freedom and reason

In light of the scientific literature on the matter of officer-involved shootings, the greater criminal justice system, and race relations, which does not support core claims made by #BlackLivesMatter and its New Left allies, indeed, that contradict those claims, independently-minded scholars must dissent from the growing demand that that we declare ourselves allies to what amounts to a regressive countermovement against freedom and reason and an assault on the truth. In this essay I expose the myth of systemic racism in lethal police-civilian encounters.

For the record, for those who do not know what I do for a living, I am a professional criminologist tenured at a public university who has spent more than a quarter century studying patterns of crime and punishment. In the 1990s, as a graduate student at a major public university, a milieu shaped by neomarxist and postmodernist epistemologies, I came to believe that systemic racism in part explained disparities in the criminal justice system.

My dissertation, Caste, Class, and Justice: Segregation, Accumulation, and Criminalization in the United States (2000), was influenced by epistemological notions embedded in the approaches of critical race theory and the social reality of crime. I won’t elaborate these here, but the core methodological error I make on their account is conceptualizing race relations as existing on the same ontological plane as class relations. I hope it will suffice to note that sociology, as do other domains of science, elaborates conceptual schemes in order to tap the unseen structures of relations the world and thus risks reifying its constructions. While class relations are material relations, since they exist in economic institutions, the concrete institutions of segregation were dismantled more than half a century ago. A system of categories remains in demography. But demographic categories don’t do anything. Therefore, to assume systemic racism on the basis of grouped differences commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

After spending a number of years after graduate school finding my way out of New Left ideology—what I now recognize as left-idealist romanticism—I discovered that what I had believed about race and criminal justice was misguided. A testament to the power and the problem of ideology, the facts were “hidden” in plain view. I want to tell you about those facts in this essay because many others are making the same errors I made those many years ago. (I critique the fallacy in previous blog entries, so I won’t rehearse that argument here. But you can see an example of my writing on this topic in this essay: Zombie Politics: the Corporatist Ideology of Antiracism.)

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In testing the claim of systemic racism in criminal justice, William Wilbanks, in The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System, published in 1987, produces a comprehensive survey of contemporary research studies, searching for evidence of discrimination by police, prosecutors, judges, and prison and parole officers. Among the specific areas considered in his analysis are provisions of counsel, police deployment, use of deadly force, bail decisions, plea bargaining, sentencing patterns, and inmate classification and discipline. Wilbanks finds that, although individual cases of racial prejudice and discrimination do occur in the system, there is insufficient evidence to support a charge of systematic racism against blacks in the criminal justice system, which is the main issue animating #BlackLivesMatter. Wilbanks summarizes: “At every point, from arrest to parole, there is little or no evidence of an overall racial effect.” 

Wilbanks’ findings have been repeated in numerous scholarly reviews and studies. Here are several over them spanning a quarter century (I provide a bibliography at the conclusion of the essay). I emphasized that most of these studies focus specifically on the matter of lethal officer-civilian encounters.

Contextualizing police-civilian interaction is necessary in explaining police use of force. If we look at crime statistics for blacks and whites for the year 2018, we find significant overrepresentation of blacks in serious criminal offending. Blacks are responsible for more half of all murders and more than half of robberies. Blacks account for one-third of all arrests for aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft. Moreover, contradicting the claim that violence against blacks by whites is the typical, while most serious crime is intra-racial, whites are disproportionately victims of crime perpetrated by blacks, and not just per capita, but in frequencies. And not by a little.

One finds these disproportionalities in crime reports going back for years. The persistence of black overrepresentation in serious crime is documented by the Uniform Crime Report, a collection of crimes reported to the police, arrest and clearance rates collected from thousands of police department across the nation, published by the FBI. It is also found in the National Crime Victimization Survey, conducted by the Justice Department. These reports are published annually. These are the two major crime surveys produced on crime in the United States. 

I want to emphasize that most blacks do not commit serious crime. There is nothing intrinsic to being black that makes a person crime prone. Race is not a biological or constitutional entity. It is a social construct. Overrepresentation of blacks in serious crime is a persistent demographic fact. But the assertion of systemic racism rests on interpretation of disparities in demographic representation, therefore we must take the facts together. Controlling for rates of serious crime and considering the context of the encounters, the racial disparity in policing killings is explained. #BlackLivesMatter is based on a myth, the myth of racial bias in lethal (and even less-than-lethal) officer-civilian encounters.

The demographic profile of crime indicate these concrete circumstances: When police are called to a crime scene, or when they have probable cause that a crime is occurring or has occurred, they are more likely to interact with blacks on a per capita basis than they are with whites. Because of black overrepresentation in serious crime, these encounters are more likely to involve serious interactions. If the suspect officers encounter is armed and resisting, then the suspect will be at higher risk of being killed or injured. So will police officers (who are every year killed in the line of duty). Police officers share with all civilians a right to defend themselves. They are, moreover, charged with putting themselves in harm’s way.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw writes that the problem with liberal accounts of the law is “treating the exercise of racial power as rare and aberrational rather than as systemic and ingrained.” The way Crenshaw puts the matter suggests that there is the evidence of systemic and ingrained racism is abundant. In fact, police shootings of unarmed black men, to take the master complaint, are in fact highly unusual. Police interact with civilians millions of times each year. There are approximately 42 million black people in the United States. The number of unarmed blacks killed by the police for all of 2019? Around a dozen. Given such frequencies, police officers killing unarmed black men is rare and aberrational. We should celebrate this fact. Instead, we hear the crowd chanting the slogan: “Defund the police.”

On the larger question of systemic racism in the criminal justice system, scientific studies find little empirical support for the claim of systemic racism in the criminal justice system as a whole. A close examination of prison demographics in light of crime statistics finds that the ascertained patterns are, as they are with officer-involved shootings, largely explained by patterns of criminal offending. Even Michael Tonry, a public intellectual highly critical of US prison policy, had to acknowledge in his 1995 book Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment that racial disparities in the criminal justice system are mainly due to differences in criminal activity among races.

John Pfaff points out, in his 2017 book Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration-and How to Achieve Real Reform, more than half of the 1.3 million inmates in state prisons are there for violent offenses (aggravated assault, murder, rape, and robbery) and many tens of thousands more are incarcerated for burglary or other serious property crimes. Given the demographics of criminal offending, blacks are not overrepresented among prisoners relative to their involvement in serious crime. Moreover, the moral necessity of ending the drug war accepted, racial disparities in the enforcement of drug prohibition only minimally skew this pattern.

(On that last score, Pfaff’s work bring into question Michele Alexander’s popular 2012 The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, a book I dropped from the reading list in my undergraduate criminal justice class because its race-centric approach distorts student understanding of the problem. I would likely use the book in a graduate seminar to illustrate the problem of ideological thinking, but undergraduates cannot be burdened with a hefty reading list. We have to get straight away to the truth. Pfaff’s Locked In has replaced it. I have my hands full having to correct misrepresentations in the otherwise excellent The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, by Jeffery Reiman.)

