Do Black Lives Really Matter to Black Lives Matter?

Does the Black Lives Matter movement really believe what is asserted in its own name?

That this is highly questionable has been pointed out on the grounds that if the movement really believed that black lives matter, it would not be wasting all of its time protesting the miniscule fraction of black deaths that are caused each year by white policemen and instead would be protesting the intraracial violent crime in the black community that is responsible for a much larger percentage of black deaths and would undoubtedly be responsible for many more were it not for the very police they hate so much.

Today, I would like to approach this question from a different angle – that of the Black Lives Matter movement’s position on abortion.

Although it is a single issue movement dedicated to fighting what it perceives as - or, more accurately, labels as systemic or institutional racism against blacks, particularly on the part of the police, it does seem to have a position on abortion. It is in favour of it. To be more precise, it supports and demands what it calls “reproductive justice.” This, of course, is just an absurd euphemism for abortion. It in turn is supported by pro-abortion groups such as NARAL and Planned Parenthood. Anyone familiar with the founder of the latter group, Margaret Sanger, her views on eugenics, and who all she worked with to promote those views, will find this deliciously ironic.

Black Lives Matter is not the first anti-racist group to support abortion. Years ago I noticed that Anti-Racist Action, a gang of punks similar to the skinheads but with an anarcho-Marxist ideology and Communist backers that was a forerunner to what is now called Antifa, gave support for abortion rights a prominent mention in its manifesto, which was not a long document.

That single-cause leftist groups would support other leftist causes than their own is not particularly surprising. Indeed, the concept of “intersectionality”, that was originally thought up by the non-white wing of third-wave feminism but which has since become the dominant interpretive grid in progressive theory in general, would be reason to expect that such would be the case. The gist of the concept is that someone who on the ever growing list of “victim of discrimination” categories can check off more than one box, might be the victim of discrimination not on the basis of any of these alone, but several or all of them in combination. While it is clearly a crackpot notion thought up to justify the ongoing existence and mission creep of the anti-discrimination industry long after any complaints that rational people might have thought had merit had been redressed, it has proven very useful to the left in the coordination of causes that taken on their own might be considered incompatible with one another.

What we are seeing here is an example of this. Ever since its second-wave – the wave that began in the 1950s and 1960s with the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and the founding of NOW and NARAL – feminism has held it to be one of its fundamental tenets that not to give women the special right to murder their children while the latter are still unborn is to discriminate against women. The anti-racist movement of today, of which Black Lives Matter is a part, is the successor to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Its raison d'être is to fight what it considers to be discrimination in favour of whites and against non-whites, even though it has been the case for decades that the only real institutional racial discrimination in Western countries now runs in the opposite direction. Both movements are crazy in their own right, and since both define themselves in opposition to something they irrationally and falsely perceive to be discrimination, intersectionality brings them together.

There is a major contradiction in the linking of these causes, however. I am not referring, although it is interesting to point it out, to how the more radical wing of second-wave feminism grew out of what was essentially the women’s auxiliary of the Civil Rights Movement when it objected to being treated as the kitchen staff by the male leadership of the latter movement (see Susan Brownmiller’s history In Our Time) or to how the same elements of American black culture that frequently use aggressive and hateful anti-white language also express themselves in violent misogynistic language. I am referring to the fact that blacks have the highest abortion rate in the United States.

William Robert Johnston has compiled all the available statistics on abortion by race in the United States from the years 1965 to 2017. His first two graphs and the accompanying table show the number of live births per year for each race and the number of abortions per year for each race. The third graph shows the abortion percentage. This is the number of abortions considered as a percentage of the live births and abortions taken together. From the mid-1970s until late in the first decade of this millennium, this percentage was between 40 and 45. For the same period the percentage for all races taken together was between 20 and 30. For whites in this period it was between 15 and about 27.5. The next graph shows the white percentage of total abortions declining from 1965 to 2015 and the black percentage of total abortions rising in the same period. Interestingly, the graph after that shows the white percentage of total live births undergoing a similar decline, whereas the black percentage of total live births remains pretty constant.

The point, if it is not by now obvious, is that unborn black lives are far more likely to be aborted than the unborn lives of other races.

If Black Lives Matter really thinks that black lives matter why, then, does it support abortion?

The fact that it does support abortion demonstrates that black lives obviously matter more to all those anti-abortion, right-wingers, whom they routinely accuse of “white supremacism” than they do to Black Lives Matter. Come to think of it, we right-wingers are also the ones who support the police against the black criminals who prey on other blacks rather than the other way around.

It seems to me like some people are marching under a banner that ill suits them.