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Multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos, the founder of e-tailer behemoth Amazon, tried to explain his support for the slogan “Black Lives Matter” by suggesting that it really applies universally to all ethnicities and races.
After placing the slogan on the Amazon site storefront amid ongoing protests and riots following the death of Minneapolis man George Floyd at the hands of police earlier this month, Bezos began to receive pushback.
On his Instagram page, Bezos shared an email from a customer who called the BLM slogan “offensive” and added that “all lives matter.”
When he replied, Bezos said that the slogan “black lives matter” does not mean the lives of other races and ethnicities don’t.
“Black lives matter speaks to racism and the disproportionate risk that Black people face in our law enforcement and justice system,” he wrote. “I have a 20-year-old son, and I simply don’t worry that he might be choked to death while being detained one day. It’s not something I worry about. Black parents can’t say the same.”
The richest man in the world added that his intention was not to minimize the lives of others.
“But I want you to know I support this movement that we see happening around us, and my stance won’t change,” he wrote.
While individual experiences vary, Bezos is repeating the false narrative that black Americans die at an exceedingly high rate at the hands of police.
As BizPac Review noted, the actual figures are a blip on annual police statistics. Though fatal police shootings have been rising in recent years, 98 blacks have been killed by officers this year compared to 172 whites. And while the number of black deaths is disproportionately higher as a percentage of the population, that is not a reflection of ‘systemic racism.’
Writing last week in The Wall Street Journal, Heather MacDonald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of the book, “The War on Cops,” police shot 19 unarmed whites in 2019 and nine unarmed blacks, according to a Washington Post database which she noted is generally accurate.
She also notes that police officers are many times more likely to be killed by a black suspect.
“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 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer,” she wrote.
MacDonald also noted the high murder rate of young black men by other young black men in certain parts of urban centers including Chicago and East St. Louis, figures and incidents that are rarely mentioned by white liberals like Bezos as well as Black Lives Matter activists.
But specifically to Bezos’ claim that black families have more to fear from police than whites, MacDonald noted:
The latest in a series of studies undercutting the claim of systemic police bias was published in August 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that the more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that a member of that group will be fatally shot by a police officer. There is “no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police,” they concluded.
Additional evidence puts the lie to the ‘systemic racism among police’ narrative. MacDonald cited a 2015 analysis by the Philadelphia Police Department which “found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects,” she wrote.
“Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings,” she added.
MacDonald also noted a factor that is seldom taken into consideration by apologists like Bezos when it comes to citing false or misleading information regarding police interactions with the blacks.
“Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police,” she wrote, adding that the “false narrative of police bias” begun during the Obama administration actually led to officers being targeted, often by black suspects.
“The pattern may be repeating itself. Officers are being assaulted and shot at while they try to arrest gun suspects or respond to the growing riots,” she wrote.
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Jon is a staff writer for BizPac Review with 30 years' worth of reporting experience, as well as an author and U.S. Army veteran. He has a BA in political science from Ashford University and an MA in national security studies/intelligence analysis from American Military University.
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