How much do black lives matter to @BlackLivesMatter, anyway? (Pt. 1)
The actions of the organization are at odds with the proposition for which it is named.
I guess that it is a sign of the times that I feel the need to preface this by saying that I agree unreservedly with the proposition that “black lives matter” — along, I think with an overwhelming majority of the population of the United States.
But I hold an unpopular opinion: that the organization named “Black Lives Matter” (hereafter, in Twitter fashion, @BlackLivesMatter) has probably already led to the deaths of more black Americans — in a little over seven months — than police would wrongfully kill in centuries.
You may not agree with me on this, and you certainly don’t have to. But I am going to ask you to consider a thesis that I think is much easier to establish: that @BlackLivesMatter knowingly embarked on a course of action that they had every reason to believe would cost more black lives than what they were protesting against.
Even this will take more than a single newsletter, which is why this is Part One. Part One concerns only one dimension of the problem: COVID-19.
For posterity I should set down what everybody knows at the time of this writing: that the @BlackLivesMatter protests of 2020 were undertaken against the backdrop of a global coronavirus pandemic that appears to be the most deadly pandemic since the Spanish Flu in 1918. As of yesterday it is estimated that over 358,000 Americans have died of this disease. This is well more Americans than died in all our wars since WWII, and will surely soon exceed the number of Americans that died in WWII. (Plenty of people are disputing the death numbers, and you can reasonably quibble about them on the margins, but I think it’s nuts to think they are vastly overstated.)
So let us do some math.
Black Americans make up about 13.4% of the U.S. population, which stands at about 328.2 million. As far as I know we have every reason to believe that black Americans disproportionately die of COVID-19. Hence, we can estimate that at least about 44 thousand black Americans have died thus far from the disease — and the pandemic is not even close to being over.
The @BlackLivesMatter protests have grown to encompass a lot of complaints and demands, but the central complaint that kicked off the protests of 2020 and that gave them a sense of urgency was the wrongful or avoidable killing of unarmed black people by police. How many unarmed black people are killed by police in a given year? It’s basically impossible to be exact. I believe the Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings indicates the number of such shootings is usually around 10-20 per year. Of course, not all police killings are shootings. But I think it is reasonable to assume that the number of unarmed black people killed by police per year in the United States is in the tens, not the hundreds.
Further, many if not most of these are not clear-cut cases of wrongful death. In many cases the person is violently resisting arrest, and there is no surefire, 100% non-lethal way of subduing a person who is actively resisting. There can also be legitimate uncertainty about whether a suspect is armed, and just like the rest of us the police may justifiably kill in self-defense.
Hence, I think it would be generous to assume an average of twenty cases a year of wrongful death by police against unarmed black Americans. COVID-19 is nowhere near over and the number of black Americans that have been killed by this disease is 2,200 times as great as the number of unarmed black Americans killed by police.
Hence, if just 1 in 2200 cases of COVID-19 has a @BlackLivesMatter protest anywhere in its transmission chain, the protests have the cops beat this year. If 1 in 220 cases does, the protests have the cops beat for a decade. If 1 in 22, the protests have lead to more deaths than a century of wrongful police killings of unarmed black Americans.
This all follows from the most conservative assumptions. Remember, black Americans are more likely to die from the disease, and we have not accounted for that. We also are not accounting for the likelihood that a black American who dies of COVID-19 is probably more likely to have a protest in their transmission chain than a white American — because the percentage of black people at protests was undoubtedly greater than the percentage in the population at large, and because the protests tended to be held in neighborhoods where more black people live. So it’s actually worse — I just can’t say how much worse, so I stick to what I think can defended with reference to fairly solid facts.
I’d like to think that we could all agree that if in fact protest gatherings has led to more people dying from COVID-19 than are killed by police in a decade, then it would have been better to defer protest gatherings until after the pandemic. And/or to find other means of protest in the meantime. I really don’t know what to say to people who cannot agree with that.
Partly I don’t know what to say to that because the conversation doesn’t ever seem to get to that point: it’s like an interesting chess defense that no one ever plays. Instead, the defense that gets played is the “protests don’t spread COVID” defense.
