Conservative Commentators Suggest Protests Are Based On A ‘Lie’ — Here’s Why That’s Misleading

“Is our nation being ripped apart by a total and complete lie, a provable lie?” Tucker Carlson asked his audience on his show after reciting facts on police killings from the Washington Post database that showed 10 instances where an unarmed African American was killed by police last year. 

“People say ‘police are killing unarmed black men at record rates!’ — this is a lie,” Charlie Kirk said, also referencing the Washington Post database, in a selfie video tearing into the protests posted on his Instagram account that as of Thursday had more than 1.4 million views.

Kirk and Carlson also both reference a Wall Street Journal opinion piece entitled “The Myth of Systemic Police Racism” published on Tuesday by Heather Mac Donald, a conservative commentator and author, who makes a similar argument: “However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians,” Mac Donald writes.

Yet while the data is right, the majority of protesters are railing against the fact that black people are disproportionately shot and killed by police, which is supported by the Post’s database.

As Philip Bump of the Post points out, according to the same statistic category, twice as many unarmed white people (20) were shot and killed by police as black people (10) last year, but whites make up almost five times as much of the population (blacks were also much more likely to be arrested than whites in every year since 2012, for which data are available).

Many prominent black rights organizations, such as Black Lives Matter, have characterized their demands as broader than police shootings: “…when we started Black Lives Matter, it wasn’t solely about police brutality and extrajudicial killing,” Opal Tometi, co-founder of the activist group Black Lives Matter, told the New Yorker in an interview on June 3.

 Tometi says the movement is “bigger than that” and that Floyd’s death was a “spark point” that encompasses other injustices such as African Americans’ housing, education and health care struggles.