima’s face from its pancake mix boxes fast enough. I, like so many others, grew up with Aunt Jemima never once imputing negative stereotypes to her happy face. The same goes for Uncle Ben. Mars Incorporated is scrubbing his friendly face from their boxes of parboiled rice as well. Introduced in 1943, Uncle Ben has been a staple in kitchens for decades. To fight racism, companies must airbrush the faces of two iconic black people from food boxes? It gets worse.
Unbeknownst to kids growing up years ago, Mary Poppins and chimney sweep Dick van Dyke were racists. In the 1964 children’s classic, Mary Poppins (Julie Andrews) uses her magic to ascend a chimney with the kids she is babysitting to a rooftop above. Covered with soot, Mary commits the unpardonable sin of powdering her face making it darker to look like a chimney sweep. Then she dances across the rooftops with equally be-sooted Dick van Dyke. According to gonadectomized New York Times hyphenated editorialist Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, this is pure racism. White people in “black face” is an unacceptable form of racist mockery. Shame shame.8 Perhaps Pollack-Pelzner has been in cryostasis for a long time but black face fell out of favor in the 1930s. It made a few cameo appearances in early 1950s Hollywood films and then disappeared. It has been gone for some seventy years. I never saw or heard of black face as child hence, watching Mary Poppins, I made no connection between her soot smeared face and black people. Poppins was about to dance with a chimney sweep who naturally would have a carbon blackened face. It was a skit, a musical. Like subliminal messages Hollywood purportedly embedded throughout drive-in movies, one would have to strain very hard to find secret coded racist messages in Mary Poppins. Pollack-Pelzner’s white-guilt ridden garment rending lament, and that of other BLMM mouthpieces, makes it sound as if slavery ended last week. Perhaps someone should examine Julie Andrew’s performance in The Sound of Music for other hidden messages. Better yet, Pollack-Pelzner could write an expose about racist Kentucky coal miners emerging from beneath the ground in black face. How does scrubbing the faces of friendly black people from product boxes, banishing police shows from television, and violent protests, looting, and rioting save one black life in Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Oakland, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and other cities? Maybe for BLMM, not all black lives matter.
Over Father’s Day weekend (2020) in Chicago, killers shot 104 people. Fourteen died including five children, a 3-year old, and a 13-year old girl. Almost all the victims and their killers were black.8 Liberals, like Democrat Party strategist Jessica Tarlov, appeared on news programs arguing the sudden tidal wave of black inner city violence was the natural consequence of people cooped up too long from China virus stay at home orders. Tension between family members leads to conflict, fights, and ultimately someone grabs a gun.9 If this were true, violence would be uniform across America including in white neighborhoods. However, this is not the case. It was limited almost entirely to Democrat run cities with large black populations. Over the same weekend, Detroit experienced 25 shootings with four dead. Police Chief Craig noted most were drive-by and targeted shootings. The same proved true for Chicago.10 Minneapolis, where its ultra-liberal government is dismantling its police department, witnessed 12 people shot with one dead. Most of those the hoods shot were standing in a crowd on a public street. A drive-by. In Syracuse, New York, thugs shot nine people who were at a large outdoor gathering. None of these shootings was between people cooped up too long.11 It is clear that blacks are gunning down other blacks, including children and infants, every week in major cities, but no one marches for them. Are whites killing blacks in large numbers? In one place they are.
The majority of feminists promoting abortion and owners of abortion mills are white. Keeping this in mind, the abortion rate among black women in America is four times that of white women. On average, doctors abort 900 black babies every day [328,500 each year]. Considering black women make up approximately 7% of the U.S. population, and have 35.6% of all abortions, it is clear it is not the police blacks should fear but the white doctor holding a scalpel and vacuum hose.12
Freakonomics, authored by liberal University of Chicago and Yale professors Steven Levitt and John Donahue, respectively, was a 2005 bestseller. They argued abortion is a significant factor in reducing crime. Unwanted babies are typically born to black unwed mothers. Black males, growing up poor and fatherless, are much more likely to become violent criminals than kids who grow up in two-parent families. The U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion on demand in 1973. According to Levitt, violent crime began dropping in 1991 because black kids, who would have turned eighteen that year, were never born.13 One would think a book arguing for the preemptive mass murder of unborn black babies as a crime-fighting tool would generate outrage leading to mass marches. It has not. Ultra-liberal MIT professor Jonathan Grueber, mover and shaker behind former President Obama’s socialized healthcare scheme, made the same argument as Levitt; abortion is an economic boon reducing welfare spending and the costs of America’s criminal justice system.14 Arguments that abortion of black children amounts to genocide are persuasive and our silence a form of complicity. Black and white people should be surrounding abortion mills not pulling down statues. Where is the outrage?