I don’t want to get in the weeds taking apart this defense here in Part One. There is too much to say without this newsletter getting overlong. And remember, the thesis of this particular series is merely that @BlackLivesMatter knowingly embarked on a course of action that they had every reason to believe would cost more black lives than what they were protesting against.
Let us for a moment assume that the absurd “strong form” of the “protests don’t spread COVID” defense is true. Let us assume that in fact zero COVID-19 deaths have resulted from @BlackLivesMatter protests. Let’s assume that for some reason still not understood, it is somehow impossible to catch the virus if you are standing and moving shoulder-to-shoulder in a crowd of people, most of which are wearing partially effective masks, even though they are yelling and chanting, and sharing the same restrooms and probably doing some carpooling.
Even if you assume this, the question is: How could the leaders of @BlackLivesMatter have thought it was reasonable to expect this in late May? Based on what “the science” had told us thus far, in the context of the admonitions of the time, how could the leaders of @BlackLivesMatter have possibly thought that protest gatherings were safe?
The answer is that they could not have. Even less was known about the mode of transmission then. There was every reason to believe that large and close gatherings of any kind and under any conditions was a big risk. We were being told that outdoor family picnics were dangerous. Playgrounds and beaches were being shut down.
Furthermore, we already had reason to believe (by April 20th at the latest) that black Americans were experiencing more serious illness and death from COVID-19 than white Americans.
Despite this, over a month later @BlackLivesMatter began to protest en masse in as many locations and at as many times as they could manage. Between May 26th and August 22nd (just about three months) there were more than 7,750 @BlackLivesMatter demonstrations in all 50 states and Washington D.C. This is the number of protest gatherings analyzed by The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) as reported by Time Magazine on September 5th. It doesn’t count probably an additional one or two thousand protests that have taken place in four months since.
I’m sure most of the people who protested did so with the best of intentions and simply did not give the likely consequences of their actions much thought. But could the leaders of @BlackLivesMatter have reasonably expected that holding thousands of mass protest gatherings would not lead to the deaths of more black Americans than what they were protesting against? No.
Might they not have found some more “distanced” way to protest? They could have buried the government in letters. They could have clogged the streets with their cars and honked their horns in unison. (After all, we know they have no reservations about blocking thoroughfares.) Couldn’t they have waited to indulge in the standard, intrinsically not “distanced”, manner of protest? You know, to save black lives?
Granted, the leadership of @BlackLivesMatter wasn’t operating in a vacuum. They were being cheered on by many politicians, by nearly all of the legacy media, and even (unbelievably) by many “health experts” and medical professionals. On social media, one would swiftly be called a “racist” or a “white supremacist” for expressing grave misgivings about protesting during a pandemic. I will say more about this in a future newsletter, probably. But suffice it to say that anyone who tried to save some black lives by criticizing protest gatherings in the middle of a pandemic was pretty much shut down and ignored. Certainly the enablers in the media did not often give them the microphone.
In my opinion these enablers deserve their share of the blame. But in the end, you would think the organization that named itself “Black Lives Matter” could be the one counted on to act as if black lives matter . . . and to avoid a course of action that was likely to cost a lot of black lives. But they didn’t avoid that course of action. Instead, they set the controls for the heart of the sun.
COVID-19 is not the only way that @BlackLivesMatter invited the deaths of the very people they presume to protect. I will discuss the other ways they undermined their own nominal goals in upcoming parts of this series.
Be seeing you!
Gideon Fell
Author’s Notes:
In this article I make the claim that COVID-19 is probably the worst pandemic since the 1918 Influenza pandemic. A friend pointed out that this ignores the AIDS pandemic. Fair enough: AIDS has probably killed about 32.7 million people globally, whereas registered COVID-19 deaths are now approaching 2 million. On the other hand, AIDS took forty years to exact that greater death toll, and it wasn’t something you could just catch picking up milk at the corner grocery!
I have replaced the original header image, which was of a 2016 Black Lives Matter protest, with one of a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest. This seemed like the right thing to do because of course no one was wearing masks in the 2016 protest, so it seems unfair to use it as an emblem in an article discussing the attendant COVID-19 risks. But the new image also exhibits some poor mask discipline on the part of protesters.