In the grief and shock following the grand jury’s decision not to indict the officer who put Eric Garner in a chokehold that proved deadly, one protester remarked, “We have to make a change because they’re killing us off.”
Without a doubt, there is a war on black America. The question is: Who is really trying to kill off black Americans?
Many conservatives who felt that the grand jury acted rightly in Ferguson, Missouri, with the death of my namesake Michael Brown at the hands of Officer Darren Wilson cannot understand how the grand jury in Staten Island, New York, decided not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner.
As Charles Krauthammer expressed, “From looking at the video, the grand jury’s decision here is totally incomprehensible. It look as if at least they might’ve indicted him on something like involuntary manslaughter at the very least.”
Many black Americans are saying, “Now do you see our point? Now do you see why we don’t trust the justice system?
As protester Courtney Wicker told CNN affiliate NY1, “I’m out here because the system has failed us too many times. It makes me feel like there’s no justice.”
Regardless of the color of our skin or our ethnicity, we need to listen carefully to these charges of injustice, asking difficult questions about failures in our system. Simply to ignore them or deny them won’t do.
That being said, it is not the police who are the main culprits in killing off black Americans. Not a chance.
According to the best research I’ve seen, roughly 100 blacks are killed by police officers every year compared to roughly 300 whites killed by police over the same period of time.
That means that, although the percentage of blacks killed by police is higher than the percentage of whites, per capita, this is hardly the biggest problem faced by African Americans.
Of course, this doesn’t lessen the pain for the Garner family and others, but it does put things in context, especially when we also realize that roughly 150 cops are killed in the line of duty each year.
What about black homicides?
There are roughly 7,000 blacks murdered every year, the vast majority of them killed by other blacks, which means that black on black violence is far more of a threat to African-Americans. And while the great majority of whites are murdered by other whites, the percentage of homicides in black America is much higher than the percentage of homicides in white America. (For the record, black-on-white crime is astronomically higher than white-on-black crime.)
In response, you might be thinking, “You just don’t get it. The entire American system is stacked up against black families, so there’s a national crime being committed against us every day. That’s why so many of our families are so dysfunctional.”
Without a doubt, there’s an issue even bigger than black-on-black crime, and that’s the issue of the state of the black American family.
Earlier in the week, in my article on “Some Inconvenient Truths About Ferguson,” I quoted David Horowitz and John Perazzo, who claimed in 2012 that “the rise of the welfare state in the 1960s contributed greatly to the demise of the black family as a stable institution.”
For Horowitz and Perazzo, it was LBJ’s War on Poverty that resulted in the formation of a massive welfare state, one that took away personal responsibility from many African-Americans and instead created a mentality of entitlement.
Were they right?
That’s a subject of massive debate, but the bottom line is this: Whatever our government has tried to do to correct our history of injustice to African-Americans, we have not made things better. In many ways we have made things worse, but this is not just the problem of black America.
This is our problem—all of us, as Americans and fellow-citizens, especially if we are people of common faith.
Why is there so much fatherlessness, so much violence, so much drug abuse in black America? Why are there so many incarcerated, and why are so many lacking solid education in black America?
While I absolutely agree that every individual must take personal responsibility for his or her life and that blaming others and making excuses solves nothing, it is also clear to me that the whole nation—especially the Church—needs to ask together: What can we do to address this great crisis?
But there’s an even greater killer of black Americans, and it doesn’t snuff out 100 precious black lives or even 7,000 black lives every year. No, this killer of black Americans snuffs out roughly 360,000 black lives every year, and it is the ultimate black genocide that we must combat.
I’m talking about abortion, and as the abort73.com website states, “Whatever the intent of the abortion industry may be, by functional standards, abortion is a racist institution. In the United States, black children are aborted at nearly four times the rate as white children and Hispanic children don’t fare much better.”
And while New Yorkers are understandably grieved and indignant over the death of Eric Garner (and others), they also need to consider this: In 2012 in New York City, while black women gave birth to 24,758 babies, they aborted 31,328 babies.
This tragic statistic would warm the heart of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, who stated, “[We should] apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.”
She also wrote, “We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
Yes, there is a war on black America—ultimately, satanic in origin—and it is killing off black Americans at an alarming rate.
What are we going to do about it?
Michael Brown is author of Hyper-Grace: Exposing the Dangers of the Modern Grace Message and host of the nationally syndicated talk radio show The Line of Fire on the Salem Radio Network. He is also president of FIRE School of Ministry and director of the Coalition of Conscience.
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