The obsession with race reflected in the work of Alexander, CRT scholars, and others gives short shrift to the matter on which we should focus our attention: social class. The United States is a capitalist society. Police and the greater criminal justice apparatus constitute a system that manages social problems systematically generated by the capitalist mode of production. Those displaced and underserved by an economic system based on the accumulation of capital are overrepresented in our prisons and jails. To be sure, historic forces have played a role in producing the demographic overrepresentation of blacks in the criminogenic conditions capitalism systemically produces, but the claims presented by #BlackLivesMatter and its allies concerning systemic racism in policing and the criminal justice are not supported by the evidence. As I stated at the outset, they are contradicted by the evidence.

Finally, advocacy of the #BlackLivesMatter understanding of the problems of police brutality obscures the progress democratic societies have made on this front. As Samuel Walker, arguably the most important expert in police accountability, tells us, “Whether the benchmark is one-hundred years, fifty years, or only twenty years ago, it is possible to see significant reforms in police management, crime fighting tactics, police personnel standards and training, the diversity of the work force, constitutional standards for policing, and the accountability of officers for their actions in critical situations.” We should acknowledge progress made in this area and keep our attention on continuing that progress. This means rejecting the regressive policies of depolicing and the #BlackLivesMatter interpretation of racial disparities in policing and the criminal justice system.

Bibliography

Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press.

Cesario, Joseph, D. J. Johnson, and W. Terrill. 2018. “Is There Evidence of Racial Disparity in Police Use of Deadly Force? Analyses of Officer-Involved Fatal Shootings in 2015–2016.” Social Psychological and Personality Science 10(5): 586-595.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas. 1996. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. The New Press.

Pfaff, John. 2017. Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration-and How to Achieve Real Reform. Basic Books. 

Fryer, Ronald G. 2018. “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force.” Journal of Political Economy 127(3): 1210-1261.

Jetelina, Katelyn K., Wesley G. Jennings, Stephen A. Bishopp, Alex R. Piqueri, and Jennifer M. Reingle Gonzalez. 2017. Dissecting the Complexities of the Relationship Between Police Officer–Civilian Race/Ethnicity Dyads and Less-Than-Lethal Use of Force. American Journal of Public Health 107(7): 1164-1170.

Johnson, David J., Trevor Tress, Nicole Burkel, Carley Taylor, and Joseph Cesario. 2019. “Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 116(32) 15877-15882.

Mac Donald, Heather. 2016. The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. Encounter Books. 

_______________. 2020. The Myth of Systemic Police Racism. Wall Street Journal, June 3. 

Menifield, Charles E. 2019. “Do White Law Enforcement Officers Target Minority Suspects?” Public Administration Review 79(1) 56-68.

Sampson, Robert J. and Janet L. Lauritsen. 1997. Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Crime and Criminal Justice in the United States. Crime and Justice 21:311-374.

Tonry, Michael. 1995. Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in America. Oxford University Press.

Tregle, Brandon, Justin Nix and Geoffrey P. Alpert. 2019. “Disparity does not mean bias: making sense of observed racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings with multiple benchmarks.” Journal of Crime and Justice 42(1): 18-31. 

Walker, Samuel. 2012. “Institutionalizing Police Accountability Reforms: The Problem of Making Police Reforms Endure,” Saint Louis University Public Law Review 32:1.

Walker, Samuel and Carol Archibald. 2013. The New World of Police Accountability. Sage.

Wilbanks, William. 1987. The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System. Brooks/Cole Publishing Company.

_______________. 1987. “The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System.” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 3(2):88-93.

You may be hearing a lot about “Cultural Marxism” lately. Steven Bannon is all over it in his podcast War Room (See The Economic Nationalism of Steven K. Bannon for my views on Bannon). The New York Times denies there is even such a thing as Cultural Marxism. It’s an “far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory,” it claims. The NYTimes is not alone. The Establishment seems obsessed with denying this thing called Cultural Marxism, always pairing it with the rightwing of American politics. So the right has a view on a thing and that makes it what it is. Way to leverage an ideology in order to engage in denialism.

The online open source encyclopedia Wikipedia takes up the line: “In contemporary usage, the term Cultural Marxism refers to a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory which claims that the Frankfurt School is part of an ongoing academic and intellectual effort to undermine and destroy Western culture and values. According to the conspiracy theory, which emerged in the late 1990s, the Frankfurt School and other Marxist theorists were part of a conspiracy to attack Western society by undermining traditionalist conservatism and Christianity using the 1960s counterculture, multiculturalism, progressive politics and political correctness.” (See Frankfurt School.) I don’t normally cite Wikipedia, but I have a point to make.

I can be of some help here. I am a Marxist—a libertarian Marxist not one of these New Left Marxoids. I have read deeply into the body of literature produced by the Cultural Marxists (you should see my library!). But perhaps more importantly, for more than quarter century, I have been on the inside of the style of politics emanating from the Frankfurt School. I am, after all, an academic in a public university, an institution that is, as you probably know, seriously woke. I am in a position to testify to the fact that Cultural Marxism is not a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory. Quite the contrary.

Cultural Marxism, or Critical Theory, is a very real tradition in Marxism and really does work through the “1960s counterculture, multiculturalism, progressive politics, and political correctness” that animates activism to this very day. Get your hands on the 1965 neo-Marxist collection A Critique of Pure Tolerance, by Herbert Marcuse, Barrington Moore Jr., and Robert Paul Wolff. Read Marcuse’s essay in particular: “Repressive Tolerance.” It’s a call for political correctness. Marcuse was a prominent member of the Frankfurt School. From the Wikipedia entry on Marcuse: “His Marxist scholarship inspired many radical intellectuals and political activists in the 1960s and 1970s, both in the United States and internationally.” That essay I cited is just one instantiation of a large literature of illiberal scholarship that feeds the New Left ideology. There is no guessing here. Marcuse advocated a synthesis of Marx, Freud, and Heidegger (see his 1955 Eros and Civilization). That’s right. Heidegger. Don’t know who that is? Look into it.

Is Wikipedia pushing an “antisemitic conspiracy theory”? Hardly. Why would identifying Cultural Marxism as being influential on elite culture be antisemitic anyway? Because Marxist intellectuals are disproportionately Jewish? That doesn’t make Marxism a Jewish cabal. It’s insulting to say that people shouldn’t criticize or recognize the fact of Cultural Marxism because to do so is “antisemitic.” That’s like saying that we cannot criticize the Nation of Islam because its scholars are black. You’re skin color or ethnic identity does not immunize your ideas from criticism. Who said all Jews agree with Cultural Marxism?

I benefitted from Marcuse’s 1964 book One-Dimensional Man. It’s an important book (I like C. Wright Mills, Guy Debord, Richard Grossman, and Sheldon Wolin more, but you should read One-Dimensional Man). But it is not a book that challenges corporatism from a liberal standpoint. Not even from a Marxist standpoint (which is, on these issues, liberal; see my Defending the Digital Commons: A Left-Libertarian Critique of Speech and Censorship in the Virtual Public Square). I have also benefitted from other Frankfurt School scholars, especially the work of Franz Neumann, Walter Benjamin, Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer. I even appreciate the arguments of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. The notion that we’re supposed to deny that these ideas have profoundly influenced the mode of thinking of university administrators and professors of humanities and social sciences is asking us to participate in denialism.

