Library 'Black Lives Matter' Display Dishonors Police, Misrepresents Black America


Today, The Robert R. Muntz Library at The University of Texas at Tyler presents a display on the second floor in honor of Black History Month. The display touts the popular Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement as “a new civil rights movement” and presents a timeline of contemporary events that have fueled and attended the movement. The display claims to illustrate the bad outcomes that come upon blacks when “racial disparities” exist in law enforcement. However, by unfairly maligning police, misrepresenting BLM’s relationship with black America and promoting the false oppression narrative behind Black Lives Matter, the display instead represents a lazy intellectual effort to understand the truth about individuals’ relationships within society. It achieves this in at least four ways.
First of all, the display encourages unwarranted suspicion of police officers by highlighting numerous controversial instances involving police and black Americans. Instead of acknowledging the numerous good relationships police and blacks enjoy everyday, the display highlights repeated, isolated national instances of black Americans’ violent run-ins with the police.

In this way, the display misrepresents police as oppressors, constantly targeting blacks and getting away with it. This is an intellectually lazy and unfair representation of the many civil, good-hearted Americans who serve in police work today. Furthermore, the display misrepresents Black Lives Matters’s influence in the black community. BLM claims to be a representative voice for all blacks in America when in reality, there are many black Americans who reject the Black Lives Matter movement and its narrative. These are people such as Vanderbilt University law professor Dr. Carol Swain, U.S. Army Colonel Allen West and American rapper and actor Lord Jamar. It is deceptive and lazy for the display to present BLM as the authorized view of black Americans when it merely represents one perspective among a diverse group of individuals who are black. Also, the display omits facts in individual cases that might tell a different narrative than the one Black Lives Matter promotes. In this case, rather than function as a display in which the facts speak for themselves, instead the presentation serves primarily as a communication tool to promote BLM’s false narrative and biased propaganda regarding police and race relations in America.
For example, the display claims that black American Eric Garner was “choked to death by an officer on Staten Island, New York.” In fact, Garner’s autopsy did not report he died of asphyxiation. Rather, the autopsy said that Garner--who was already plagued with health problems and suffered a heart attack in an ambulance on the way to the hospital--died of acute and chronic bronchial asthma, obesity, and heart disease. So, even though he had a physical encounter with police, the display’s claim that an officer choked him out until was dead is unfair, false and misrepresentative. In another example, the display chronicles that two NYPD officers were ambushed and murdered by a black man on Dec. 21., 2014. Yet, the display omits that the officers were Hispanic and Asian. Their ethnicities tell a different story than “white cops versus black citizens.” Instead, it tells of a police force of diverse ethnicities--not just whites--affected by depraved human nature than knows no racial bounds. This narrative conflicts with BLM’s narrative and their ethnicities are unfortunately omitted from the display. Finally, one last note about the display: Black History Month is supposed to be an occasion to reflect on others’ contributions in the past that have helped prepare the way for individuals today. It seems incredibly narcissistic to use an occasion meant to reflect on others' contributions in history to talk about yourself in the present. There is no doubt that BLM represents a limited, yet popular movement. However, it seems substantially childish and self-absorbed to turn the conversation back to yourself in the midst of an occasion that is supposed to be focused on others. The library has every right to present the display and so do the authors to present their view. However, by unfairly maligning police, misrepresenting BLM’s relationship with black america and promoting the false narrative of BLM, the display represents a lazy intellectual effort to understand the truth about individuals’ relationships within society. Students should be appalled.

Twitter: @jhescock

Editor's Note: The University of Texas at Tyler did not respond to multiple request for comment by the time this article was published.
















To read the Mother Jones article provided the basis for the content of the display, click here.

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