Do black lives really matter everywhere?

By C. ben-David

Like all the others that preceded it, “Black Lives Matter Everywhere,” Jomo Thomas’ most recent opinion piece exploring white racism, is hopelessly flawed. A quick Google search would produce a mountain of historical and numerical evidence showing that almost all the murders of black people, mostly men, “everywhere” are at the hands of other black men. But this is no concern to Jomo Thomas, a man who never lets facts interfere with his prejudices.

A mountain of data supports these assertions and prove that all of Jomo’s claims are fake history and erroneous news.

The great Martin Luther King, Jr. was certainly not the violent revolutionary portrayed by Jomo Thomas to justify all the mindless looting, shooting, and burning we now see in the United States. Though Dr. King may have empathised with what Mr. Thomas calls, “the eruption of violent protests in America’s cities,” he resolutely refused to lead any of them. This was because he was a strict follower of the political ideology of his spiritual mentor, Mahatma Gandhi, whose world view embraced passive resistance. According to the martyred Reverend King:

“Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love… Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding.

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy, instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

Conversely, it is nonsense to claim, as Jomo Thomas does, that, “Black people are not destructive by nature.”

The “everywhere” in Jomo Thomas’ opinion piece title certainly does not apply to Africa, our ancestral homeland, a place where black violence including warfare, kidnapping, slavery, and rape are still chronic and often world-leading phenomena.

During the infamous trans-Atlantic slave trade between the early 16^th and late 19^th century some 10-15 million black Africans were forcibly transported across the ocean from their homelands. This figure grossly understates the actual number of Africans enslaved, killed, or displaced as a result of the slave trade. Between 15 to 30% — numbering 1.5 million to 4.5 million people — died at the hands of their black captors or slave traders during the march to or confinement along the coast.

Such barbarity did not cease with the abolition of the slave trade. The post-colonial period in our ancestral lands in Africa has been characterized by dozens of bloody wars and other conflicts that still continue to rage. The worst was the 1994 Rwandan genocide when over the course of about 100 days between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were slaughtered by their neighbours.

Even today, Africa still has the highest rate of slavery in the world, the result of armed conflict, state-sponsored forced labor, and coerced marriages together relegating over nine million people to compulsory servitude, facts Jomo Thomas would never acknowledge since it would rain on his racialized parade.

As for other heinous crimes, “It is estimated that over 40% of South African women will be raped in their lifetime and that only 1 in 9 rapes are reported.”

Closer to home in the United States, 48 police officers, seven of them black, were killed in the line of duty in 2019. Most of the assailants were black men. And at least four more black people were killed due to the George Floyd riots than the nine unarmed black people fatally shot by police carrying out their lawful duties in 2019.

Meanwhile, some 93% of black murders in  the United States are at the hands of other black people, mainly young males. Many US cities with a large black population have huge black-on-black murder problem which makes the White cops-on-black males problem pale to insignificance.

According to renowned scholar, Heather MacDonald:

“In 2019 police officers [in America] fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.

“The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019 …. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.”

In sum, there is none of the white-on-black genocide Jomo Thomas believes in – and not even any widely disproportionate race-based murder of Black men by White police officers — in America. Instead, there are a few bad cops who race-baiters like him love to use to paint the rest of the police with the same brush and to falsely portray the great country of the United States — a nation with the best educated, most talented, hardest working, and wealthiest Black people in the world — as systemically racist.

The greatness of the Unites States is why hundreds of thousands of ambitious black people from all over the world, including thousands from our own country, one of them being Jomo Thomas himself, have clamoured to migrate there to escape the poverty, corruption, exploitation, and backwardness in their native lands for over 100 years.

Finally, “Black Lives Matter Everywhere” is a parody of life in tiny SVG, a country where the killing of black people and rape of black women by violent black men have become increasingly common over the decades alongside the extra-judicial beating and even killing of unarmed or unthreatening black men by Black police officers, crimes never thoroughly investigated let alone punished.

In short, black lives certainly don’t matter to the sadistically violent black men of which our very own Caribbean country has almost too many to count. But for militant but mindless Afrocentric extremists like Jomo Thomas, black lives only matter when a few white rogue cops kill unarmed black people.

The opinions presented in this content belong to the author and may not necessarily reflect the perspectives or editorial stance of iWitness News. Opinion pieces can be submitted to [email protected].