I would be pulling my hair out if I were a young conservative coming through the modern woke general education program of today’s university. So much of what is taught as the Gospel truth amounts to compelled speech. Faculty are subjected to it, as well. Frankfurters have to be in for some criticism like everybody else. They have have a huge impact on our politics. What you are seeing on our streets today is in part thanks to their methods (and to destructive ideas of the French poststructuralist and postmodernists movement, Mao Zedong thought and the Cultural Revolution, and anarchist egoism/nihilism).

The Wikipedia entry on the Frankfurt School also contains the following: “The works of the Frankfurt School are understood in the context of the intellectual and practical objectives of critical theory. In Traditional and Critical Theory (1937), Max Horkheimer defined critical theory as social critique meant to effect sociologic change….” It continues: “The purpose of critical theory is to analyze the true significance of the ruling understandings (the dominant ideology) generated in bourgeois society, by showing that the dominant ideology misrepresents how human relations occur in the real world, and how such misrepresentations function to justify and legitimate the domination of people by capitalism.” And this: “In the praxis of cultural hegemony, the dominant ideology is a ruling-class narrative story, which explains that what is occurring in society is the norm.” Good stuff. Why run away from it? Because it gives too much away. Just don’t believe anything anybody says about it.

The problem with Cultural Marxism, for both the left and corporate power, is that Critical Theory does not separate out all the rational elements of the West—all the things Marx defended—from the deformation of liberalism by corporatism. Marx sought to overthrow capitalism to bring the values of liberalism into full manifestation by de-alienating man from man and man from nature. He never sought to overthrow values of liberalism themselves. Private control over capitalism is in contradiction to the values of modernity, of which Marx was an advocate. You don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Given the perversion of socialism wrought by Cultural Marxism, whatever its insights, we have to recognize that, in practice, this direction has not on balance been a good thing. Indeed, Critical Race Theory is one of its obnoxious children. And this fathered Black Lives Matter. Just look at our streets today. This is not a revolutionary movement. It’s a corporatist-globalist wet dream. And that, comrades, is one hell of a paradox for something claiming Marxist roots.

Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me. —Psalm 51:5

I have written quite a lot on the fallacious construct “white privilege” and the demand for reparations for slavery (see You are Broken. We Will Fix You; For the Good of Your Soul: Tribal Stigma and the God of Reparations; Such a Beautiful Moment—The Self-Flagellating of White People). But as long as folks keep running up the flagpole the banner of reparations, I don’t know if I can ever write enough condemning this regressive and (really) racist and religious project. Indeed, it is more important now than ever to criticize the demand for reparations and expose the insinuation of its supporting politics into our rational institutions.

There are many things that make reparations for slavery and de jure segregation objectionable. For example, making victims of people without their consent (thank you, Coleman Hughes). But what makes reparations straightaway something those who believe in a rational sense of justice must condemn—and those with a primitive or deformed sense of justice can never reasonably demand from others—is this: the racialist notion of reparations (besides being intrinsically racist) is a form of substitutionary or vicarious atonement requiring the living to accept the blame for errors and sins they could not possibly have committed and to atone for iniquity of corpses. I am an atheist. A citizen in a secular republic. I have in back of me the right to be free from such tyranny.

Not even particular corpses. One abstract racialized corpse—as if the skeleton of an Appalachian coal miner ever owned in common the human chattel of a Red Hills plantation owner by virtue of shared superficial phenotypic characteristics. As if their descendants carry crime and sin in their genes. What madness this is. As if the living can repair or undo the past—and not double down on racism—by being forced to give money to the racialized other. As if magic can be worked by prostrating oneself before self-declared representatives of an imagined community supposed by an ideology to which few people still subscribe—except, of course, those demanding reparations. Do those making this argument recognize how profoundly racist its premise is? It’s as if they want us all to be racists.

Reparations for slavery rests on arguably the most destructive idea in world history: imposed religious (or religious-like, if you wish) thinking, an ideological form the Enlightenment relegated to individual conscience via secularism. You know, keep it to yourself and we might all get along? Reparations emanates from a mythological worldview, a religious cosmology, from fantastic precepts, where the primitive constructs of collective and intergenerational guilt and responsibility dwell. Reparations depends on our trust in those with esoteric notions presuming an eschatology, a view of the final judgment, of humankind’s destiny—indeed of souls. I trust no one leveling charges of blood guilt. Making it doubly dangerous, the theology from which the (il)logic of reparations hails—antiracism—is a quasi-religion that dovetails effortlessly with the Abrahamic traditions, ironically the same body of religious thought used for centuries to justify slavery and racial separation. This makes decent people of faith susceptible to the pathology of racecraft. Tragedy upon tragedy.

The desire for reparations for slavery or de jure segregation, the desire of race identitarianism, is a secret wish to preserve a black and white world, to live in the past, to alienate people from one another via an obnoxious construct (race), to base social justice on claims of past oppressions that our ancestors—and some still living—overcame through war and democratic republican processes, proof of the validity of the processes of justice that inhere in free and open societies based on individual liberty and civil rights. Reparations seek to erase the individual, to subsume a myriad of human personalities into a reified handful of antagonistic collective identities. (Cultural managers “teach” our youth these delusions in our public schools and universities and press, shame, and coerce participation from recalcitrant faculty.)

Reparations is antithetical to human rights. After all, it is because of the ideals of individual freedom and equality before the law, the birthright of every human being by virtue of being human, that unjust institutions limiting some while advancing others are dismantled. The abolition of slavery and then of de jure segregation testify to the power of Western justice, a sense of justice that should really need no qualifiers.

The reparations countermovement, despite its members claiming to be “progressive,” denies progress. Blaming the living for the deeds of the dead and demanding from them payment for debt they did not incur is regressive. It is, moreover, pathological. It hides behind a rhetoric of “love” and “empathy” the impulse to shame and humiliate. Advocacy of reparations is at its core a rejection of modernity, the development that abolished slavery and produced human rights. Reparations is part of a countermovement that means to undo hard-fought justice based on reason. Despite only a minority subscribing to this wicked idea, they have the ear of powerful forces who see advantage in their delusions. Encouraging the idea risks civilization.

I can’t stop white people giving money to black people any more than I can stop people from putting cash and coins in the offertory. You are free to be charitable. You are free to self-loathe. You are free to self-flagellate. I’m not your therapist. (Because I have empathy, I do feel embarrassed for you, though.) But I cannot permit the state to make me or my sons guilty of the errors and sins of other people. This violates my conscience, the integrity of which, last time I checked, is my birthright (see First Amendment to the US Bill of Rights; UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights).

I will never apologize for something I did not do. I will not be compelled to say things to which I do not subscribe. I must never be forced to repay debts I did not incur. I will never kneel to anybody or anything. Those who demand these things from me are narcissistic. Those who shame me and my children for existing are cruel. They are not my betters. They seek to oppress me. And when they do it on the basis of race, they are racists. I am a man. My dignity is precious to me. I mean to preserve it.

