A Close Look At the Facts

Oh well, one of my friends is once again calling me a racist. I find it odd that every time I don't agree with him, I'm a racist. Maybe one day he will understand the underlying racist tendencies in his own heart... but I'm not going to hold my breath. We were discussing the whole Ferguson thing and the New York choke case (which in my opinion do not even belong in the same conversation) and he simply will not listen to the facts. Rather, he does not care about the facts. We've debated and argued this to the point that I really don't even want to talk with him about it anymore, because even when presented with the facts of testimony of witnesses before the Grand Jury, he is convinced that a white cop murdered an innocent black "boy" (as he always calls him).  So, today I presented a different side of this argument to him, totally ignoring either of these stories in the news, rather using actual statistics from the past year. When I gave him these numbers, he became really agitated and loud. The numbers just don't lie. 

Here are the numbers and facts I presented to my friend:
- The number of blacks killed by police gunfire in 2013 was 123. 
- The number of whites killed by police gunfire in 2013 was 326. 
- There are 43 million-plus black Americans — 123 were killed by police gunfire. 

This does not sound like an "epidemic" to me.  I certainly don't mean to minimize a single death, but the fact is that there are nearly three times as many whites killed by police each year as there are blacks killed. He argued that those numbers are such because there are more whites in America than there are blacks. I'll agree with him here, but let's take this a step further. 

- Whites comprise 63% of the US population
- Blacks comprise 13%
Take careful note of these numbers. 
- In 2013 blacks committed 5375 murders in the USA 
- Whites committed 4396 murders last year. 

Folks, that is one telling statistic, but let's add another statistic to mix:
- 93% of all black murders are committed by other blacks. 

Anyone see a problem here?

The mantra being screamed across this Nation today is "Black lives matter."  
I agree, they do. 
But it's high time they start looking at their own community and saying the same thing, because that's where the killing fields are.

Blacks MUST take ownership of this problem if they are ever going to change things. Again, every life matters, but when you are protesting, rioting and looting over your PERCEIVED notion that cops are "hunting black men" while the fact is that 93% of blacks murdered are murdered by other blacks in their own communities, you are delusional. Turn your focus own your own communities and lets begin to get real about where the problem lies. Only you can fix this.