Michael Brown and the Twisted Hagiography - Part 2

By Patrick Hall

Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd are three names that represent an unfortunate, if not unholy Trinity, that underpins the distortion, a dangerous twisting of the reality concerning black criminality. Of course, the fall guy in this hagiography always seems to be our men and women in blue.  Let’s state this again. Blacks murder each other. In the case of Ms. Taylor, it was her close association with a known criminal enterprise, that led to her death.

This existential paradigm hangs over many in our nation’s inner-city areas as well as in the working-class neighborhood I call home. Yet race entrepreneurs like Rev. Al Sharpton, Rev. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), and former President Obama continue to preach the profane homily, that law enforcement represents the greatest danger.
 
In regards to the former President, it is punch-in-the-gut when he could single-handily address or point out the truth to the Black community about Black-on-Black killings if he chose to. Regrettably, he continues to be the most surreptitious and dissembling individual, who has ever served as our nation’s Commander-in-Chief. He is particularly “blessed” with a unique gift and oratory skill of saying and doing nothing quite well. So, the cruel and malignant cancer of black folks killing other black folks will continue unabetted.

Here are some more noxious statistics. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics in many large urban communities, blacks commit over 73% of all shootings, 70% of robberies, and 45% of assaults.  The year 2015 was particularly bad for black-on-black homicides. Nationwide, 6000 African Americans suffered at the hands of their brethren.  The silence over all these black deaths by Democrats like President Obama, BLM, the cultural left, and their “special-kind-of-obtuse” followers, who call for defunding the police, is deafening. What is even more absurd about the accusation of law enforcement indiscriminately killing African Americans is simply refuted by the numbers. Each year law enforcement nationwide conducts millions of interventions and/or traffic stops, without something turning into a deadly confrontation. In the “few” but highly publicized cases, where force had to be used, mostly because of the uncooperative suspect. Those incidents turned deadly. Invariably, they become the distorted socio-political currency, that is sold to the public.

Racist cops are killing innocent black people.  It is politically calculated BS!  It makes policing in high-crime areas even more difficult for the police. At the same time, the lives of the majority of law-abiding citizens must live under the tyranny of their criminal brethren. Also, blacks have a higher rate of criminal offending. Subsequently, if blacks seem to have more negative interactions with the police, that is because they commit or are involved in criminal activities at a higher rate than other groups. Remember the stat that blacks are only 13% of the population but are responsible for over 53% of all homicides nationwide.

Some Brutal Truths

In many of the most high-profile deadly encounters between blacks and law enforcement, stupid and defiant behavior on the part of the black suspects has often led to the deadly outcomes, that the Democrat Progressives seem to embellish and employ for political purposes. Even in the case of George Floyd, his death was unnecessary. Let me be extremely terse.  If Mr. Floyd had just stayed in the police car, during his initial arrest, his demise could have been avoided.  This itself does not exonerate the actions of Officer Devin Chauvin, but the fact the officers involved had to deal with an unruly suspect, with enough illegal drugs in his system to kill a horse, added to the orchestrated melodrama, the secular heresy, that police conduct an open hunting season on blacks.  It nurtures the big lie. It mitigates the distortion, bias, and misrepresentation that America, and by extension, law enforcement is intrinsically racist.

Not so long ago while working as a volunteer at the local VA Hospital, I happen to be watching a news report with a friend who was a retired police detective. The news footage that day showed several incidents of blacks pouring water on the local police while at the same time the police stood and did nothing. I distinctly remember little black kids standing around cheering the activities by their so-called adult mentors. My retired police friend was more than shocked and aghast.  He just shook his head and quietly said “the culture is losing it.”
 
There is a growing segment within the black community in which the breakdown in the social contract has metastasized. Over the past two decades, young black men have ingested the myth of an institutionally racist society and law enforcement. So, they have taken it upon themselves to be defiant and acquit themselves as “really-cool-brave-black-guys.” They believe themselves to be standing up to their modern-day version of Bull Conner.

They mouth off, disrespect, question, resist and comport belligerency during any routine traffic stop or questioning by the police. The police are just trying to protect the vast majority of inner-city residents from potential (or very real) criminal elements.  Many of the high-profile police interdictions, that have led to the death of a black suspect, started with these individuals resisting arrest. As a result, these everyday law enforcement protocols quickly go sideways, and you get the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Breanne Taylor, Daunte Wright, and George Floyd.  As alluded to earlier, the breakdown in the social contract or cultural capital which keeps, a society “civil” has all but collapsed in a segment of the African American community. The throwing of water at police and hordes of black youth seen stealing and robbing businesses via flash mobs exemplify the abrogation or death of civil society.

For the most part, the Black political class has encouraged this anti-social behavior by pushing the fable that America is irredeemably racist.  This belief or racist catechism has kept members of the Congressional Black Caucus in business for decades. This sanctification or temporal hagiography nurtured by BLM and many in the political class has conveniently enshrined many of its temporal antiphons, which have been devastatingly effective: “I can’t breathe”, Hands-up-don’t shoot”, “Take a knee”, “Driving while black”, and “Say Her Name”. The latter led to deifying the tragic death of Breanna Taylor.  In the news cycle, she was portrayed as an innocent black woman, gunned down by police during a raid. Despite the media’s portrayal, it turns out she was caught in the crossfire because of her drug-running boyfriend. For years, Ms. Taylor kept the books for her boyfriend’s drug operation.    

During the Obama administration, Rev. Al Sharpton, Obama’s advisor on race, directly pushed the story to the black community that “racism is everywhere”, and that out-of-control racist law enforcement is purposely gunning down blacks. And please don’t give me the Progressive Liberal milk-toast excuse, that there are some bad cops out there. Of course, there are!

But it is simply a dodge or regrettable attempt at putting one’s head in the sand when we see black murdering each other with impunity by the thousands. Coupled with the popularity of Critical Race Theory and Implicit Race Bias alchemists, who perfected the formula for effective race-baiting. Black elites and the cultural left (again, mostly Democrat) have been able to set the default setting of America as a racist nation and generally an awful place to live.

[Patrick is a retired University Library Director. He is graduate of Canisius College and the University of Washington where he earned Masters Degrees in Religious Studies Education, Urban Anthropology and Library and Information Science.  Mr. Hall has also completed additional course work at the University of Buffalo, Seattle University and St. John Fishers College of Rochester New York. He has published in several national publications such as Commonweal, America, Conservative Review, Headway, National Catholic Reporter, Freedom's Journal Magazine, and American Libraries. He has published in the peer reviewed publications, Journal of Academic Librarianship and the Internet Reference Services Quarterly. From 1997 until his retirement in January 2014 he served on the Advisory Board of Urban Library Journal, a CUNY Publication.]