I am white (it says so on my birth certificate). I’m not Christian, so there is no moment of reckoning for me with respect to that. But I’m not sure white Christians have a moment of reckoning, either. At least not on moral grounds. At least not specially on the matter of race (that will get me, too, I fear). It’s more about whether conservative Christianity will be allowed to survive alongside the new progressive religion of Woke.

Quoting from the setup to the CNN interview with Robert Jones, CEO and founder of Public Religion Research Institute, and author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, “In survey after survey … contemporary white Christians repeatedly deny that structural racism is a problem, that shootings of unarmed blacks are not isolated incidents, or even that African Americans still face racism and discrimination.” 

Jones says, “One of the challenges, historically, has been that the Christian theology developed in white churches intentionally blinds white Christians to racial injustice.” The evidence for this? “White Christians are nearly twice as likely as non-religious Americans to say police shootings of unarmed black men are isolated incidents.” Jones adds, “That is a moral and theological problem.”

The claims Jones make in this interview, claims that are being repeated incessantly and reflexively by establishment voices in the Democratic Party, the corporate media, and the progressive (counter)movement, rest on a false premise—two false premises, in fact, namely that there is structural racism (systemic or institutional racism) and racial bias in police shootings.

Let’s take up the second premise first. There is no systemic racism in lethal police-civilian encounters, as the empirical research makes clear. A dozen or fewer unarmed blacks were killed by police in all of 2019. While every death is tragic, in light of the tens of millions of blacks in the United States, these are isolated incidents. And taking context and crime rates into account, there is no racial bias in police shootings. (Stay tuned for my upcoming podcast and companion blog entry on this for details.)

On the more broad claim of systemic racism, it is true that blacks still face race prejudice and discrimination based on prejudice. So do other groups. I’m unsure whether the United States will ever end prejudice and discrimination. It is human nature to operate according to cognitive stereotypes, and as long as the administrative state and the culture industry prime them by continuing to conceptualize humans in racialized terms, prejudice and discrimination with persist—from all sides. But the United States did end systemic racism decades ago. 

So we might dismiss Jones’ thesis out of hand. However, the appearance of Jones’ thesis, and his claim that this is a “theological problem,” does point to antiracism as a quasi-religious movement.

A couple of days ago I discovered (actually, a brilliant woman in my life directed me to it) an essay by Valerie Tarico, “The Righteous and the Woke—Why Evangelicals and Social Justice Warriors Trigger Me in the Same Way.” Tarico is a psychologist and writer living in Seattle, Washington. In reading her essay, I was struck by its affinity with my own arguments. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to read her blog. You have to read it. It’s rich and powerful in its comparisons.

Tarico discusses the righteous and the infidel—the saved and the damned, the woke and the bigots. In this worldview, every person is seen not as an individual but as an organic member of a particular group, really a creature lying at the intersection of several group identities.

Tarico explains: “In Woke culture, hierarchy is determined by membership in traditionally oppressed tribes … based largely on blood lines and chromosomes. Note that this is not about individual experience of oppression or privilege, hardship or ease. Rather, generic average oppression scores get assigned to each tribe and then to each person based on intersecting tribal identities. Thus, a queer female East Indian Harvard grad with a Ph.D. and E.D. position is considered more oppressed than the unemployed third son of a white Appalachian coal miner.”

People are initially seen either as friend or foe. Seeing the world in black and white terms reduces people to good and evil. If a person is marked supremely good, then they can do no evil. For example, you have probably been told that blacks cannot be racist. Only whites can be racist. You also see this in the claim that, in transitioning from “man” to “woman,” one’s “male privilege” is erased—a privilege that is itself a construct of an identitarian ideology. The question of whether an evil person can do good is conditional, determined by his or her relationship to the spiritually superior categories. In any case, the evil people must be made subordinate to the good people, this determined not by what they do but what they are.

This worldview is straightaway a recipe for legitimizing authoritarian relations. We see it in cancel culture, deplatforming, doxxing, mobbing, and all the other expressions of Wokeness.

In his talks, Richard Carrier notes the way Christianity attracts followers by using a specialized language, what Tarico called “insider jargon.” Insider phrases and slogans mark people as members of tribes. “Transwomen are women” perfectly illustrates the phenomenon. You must agree with this to mark yourself a tribe member. If you don’t, you’re worthy of being canceled.

I argue that specialized language not only frames reality, but produces a reality of its own. It demarcates what is acceptable at the same time is hypostatizes ideological constructs as part of fundamental, albeit cosmological, reality. So one does not simply offend a transwomen by denying she is a woman. One is attempting to erase her as a human being—even if one fully supports the right of people to express themselves as any gender they wish. As O’Brien told Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is not enough to tell those who define reality that “two plus two equals five.” Those subjected to the party rules must believe “two plus two equals five.” Whether it’s true is beside the point. You are simply not allowed to be a libertarian or a free thinker in the religion of Woke. You are either with the authoritarian or you are crushed under the authoritarian’s boot heel. It’s like living in a Muslim-majority society governed by the sharia.

Tarico lists several of the insider concepts used by evangelicals and compares them to those used by woke people. Here are some of the latter: “intersectionality,” “cultural appropriation,” “trigger warning,” “microaggression,” “privilege,” “fragility.” She writes that “jargon isn’t merely a tool for efficient or precise communication as it is in many professions—it is a sign of belonging and moral virtue.”

She works with the concept I have been working with, and John McWhorter has been working with this concept, too, and that’s the notion of “original sin.” Tarico writes, “In Woke culture, white and male people are born with blood guilt, a product of how dominant white and male people have treated other people over the ages and in modern times. Again, though, individual guilt isn’t about individual behaviors. A person born with original sin or blood guilt can behave badly and make things worse, but they cannot erase the inborn stain. (Note that this contradicts core tenets of liberal, humanist, and traditional progressive thought.)” (That’s her note in parenthesis. I would leave out progressive thought, since it is in many ways the beginning of the rot.)

I hasten to add that there are very particular ways a person can find their way out of evil, but this depends on contradictory rules (apropos of a religion). So, as Adolph Reed, Jr. points out in his essay One Trans Good the Other Not So Much, published in Common Dreams, the theology on this is tricky. He takes on the case of Rachel Dolezal, who claimed to be transracial but was denied permission by the woke to do so and was promptly cancelled once they learned she wasn’t black (since they could not tell from looking at her). You can read Reed’s essay to understand why, but his conclusion is at least worth stating here:

“The transrace/transgender comparison makes clear the conceptual emptiness of the essentializing discourses, and the opportunist politics, that undergird identitarian ideologies. There is no coherent, principled defense of the stance that transgender identity is legitimate but transracial is not, at least not one that would satisfy basic rules of argument. The debate also throws into relief the reality that a notion of social justice that hinges on claims to entitlement based on extra-societal, ascriptive identities is neoliberalism’s critical self-consciousness. In insisting on the political priority of such fictive, naturalized populations identitarianism meshes well with neoliberal naturalization of the structures that reproduce inequality. In that sense it’s not just a pointed coincidence that Dolezal’s critics were appalled with the NAACP for standing behind her work. It may be that one of Rachel Dolezal’s most important contributions to the struggle for social justice may turn out to be having catalyzed, not intentionally to be sure, a discussion that may help us move beyond the identitarian dead end.”

