Yes, black lives matter; however, some folks take offense at that statement and readily proclaim that “all lives matter.” To those persons I suggest taking a closer look at the issues. First, data suggest that in the United States black lives do not matter, or at least they do not matter as much as white lives. Perhaps the greatest example is the killing of black males by police and related officials. Often these men are unarmed and seldom are these police officials prosecuted.
For example, in 2012 there were at least 313 black victims of these extra-judicial killings. Arlene Eisen conducted a study of these killings for Operation Ghetto Storm. She found the following:
- Nearly one-half (44%) of the black victims were unarmed.
- Black women as well as men were killed: 23 (7%) were women.
- In 275 cases of extrajudicial killings (excluding cases that may be “justified”), the legal system only charged 23 people, or 8.4%, and a disproportionate number of those were security guards and self-appointed law enforcers.
- What about the killing of whites? Since these data are not collected and kept in any organized manner one has to collect and organize the data from various public and news reports. To examine killings by race, Eisen organized data for four cities—Chicago; New York City; Rockford, Ill.; and Saginaw, MI. The results:
- In Chicago, blacks are one-third of the population, yet they were over 90% of all killings, and whites were just 4%.
- In New York City, blacks are less than 30% of the population but were 87% of all killings, and whites were 4%.
- In Rockford, IL, and Saginaw, MI, at 21% and 46% of the population respectively, blacks were 100 percent of the killings.
- These data show that these extra-judicial killings are a black phenomenon.
State-sanctioning of the devaluing of black lives can also be seen in the application of the death penalty: those who kill non-Hispanic whites are over three times more likely to be sentenced to die as those who kill African-Americans. In death penalty cases, premiums are placed on white lives. In the three decades or so after the reinstitution of the death penalty in 1976, nearly 80% of murder victims in death penalty cases were white, even though nationally only 50% of murder victims were white. The United States General Accounting Office examined death penalty sentencing and found that those who murdered whites were significantly more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murdered blacks. See Death Penalty in Context for short discussions of these issues.
If black lives mattered as much as white lives in the United States, one would think that either these state-sponsored racial disparities would not be occurring or more official efforts would be taking place to reduce these disparities.