America Has a Silent Black Majority: They fear crime more than police and know rioters are opportunists, not revolutionaries

By Jason Riley. Excerpts:

"You don’t need to read an academic paper to understand that peaceful civil-rights demonstrations have had more success than violent protests, but a Princeton scholar just published one that is well worth your time. Writing last month in the American Political Science Review, Omar Wasow, a professor of politics, described the results of a 15-year research project on the political consequences of protests.

Mr. Wasow, who is black, focused on black-led demonstrations between 1960 and 1972, and he found that the “types of protest tactics employed” can make all the difference in advancing a social cause. “Nonviolent black-led protests played a critical role in tilting the national political agenda toward civil rights,” he concluded, while “black-led resistance that included protester-initiated violence contributed to outcomes directly in opposition to the policy preferences of the protesters.”"

"Mr. Wasow said he found a “causal relationship between violent protests” that occurred after the April 1968 assassination of Dr. King “and the shift away from the Democratic coalition.” More specifically, “if your county was proximate to violent protests, then that county voted 6 to 8 percentage points more toward Nixon in November.”"

"That was true 50 years ago and remains true today. Most black people know that George Floyd is no more representative of blacks than Derek Chauvin is of police officers. They know that the frequency of black encounters with law enforcement has far more to do with black crime rates than with racially biased policing. They know that young black men have far more to fear from their peers than from the cops. And they know that the rioters are opportunists, not revolutionaries."