Returning to the CNN interview with Jones, the buried headline is the project to delegitimize conservative and evangelical Christianity and replace it with progressive ecumenicalism centered by a theology that makes whites and the culture identified with them—Western civilization—the chief source of evil in modernity, which they reject in favor of a postmodern situation where all the older truths fall away. It is a doctrine of transcendence in world that was secularized by the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. Detribalized by the dynamics of democratic-republicanism and nationalism, the left seeks to return to some comfort of the chaos of the world by retribalizing the West, which is intrinsically destructive to the values of the West: liberalism, rationalism, secularism, and so forth. It seeks to solve the problem of racism through theological means, which means not to solve the problem of all; as history tests to, solving any problem through religious means does not turn out well for those theologized to stand outside the proper moral order. Paradoxically, it seeks to solve the problem of any real antiracism, i.e., the negation of racism, by rebranding racism. The new and improved racism is antiracism.

Jones’ language is steeped in wokeness and a desire to theologize antiracism (see also Eric Mason’s Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice). This project is, at first approximation, redundant. “One measure of authenticity for white Christians is whether they link reconciliation with justice and repair,” Jones says. “It’s easy for a white Christian leader to jump in a march and put his arm around an African-American pastor. But will we see Joel Osteen preach a sermon calling for white Christians to reflect on the ugly parts of our history? Are pastors going to help white Christians free their faith from privileged claims of whiteness?”

But on closer examination the Church of Woke, while adapting Christian rhetoric of justice and repair, represents a rejection of the core principle of Christianity: personal salvation. Jones reveals the problem without recognizing it. “As long as white supremacy has a hold on our culture, it’s pretty comfortable for white Christian churches to say their theology is about personal salvation and personal lives.” Jones says. “Theology has been constricted to be only about personal piety, disconnected from claims of social justice. Everything outside of salvation has been labeled ‘politics’.”

Leaving the doctrine of predestination to one side, all brothers and sisters in Christ have a way out of their inherited sin: they can be saved. Every person is redeemable in the end. This is not true for white people in the Church of Woke. No matter how many times white people prostrate themselves before black people, no matter how many black feet white people wash, they will never not be white. They are required to be white forever. And since whiteness is intrinsically evil, white devils will always be evil. Antiracism is not an ideology seeking racial equality. This is a theology that strives to invert an imagined hierarchy.

Jones says, “White Christian churches have not just been complacent; they have not only been complicit. Rather, as the dominant cultural power in America, they have been responsible for constructing and sustaining a project to protect white supremacy and resist black equality.” However much this is true, it could not stop the abolition of systemic racism more than half a century ago. Far more powerful than the Christian Church is the Church of Woke. Under the guidance of Woke ideology, the country is well on its way to reclaiming systemic racism.

One last thing. Jones’ says, “Dylan Roof was a confirmed Lutheran, who, in his journal while imprisoned has been drawing crosses and white Jesus and is completely unrepentant.” The construct “white Jesus” is among the most obnoxious images of the Woke religion. Of course, there is no evidence Jesus was an actual historical person. I suppose he can be any race one wishes. Like Santa Claus. But if Jesus was a real person, he would likely have been a Middle Easterner. Since when were Middle Easterners stripped of their whiteness? Has anybody told Kasey Kasim yet?

I am 58 years old. My earliest memories of the 1960s finds me filled with optimism about the future. But I have over the many years since then watched my republic being dismantled and re-incorporated into a global economic order that has devastated the organizations of working people and undermined their class consciousness. 

The dismantling and reincorporation began in the 1960s at the hands of Democrats. Democrats—progressive, neoliberal, neoconservative—have been at the helm or behind the scenes all the way. Republican leaders during this the period for the most part bent to the will of the globalist corporatist elites who were busy denationalizing America. The current president is an exception. And that’s why the establishment has turned on him in an unprecedented manner.

We were told for decades that acknowledging the truth of globalization was a “conspiracy theory.” I’m an expert on political economy. Globalization is not a conspiracy. What happened has happened in the open and is well known to anybody who troubles himself to look around. Our rulers don’t hide it. They speak of these developments in virtuous terms. They tell us that globalization is good for us. There is really no theory involved. For the most part, we just describe what has happened and what is happening.

The Democratic Party has betrayed the working people of America. Hand-in-hand with the corporatists of Europe and Asia, they have betrayed the working classes of the world. 

For those of you who were not around when I made it clear that I was not and why I was not voting for Obama, and then Clinton, I want to make sure you know I will not vote for Biden and why I will not vote for him. For his entire career, Biden has been at the forefront of selling out the American working class to the globalists who are destroying my country. Biden is a corporatist shill. The worst of the worst. I could not vote for him. (See Joe Biden is the last, best hope for globalists, Financial Times.)

“But, Andy, what about Trump?” The lesser-of-two-evils argument is not only fallacious because it assumes that a vote can be used strategically in a national election, the argument is also wrong because it misidentifies the greater evil (See I’m With Her). Those who are dismantling my country are the greater evil. 

Here’s what I will do. If there is no one I can vote for, then I won’t vote. I won’t let people shame me with the canard that I’m throwing my vote away because I either don’t vote for who they want me to or don’t vote at all. Not voting for a principled reason is a noble political act. Freedom means the right to participate or to withdraw consent by not participating. What is it they say? If you choose not to decide, then you still have made a choice? Exactly. My vote can only be a vote for my aspirations and values. It’s a symbolic gesture in a democratic society. The hard work of democracy is about persuading people to do the right thing.

I have published papers on lynching, so this subject is close to me. I also know how to work from a societal reaction perspective where regular events become defined differently based on the greater context in which they appear. Ideology and worldview can dramatically change the meaning of events. 

I want to put in a word of caution concerning what I see as an emerging moral panic, which is perhaps understandable, but no less troubling. The risk is that public pressure could compel authorities to define things differently than they know them to be thus making the imagined appear real. Such acts of reifications will likely function to perpetuate a false narrative. 

The memes circling around social media about five black men found hanging from trees has all the marks of a moral panic. Such memes conjure images of lynchings and, in the present context, are sure to heighten racial suspicions and animosities.

U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee told Fox 26 Houston that she “believes there could be more to the story after an eerie pattern of recent suicides where black men were found hanging from trees.” What pattern? Calls to suicide hotlines skyrocketed during COVID-19. The hanging occurred in different cities. There’s security footage. No foul play is suspected. “People are on edge,” Jackson continued “They are nervous. This is a troubling, a challenging time for us. It is shocking in our community, and no death in that form should go uninvestigated. No death should go uninvestigated.

This is reckless rhetoric on Lee’s part. She is the one ramping up fear. First, the number is erroneous. Three black men, two found to have hanged themselves and another under investigation (no foul play suspected) is not five black men. Second, investigators see far more suicides than they see murders. How many more? Three times more. Investigators can tell the difference. Based on all the evidence we have at this point, the memes are inflammatory and irresponsible.

