Here is Roland Fryer talking about his 2017 paper, An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force, published in 2018 in The Journal of Political Economy. The paper debunks the myth of racial bias in officer-related shootings. The focus of the clip is the reaction to his paper.
The paper was attacked for the following conclusion: “On the most extreme use of force—officer-involved shootings—we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.” This was an unexpected finding in light of comprehensive studies by William Wilbanks in the 1980s, Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen in the 1990s, and Heather Mac Donald in the 2010s. The reaction story is scary, albeit also not unexpected. There are truths progressives don’t want to hear, and they have the power to punish those who speak them.
I have been talking for a number of year now about how I have become suspect in my colleagues’ eyes concerning lethal police encounters even though it is not my research. To be sure, I have disseminated Fryer’s research—as well as research by others anticipating and confirming his finding (The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters; The Far Podcast: The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police Officer-Civilian Encounters; Perpetuating the Big Lie About Lethal Police Encounters; Demoralization and the Ferguson Effect: What the Left and Right Get Right (and Wrong) About Crime and Violence; Debunking Mythologies Surrounding the American Criminal Justice System; America’s Crime Problem and Why Progressives are to Blame; Ever Wonder What Progressives are Trying to Accomplish with Their Social Policies?), but this in itself is problematic in today’s woke climate. It got me called to the dean’s office (a story I shared on Freedom and Reason a while ago—The State of Cognitive Liberty at Today’s Universities). Students reported me for heresy.
I am not trying to graft Fryer’s travails onto my own biography. I haven’t suffered anything like Fryer has for speaking truth to power. Rather, I associate his situation with my own because there are so many academics who can do the same (or could if they poked their heads up) and the reason why is very important for the public to understand.
Progressives see the academy as a church. The academic sees himself as a cleric whose job it is to uphold the sacred doctrine. In the progressive church, the sacred doctrine is that America is systemically racist and that police and prisons exist to perpetuate the racial order of things, which is whites on top and blacks on bottom. When a cleric checks the doctrine and finds that it’s false, and then talks about it, he becomes a heretic and risks facing both the wrath of the pitchforked mob and an inquisition conducted by his fellow clergymen.
We see this in other areas, as well. For example, when a cleric checks the doctrine that would have us believe that men can, through a series of incantations and rituals, become women and finds that this is untrue, he risks provoking the same mob and the same inquisitors. If he deviates from the ritual of denying objective reality by referring to people by their gender, he will not only face discipline but he may be at risk for excommunication. The professor-as-cleric is expected to believe and uphold the doctrine or act in bad faith and uphold the doctrine anyway.
This is the state of today’s universities. What was originally established as a space where intellectuals gather to bring light to darkness has become a place where darkness is redefined as light and the intellectual-as-cleric is expected to bear that false light as truth. The professor-as-cleric is expected to deceive those around him, including his students. Here’s is Heather Mac Donald explaining the situation.
freedom and reason 