LeBron Is On To Something – OpEd

Los Angeles Laker’s star LeBron James is being slammed on social media for his tweet regarding the killing of Tyre Nichols by five police officers in Memphis; the victim and the police are all black. “WE ARE OUR OWN WORST ENEMY,” he said. 

LeBron was right. It is not white people who are going into black neighborhoods in Chicago, for example, killing black people. Black people, almost all young men, are killing black people. In this year alone, the Chicago Sun-Times reports that 27 black victims have been killed in Chicago.

Where is the uproar over that? Think of it this way: If the five black Memphis cops not been cops—and they did what they did—would there be any protesters in the streets? Black lives should matter, but they only seem to matter when the killer is white or a cop, and those instances are comparatively small.

The latest Census Bureau data show that no racial or ethnic group has a higher rate of alcoholism than Caucasians (disproportionately driven by the Irish). Homosexuals have a much higher rate of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) than heterosexuals. When it comes to drug overdose, American Indians and the Alaska Native population lead the way. 

White people need to police themselves—they are their own worst enemy when it comes to alcoholism. Gays need to police themselves—they are their own worst enemy when it comes to STDs. Indians and Alaska Natives need to police themselves—they are their own worst enemy when it comes to drugs. And blacks need to police themselves when it comes to violent crime—they are their own worst enemy.

Regarding the Memphis tragedy, we need to stop with reckless accusations made against the police. 

Michael Tonry, a researcher whom no one would consider a conservative, came to a surprising conclusion in his book, Malign Neglect. “Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned.”

Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen, who have sterling liberal credentials, found that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites for longer terms.

In 2016, Roland G. Fryer Jr., a Harvard professor, led a team of researchers to study the issue. They examined more than 1,000 police shootings in 10 major police departments in three states. “On the most extreme use of force—officer-involved shootings—we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.” The black economist admitted, “It is the most surprising result of my career.”

In 2019, social scientists from Michigan State University and Arizona State University reported on the results of their two-year study. “When adjusting for crime, we find no systemic evidence of anti-Black disparities in fatal shootings, fatal shootings of unarmed citizens, or fatal shootings involving misidentification of harmless objects.” 

Glenn Loury, a black professor who teaches at Brown University, says, “We need to put the police killings in perspective. There are about a thousand fatal shootings of people by police in the United States each year, according to a carefully documented database kept by the Washington Post. Roughly three hundred (about one-fourth) of those killed are African Americans, while blacks represent about 13 percent of the American population. Black people are overrepresented among these fatalities, though they still make up far less than a majority. (Twice as many whites as blacks are killed by police in this country every year. You wouldn’t know that from the activists’ rhetoric.)”

Loury offers support for what LeBron said. “For every black person killed by the police,” he says, “more than twenty-five others meet their ends because of homicides committed by other blacks.”

Most of the public has no idea of what I just said. That’s because the mainstream media does not want to acknowledge it. Yet it is all true. They are hosing the public because they want to feed the narrative that racism is baked into law enforcement. Their deceit is appalling.