“We’re talking about multiple people hanging from trees across America in the middle of a race war that’s going,” said resident Anthony Scott, according to the station. “With everything that’s been transpiring, with all of the hangings that have been taking place within the last two weeks, why wouldn’t you automatically assume foul play?” Because there is no reason, too?

Suicide is common—even using the method of suicide we see in these cases. I’m not sure whether people know this, but more than 130 individuals kill themselves every day in America. Stop and reflect on that. In 2018, more than 48 thousand people killed themselves. In contrast, there were around 16 thousand homicides in 2018. Suicide by hanging is not unusual. In fact, hanging is the preferred method of suicide after firearms. Where people hang themselves depends. Some hang themselves in closets. Some in basements. Others from trees. Hanging oneself from a tree is rarer than other locations, but it happens. Whites are also found having hanged themselves from trees, too. 

We are going through a period sociologist Émile Durkheim would describe as anomic, a period where rapid change upsets the normative structure. This leads to a profound confusion in which some individuals find death preferable to living. In fact, suicides have been rising over the last two decades.

The myth of a racist America shapes perception. We see this in the fact that a large proportion of Americans believe police officers murder black men as a higher rate than they murder white men. This isn’t true, but because of the myth, a false perception perpetuates itself on the basis of selected and misperceived facts. The false perception is even causing people to call for dismantling law enforcement, which will make their communities even more dangerous. It causes them to focus on the bigger threats to black lives. Indeed, suicide is a threat to black lives.

Finally, as a conceptual and historical manner, lynchings are public events. (See Explanation and Responsibility: Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide, Journal of Black Studies; Race and Lethal Forms of Social Control, Crime, Law, & Social Change; see the blog entry Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide.) Victims of lynchings can be of any race. Lynchings are not reducible to hangings. In lynchings, the victim or victims die surrounded by a mob. In the case of racist lynchings, the victims are typically beaten, tortured, and then killed, with body parts taken as souvenirs. If the victims in these cases were victims of lynching, there would likely be a lot of evidence for it.

I recognize the psychological need to deny that a loved one did not commit suicide. Suicide still comes with a stigma. It especially tempting to suspect foul play the victim showed no suicidal tendencies. But the truth is that a lot people who kill themselves do not show suicidal tendencies. Suicide is sometimes expected. Other times, it comes as a complete surprise. It may be that one or more of these was a racially-motivated killing. These do happen. But the moral panic is unwarranted.

Update (June 18, 2020):

More signs of moral panic grow. According to several news agencies, authorities in Oakland, California, are going forward with a hate crime investigation despite the fact that several alleged “nooses” found in a park turned out to be foot swings, according to the black man who says he put them there. Mayor Libby Schaaf said Wednesday that the intentions “don’t matter” in light of the current racial climate.

“We have to start with the assumption that these are hate crimes,” the mayor said during a press conference. “The intentions do not matter, because the harm is real. They will matter with regard to whether or not this is, in fact, charged as a hate crime, but they do not matter about whether or not we should tolerate symbols of hate and violence and torture in our public spaces.”

No, Mayor Schaaf, intentions do matter. They were for exercising. There is no harm—unless somebody hurts themselves using them while working out. If the mayor interpret everything that looks sort of noose-like as a racist system I would suggest psychological counseling. Because that is crazy.

But the comment, “We have to start with the assumption that these are hate crimes,” is emblematic of a moral panic. Makeshift hoops for exercising, plainly not hate crimes, are seen as hate crimes because mass hysteria causes people to see things not for what they are but for what they expect—or want—them to be.

Update (June 24, 2020):

Bubba Wallace, the only black driver racing full-time in NASCAR, was told that he the target of a hate crime when a noose was found hanging in his garage. There was a massive public display of support by other drivers and fans ahead of the Geico 500. “I’m enraged by the act of someone placing a noose in the garage stall of my race team,” Richard Petty said in a statement. “There is absolutely no place in our sport or our society for racism. This filthy act serves as a reminder of how far we still have to go to eradicate racial prejudice and it galvanizes my resolve to use the resources of Richard Petty Motorsports to create change.”

Today, the US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama and the FBI said in a joint statement that the noose had been in Wallace’s garage stall since the October race at Talladega in 2019. It was a garage stall rope handle. (Remember Jussie Smollett? See Hate Crimes, Hoaxes, and Identity Politics.)

On June 9, NPR carried this piece by Ari Shapiro, “‘There Is No Neutral’: ‘Nice White People’ Can Still Be Complicit In A Racist Society.” It’s an interview with Robin DiAngelo, author of the popular “White Fragility.” Robin DiAngelo is a functionary of the bourgeoisie. (See my The Psychological Wages of Antiracism and Not All White People Are Racist.)

DiAngelo claims that racism is the status quo in the United States. Speaking for herself, she says that “it is comfortable for me, as a white person, to live in a racist society.” That’s why white people don’t see it, she contends. She wants to, in Shapiro’s words, “sustain the momentum of these protests” by making it (again, in Shapiro’s words), “uncomfortable for white people to continue to benefit from racist systems.”

Let her speak for herself. “We’ve got to start making it uncomfortable and figuring out what supports we’re going to put in place to help us continue to be uncomfortable,” DiAngelo says. “Because the forces of comfort are quite seductive.”

Exactly. The twenty-five million white Americans who live in poverty, and tens of millions more working class people at its margins struggling daily to make ends meet, are seduced by their comfort. It sounds like DiAngel’s comfortable existence is being mapped onto all whites, doesn’t it?

Who does she think she is? Not a nice white person, she will have you know. “Nice, white people who really aren’t doing anything other than being nice people are racist,” DiAngelo says, “We are complicit with that system. There is no neutral place.”

Get that, white people? You are a monolithic group, all enjoying comfort, and guilty of racism. DiAngelo is racist, too, but at least she’s trying. What are you doing?

According to DiAngelo, “Racism is what happens when you back one group’s racial bias with legal authority and institutional control.” Like the apartheid system in South Africa or Jim Crow in the United States South.

As I have reported on Freedom and Reason—what I thought was old news, but apparently not—the United States dismantled its system of apartheid more than half a century ago.

Undeterred by this fact, DiAngelo says, “When you back one group’s collective bias with that kind of power, it is transformed into a far-reaching system. It becomes the default. It’s automatic. It’s not dependent on your agreement or belief or approval.”

What collective bias? Backed by what power?

Plainly these claims are false. So why is DiAngelo so popular? Why is a person with a cracked theory of the United States being interviewed with such a degree of unconditional positive regard? It’s almost as if the bourgeoisie is distracting the working class by sowing racial division. Why would it want to do that?

DiAngelo says that black people have an understanding of racism that we, as white people, can never understand. Yet she presumes to speak for black people. And for white people.

There are lot of DiAngelos out there. Tim Wise hops in like an unwelcome toad in your potato salad. The white progressives on my Facebook newsfeed. The white progressives on corporate media. The white progressives in the administration and humanities and social science departments at our nation’s universities.

