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Following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, by a White police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and the emergence of Black Lives Matter as a national movement in 2014, Black writers began to refer to “the talk” as a one-of-a-kind conversation Black parents had with their children about racist policing.
In 2016, Washington Post journalist Wes Lowery published They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement. The book’s goal was to educate the public on the scale of modern police violence. The title of the book, “They” (police) Can’t Kill “Us” (black people) All, implies that the police are making every effort to kill all Black people.
The same year, Harvard economist Roland Fryer published a study that found racial differences in the use of nonlethal force but no racial bias in officer-involved shootings. Also, the Washington Post police shootings database recorded officers fatally shot more Whites than Blacks.
BLM supporters dismissed the hard numbers because police brutality disproportionately harmed Blacks in comparison to their percentage of the population. For many Black parents, this made “the talk” even more important because it implied that their children were at greater risk of being involved in a racist police encounter.
Those who always recognized that the evidence on the ground did not support BLM’s claim of an “epidemic of racist policing” agreed that Blacks faced disproportionate harm during police confrontations but stressed that fatal police encounters constituted less than 1 percent of Black deaths per year. The research proved that there was no epidemic of racist policing, and “the talk” about racist policing fostered in Black youngsters an irrational fear of police that might do more harm than good.
According to City Journal contributing editor Heather MacDonald, the FBI’s official crime data for 2016 showed that there were nearly 900 more Black homicide victims compared to 2015, bringing the total to 7,881. Those 7,881 Black homicide victims are 1,305 more than the number of White victims during the same time period, despite the fact that Blacks make up only 13 percent of the US population. According to the Washington Post, “in 2016, police fatally shot 233 Blacks, the vast majority of whom were armed and dangerous. Only 16 Black male victims of police shootings were classified as unarmed.”
BLM critics who pointed out these black-on-black crime stats emphasized that there was another “talk” Black parents were forced to have with their children. This “talk” occurred when a parent had to confront their child after one of their friends was gunned down or hit with a stray bullet. This “talk” was disproportionately held in poor Black neighborhoods, and the critics stressed to BLM that the FBI statistics indicated these “talks” were increasing.
In response to the criticism, BLM supporters condemned the term “black-on-black crime.” BLM supporters argued that Whites killed each other in the same way that Blacks did, but there was no term called “white-on-white crime” to imply some form of criminal sickness within the White race.
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, BLM supporters and the national media continued to propagate the impression that racist policing was rampant in the United States. In 2019, when researchers surveyed the public and asked about the number of unarmed Black males killed by police each year, over half of those polled answered over 1,000. However, according to the Washington Post, in each year from 2015 to 2018, the number never surpassed 50.
Meanwhile, Black parents in poor neighborhoods had to comfort the same child as more and more of their friends got gunned down or hit with stray bullets.
The year 2020 provided BLM supporters with a new list of victims of racist policing: Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Jacob Blake. Across the country, riots erupted, prompting Black parents to once again have “the talk” with their children about racist policing.
2020 was also the year that lawmakers resolved to confront the issue. Cities around the country suggested cutting police funding, and voters elected progressive prosecutors to reduce mass incarceration.
This was a win for all BLM supporters who did not reside in a poor Black community.
According to CNN, when the FBI released its annual Uniform Crime Report for 2020, the number of homicides climbed nearly 30 percent from 2019. That was the agency’s highest single-year increase since it began recording these crimes in the 1960s.
This proved that BLM’s critics were correct when they stated that there was another “talk” that Black parents were obliged to have with their child and that it was on the rise.
But has anyone attempted to have a genuine discussion about this?
A recent Washington Post headline promoted that: A Black father wrote a book about ‘The Talk’—to show why it’s necessary. The author defined “the talk” as a catch-all word for how Black parents first communicate the reality of American racism with their children.
I suppose not.
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