A silent majority? Black Americans reject violence, looting in neighborhoods after Floyd death

The rioters are 'reflective of a small subset of black America that is jobless, lawless, wild, and capable of the brutality we saw,' said Rob Smith, a black conservative activist and decorated Iraq War veteran, but 'the silent majority will always stay on the side of law and order.'

Black Americans across the ideological spectrum are speaking in support of peaceful protest — but rejecting the violence, looting, and destruction of black neighborhoods after the gruesome death of George Floyd, an African-American man, at the hands of Minneapolis police.

"Black America, like broader America, they're sympathizing with the fact that the murder that triggered all of this was a horrible thing, and I think all reasonable people are appalled by it and protested," said Shelby Steele, well-known author, documentary maker and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. "After that, things become more murky. There's a certainly a segment of black America — Black Lives Matter and so forth — that want to sort of use this tragedy as a means to power, as a means to dominance in American life. Saying blacks are victims, and we have to take care of them in that sense to them, and appease them."

While acknowledging there is "a segment of black America — Black Lives Matter and so forth — that want to sort of use this tragedy as a means to power, as a means to dominance in American life," Steele says, "There's a growing number of blacks in America, who take the opposite point of view: That we've never been freer, and opportunity is sort of waiting for us to take advantage of it, and that we need to be busy with that, rather than getting sidetracked here, pretending that racial progress has never been made and that blacks are still victims. We're not. We're free. And no one sanctions that kind of murder that occurred. Nobody, certainly no one I've ever seen, not one single person is supportive of that. So I think that's...

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