“Racism is the foundation of the society we are in,” DiAngelo says. “And to simply carry on with absolutely no active interruption of that system is to be complicit with it. And in that way, we can say that nice, white people who really aren’t doing anything other than being nice people are racist.”

Let’s not mince words. The slogans DiAngelo and her ilk are rehearsing are more than bullshit. They’re racist. If you buy into this argument, then you are buying into racism.

This is what racism is apart from a pseudoscientific theories of racial inferiority or institutional structures that systemically privilege some over others on the basis of race: supposing that certain attitudes and actions are intrinsic to all individuals abstractly grouped by skin color and holding all of them responsible for the actions of a few.

To say that all white people are complicit in racism—especially white people who do not subscribe to DiAngel’s cracked theory about white fragility—is a racist smear. It’s like saying that all blacks are violent criminals because some blacks are violent criminals. Its like saying that all blacks are complicit in violent crime even when they are not complicit in violent crime.

DiAngel’s claims are not true. America is not a racist society. America is a country that overcame racism. In a long Civil War, white people killed other white people to win freedom for black people. Americans amended their Constitution to forbid chattel slavery, a system of involuntary servitude based on race. Americans passed a historic law—the Civil Rights Act of 1964—to end segregation in public institutions and places of public accommodations. Americans instituted a comprehensive program of reparations in the wake of that law. Today, black people move in all spaces of American society. They are in academia, business, entertainment, government, and sports.

Robin DiAngelo is a purveyor of racism. She is the worst of the worst. Okay, maybe the loathsome Tim Wise is worse. But DiAngelo is the current hack cult leader. She is the Richard Spencer of the left (see What racists and anti-racists have in common, at Spiked).

That the media has taken up the line of race identitarianism announces an agenda at work. What is it? It’s simple, really. The cultural managers in academia and in mainstream media perpetuate the myth of racism to keep working people from thinking and talking about what really matters: CLASS. If it’s not intentional, it’s functional. It’s a tried-and-true strategy of divide and rule.

The ruling class has used racism to divide the people for centuries. Racism was invented to fracture the proletariat. It will always serve that purpose. Its new form exploits the narcissist desire of progressives to appear virtuous. The only way racism doesn’t fracture the working class is if we reject it. Therefore, we must reject race merchants like Robin DiAngelo, Al Sharpton, and Nancy Pelosi.

And we need to reject it now. When I wrote a moment ago that America is not a racist country, I meant that it is not right now a racist country. But if we allow DiAngelo and her crowd and their hysterical ideas to worm their way more deeply into our culture and society, it will be.

Want an concrete example of the agenda? The matter with which progressives are now most obsessed is demonstrably false—the claim that lethal officer-civilian encounters are systemically racist. The science shows that, not only are blacks not disproportionately killed by the police, but that, controlling for crime and context, it’s whites who are disproportionately killed by the police. But truth doesn’t matter in the postmodern multiverse.

#BlackLivesMatter rests on a false premise. The elite know it. They’re neither ignorant or stupid. They push the false narrative systemic racism—what Kwame Ture, aka Stokley Carmichael, notorious opponent of nonviolence and racial integration, called “institutional racism”—to confuse the people about the real situation facing them: global corporatism and the neoliberal reorganization of social life.

The establishment is dividing America by race to keep America from democracy. Don’t let them.

Troy L. Smith’s op-ed, Stop using ‘black-on-black’ crime to deflect away from police brutality, continues the irresponsible practice of rationalizing the problem of black-on-black crime. “If they cared, they’d be asking about crime within the African American community year-round,” Smith writes.

Right off the bat, I have to confess to, in part, making a version of Smith’s argument. In 2016, in the pages of TruthOut, I write, “Decrying Black-on-Black homicide after every high-profile killing of a civilian by a cop has become cliché for conservative pundits (and almost obligatory for liberals who want to be taken seriously). But it is entirely beside the point.” In blogs entries since I have walked back those sentences (Demoralization and the Ferguson Effect, The Problematic Premise of Black Lives Matter, Death by Cop Redux). Why? Because the science and moral imperative compelled me to.

Now I talk about the high levels of crime and violence in black-majority neighborhoods year-around. A lot of people do. Not because we want blacks to look bad. Because we care. Moreover, I am a professional criminologist. It’s my job to care. I have an obligation to strive to be right about this (and every) issue. You know who doesn’t care? The media doesn’t care. Those who want to abolish the police don’t care. We must ask ourselves, Why do those folks only care about black bodies when the killer is a cop? It’s not entirely beside the point.

Smith writes, “When an opponent of Black Lives Matters talks about ‘blacks killing blacks’ it’s almost always to deflect attention away from police brutality.” What is the evidence for this claim? Back in 2016, I wrote that the problem of black-on-black crime was cliché. I never meant to downplay the problem. I was focused on critiquing Heather Mac Donald’s thesis, which I now recognize as not only correct, but the definitive position on the subject. Smith just said he expected that, if we cared, we’d be asking about year-around. Which is it? That’s the dilemma that moved me.

Smith’s essay is chockfull of hyperbolic claims. “When someone commits an act of terrorism against in the United States, which rightfully leads to anger and sadness,” he writes, “no one asks, ‘Well what about how many Americans kill other Americans each year?’” But I hear that all the time. When I write about Islamic terrorism (which has, for the time being at least, subsided), people are quick to scold me with numbers showing that death toll from terrorism is minuscule compared to those who are killed every year by homicide in America by Americans—especially if the perpetrators are white.

“But, by all means, let’s talk about ‘black on black crime,’” Smith continues. “You’ve probably heard a statistic like this before—The majority of black people murdered are killed by other black people. That’s true, but also misleading. The overwhelming majority of white murder victims each year are killed by white assailants. So, when’s the last time you heard the term ‘white on white crime’?” Every time there is a serial killer on the loose. Every time there is a school shooting. Every time there is a mass murder. Then, even though whites are not proportionately more like to be the perpetrator in mass murder, the corporate media and social media is overflowing with op-eds and memes blaming white men for murder and wondering why we don’t call them terrorists (in fact, we do). (See Everything Progressives Say About Mass Shootings is Wrong…and Racist.) 

“White supremacists have attributed the fact that crime rates are higher among African Americans than whites to people of color being biologically more prone to violence. In reality, crime is directly linked more to poverty than race or any other factor.” This is a straw man. For sure, the biology thing is nonsense. Race is not a biological thing. It’s a social construct. But the poverty argument won’t work. There are three times more whites who live in poverty than there are blacks. Yet blacks are responsible for more than half of all homicides. What is more, blacks have been a lot poorer in the past—back when rates of black-on-black homicide were a lot lower.

Scroll back to the previous paragraph in Smith’s op-ed. Note that the character of intraracial crime is thrown out there without noting that less than 6 percent of the population is responsible for more than half of all murders in America. They are black men. That crime is intraracial in a de facto segregated society is not unexpected. That more than half of murders are committed by a small percentage of the population is. The homicide victimization rate for blacks is six times higher than for whites. Moreover, the intraracial character of the violence is greater than it is for whites.