BLMM is a political movement. All black lives, especially those gunned down by other blacks and those killed by abortionists, do not matter to them, only those serving as expedient political props. BLMM’s insistence whites accept total blame and responsibility for all pathologies in the black community while refusing to acknowledge any responsibility on their part, sets up an impasse impossible to resolve. Whites cannot accept blame for racism and police brutality that is not occurring and nothing will ever change if those who are to blame for what is happening in black communities refuse to accept responsibility.
Do all black lives matter? Do black lives matter? Do family member’s lives matter to each other? Of course they do. Black folks have been part of America since the beginning. They are as much American as anyone. Yeah, but as slaves. Mechal Sobel, professor of history at the University of Haifa, Israel, argues regardless of condition of servitude, a natural result of blacks and whites interacting together was that blacks influenced and shaped white culture as much as the reverse. From architecture, food, lifestyles, and cultural values, blacks shaped what people perceive as “white” culture to the point they are inseparable.15 If so, that means, regardless of race, we are all family. A family that attends separate churches obviously has many problems to say the least. Nevertheless, being members of the same family is a much better starting point for understanding and reconciliation than the alternatives.
11 These are actually my boxes. I purchased them before the Left’s Committee of Public Safety could confiscate them from all store shelves.
22 Taleeb Starkes, Black Lies Matter: Why Lies Matter To The Racial Grievance Industry (Lexington, Kentucky, CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2016), 1-3.
33 IBID. 3.
44 Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy Of American Compassion (Washington, D.C. Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1992), xi-xvii, 3-5, 184-199.
55 Starkes, 3.
66 Thomas Sowell, “The Inconvenient Truth About Ghetto Communities ‘Social Breakdown”, May 15, 2015, National Review, at https://www.nationalreview.com/article/417899/inconvenient-truths-about-ghetto-communities-social-break-down-thomas-sowell.html. Thomas Sowell, who is black and an economics professor, posted his observations on YouTube. Having lived in and gone to a Baltimore inner city school, I gave Sowell’s video a like on Face Book. Subsequent to that “like”, white suburban high school, administrators investigated me for “racism”.
77 They call themselves Antifa (Antifascist after Russian Communist dictator Josef Stalin’s practice of calling rivals, who were also communists, “fascists” in order to “cancel” them) and are themselves communists and revolutionaries with European origins. Several websites, forums, and Face Book groups mock them as “Pantifa” for their penchant of wearing masks over their heads that look like “panties” to hide their identities. They consist mostly of white youth. They form a Leftwing paramilitary militia, the shock troops of the radical left and Democrat Party. Many are self-loathing society hating rage-filled white females and white hermaphroditic hipster Millennials sporting “pot-knots” (man-buns) and white “males” with long braided blonde pred-dreads (their rope hair reminiscent of the monster in the Predator movies), who despise civilization almost as much as they hate themselves. They hate all forms of achievement because it reminds them of their own failure to grow up and be a man.
88 Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, “Mary Poppins, and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting with Blackface,” New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/movies/mary-poppins-returns-black-face.htm.
88 Editors, “104 shot, 14 fatally, over Fathers’ Day Weekend in Chicago, Sun Times Wire, Chicago Sun Times, at https://www.chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/20/21297470/chicago-fathers-day-weekend-shootings-homicides-gun-violence-june-19-22-104-shot.
99 Martha MacCallum Show, FOX News, 22 June 2020.
1010 Fox2 Detroit News, “25 shot, 4 killed in Violent Father’s Day Weekend in Detroit. Chief Craig says Violent Crime Up 7%”, at https://fox2detroit.com/news/25-shot-4-killed-in-violent-fathers-day-weekend-in-detroit-chief-craig-says-violent-crime-up-7%.
1111 FOX8, “Gun Violence During Father’s Day Weekend” June 22, 2020, at https://fox8tv.com/newspost/gun-violence-during-fathers-day-weekend/
1212 Black Abortion Statistics at http://www.righttolifeofmichigan.org
1313 The Economist, December 1, 2005, “Did Steven Levitt, Author of Freakonomics, ‘Get His Notorious Paper Wrong”? at https://www.bos.frb.org/economic/wp/wp2005/wp0515.pdf.
1414 Mona Charen, “Abortion-Distortion-and Crime, National Review January 2, 2015 at https://www.nationalreview.com/article/395585/abortion-distortion-and-crime.html.
1515 Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton New Jersey Princeton University Press, 1987). Having lived in 7 states, north, south, east, and west, and the inner cities of Baltimore, Philadelphia, and San Jose, I agree with her.