Smith writes, “African Americans are two and half times more likely than whites to be killed by law enforcement.” This is true. But putting a statistic out there without explanation suggests a bad inference (I made this error in my 2016 TruthOut piece). Consider an analogy. Men are more likely to be killed by the police than women. Why? Because men are overrepresented in those serious criminal activities that are most likely to result in lethal officer-civilian interactions. Likewise, blacks are overrepresented in those serious criminal activities that are most likely to result in lethal officer-civilian interactions. Presenting this statistic without context lies at the heart of the false narrative that propels Black Lives Matter.

“When you step outside every day knowing you’re twice as likely to be killed by someone sworn to protect you just because of the color of your skin,” writes Smith, “you’re dealing with a different type of fear.” But that’s not how it goes down. You’re not very likely to be killed by the police by merely stepping outside your house. That almost never happens. Despite what the BLM rhetoric makes sound like, white police officers are not roaming the streets randomly targeting black men. However, one sharply increases his chances of being killed by the police (black or white) when he engages in serious criminal conduct. Especially if he’s armed. And if he threatens the police, his chances of being killed increase exponentially. A police officer, like every other person, has a right to defend himself from death or injury. And it’s not as if he is putting himself in harms way because he wants to. It’s his job to apprehend violent criminals. Society puts him in that position. Society needs him in that position.

The bottom line is, if Black Lives Matter wants to reduce the risk of black people being killed by police, beyond the common sense reforms that research and human decency suggest, then its leaders and members need to join with those seeking to reduce violence criminal offending in all our communities. Leftwing activists must stop apologizing for and rationalizing crime and violence and deal rationally with this issue. Smith’s op-ed doesn’t do that. On the contrary. It’s his op-ed that’s an exercise in diversion from the more serious problem of black-on-black homicide by reinforcing a false narrative about the racial disparity in police shootings.

If we care, we shouldn’t let another day go by without our leaders addressing the fact that black-majority neighborhoods are plagued by rampant crime and violence. Not only do black men murder more than any other race, black men are the victims of murder more than any other race. Don’t those victims matter? We should be talking about this year-around.

I understand why progressives want to distract others about this matter. The most dangerous places in America are our inner cities. They are mostly run by progressives Democrats. Progressive urban policy has failed city dwellers. I also understand why somebody would find the levels of crime and violence in these communities embarrassing. Nobody want’s their communities to look bad. I understand why it feels like victim blaming to talk about inner-city crime (in the long run, William Ryan’s 1976 Blaming the Victim probably did more harm than good). But we don’t save lives by denying and downplaying the significance of crime and violence. I refuse to do that anymore.

The article, “Economics, Dominated by White Men, Is Roiled by Black Lives Matter,” published in The New York Times (June 10, 2020), written by Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersley, takes up the complaint that there is not enough diversity in the discipline of economics. The complaint here is part of a larger discourse on the importance of diversity in deepening knowledge.

The occasion that draws the attention of The New York Times to this subject is a tweet by the editor of The Journal of Political Economy, a top academic journal, University of Chicago economist Harald Uhlig (a German national), in which he criticizes Black Lives Matters protesters as “flat earthers” for wanting to defund the police. Predictably, there are calls for Uhlig to resign his editorship.

The NYTimes article begins: “The national protests seeking an end to systemic discrimination against black Americans have given new fuel to a racial reckoning in economics, a discipline dominated by white men despite decades of efforts to open greater opportunity for women and nonwhite men.”

The writers presume a cause they do not demonstrate—or at least fail to challenge. The constant assuming as given “systemic discrimination against black Americans,” or systemic racism (or institutional racism), lends the protests—even the riots—an undeserved legitimacy. The words “alleged,” “perceived,” or “supposed” would be very useful here.

On the specific matter of lethal officer-civilian interactions, which is the inspiration of this article, the evidence does not support the BLM claim. Relative to population, blacks are more likely to be killed by a cop than whites, but disparity does not necessarily indicate inequity. There could be reasons other than racism that explain the disparity. In fact, there are. Research of the claim finds that black overrepresentation in serious crime explains racial disparities in lethal office-civilian interactions.

The article ignores those studies and instead uses White House National Economic Council Larry Kudlow as an example of the problem the article presumes. Kudlow has told reporters, “I don’t believe there is systemic racism in the US.” For the reporters, Kudlow’s answer exposes a discipline that “remains nowhere close to a full-scale shift on racial issues.” A full-scale shift, it seems, is what the writers desire. The suggestion is the Kudlow is racist by expressing a belief that accords with evidence. That this is an indirect dig at Trump should be obvious.

The reporters identify two problems: (1) the field is discriminatory towards blacks, and by this they mean that it is not racially diverse enough and doesn’t promote or publish enough black scholarship, and (2) many economists refuse to acknowledge discrimination in country at large. I understand this last problem to mean that there are economists who find no empirical support for the claim that systemic racism lies at the center of the difficulties some black people experience and that not going beyond the data to toe an ideological line is a problem. The way the matter is put suggests that a correct ideological conclusion is more desirable than findings reached with science.

“As protests against discrimination have grown in recent days,” Casselman and Tankersley write, “a conversation has erupted—often led by black economists—over how the lack of diversity has left the profession ill equipped for a moment where policymakers are seeking ideas on how to combat racial inequality in policing, employment and other areas.”  

The idea that having a diverse field in a discipline increases the power and scope of scientific endeavor is identitarian. It is the mark of postmodernist corruption of scientific epistemology. This is the notion of the “epistemic privilege” of identity, namely that a person of one race can produce greater truths than a person of another race because of the former can see things by virtue of his identity, presumed as monolithic, while the latter is unable to see things because of his.

We hear this in the form of the throat clearing exercise: “Speaking as a black woman….” Imagine if I, a white man, cleared my throat with, “Speaking as a white man….” Who besides a white supremacist would find that addition to the point I am about to make as anything more than asserting a racial (and sexual) privilege?

How do phenotypic characteristics produce “ideas on how to combat racial inequality in policing, employment and other areas”? How does being a member of a particular race help a person, as Howard Spriggs, an economist at Howard University, suggests, “to reflect and rethink how we study disparities”? Are white economist lacking a gene for reflecting and rethinking?

Spriggs, an accomplished black man, also served in the Obama Administration. I raise the matter of Spriggs’ race because systemic racism doesn’t seem to have hindered him. Just like it doesn’t seem to have hindered Glenn Lowry, economics professor at Brown, also a black man, who sharply disagrees with the identitarianism expressed by academics like Spriggs. (Why wasn’t Lowry interviewed for this story?)

Roland Fryer, an economist at Harvard, who found no anti-black bias in police shootings, did not come to that conclusion in spite of his blackness. (Why wasn’t Fryer interviewed for this story?) Perhaps not incidentally, Fryer’s paper on racial disparities in police-civilian interactions was published in The Journal of Political Economy.

Spriggs tells Casselman and Tankersley, “We find ourselves, as so often happens in these ugly police cases, having to prove that acts of discrimination are exactly that—discrimination.” But, as a professional economist, one whom I presume is interested in the pursuit of truth, does Spriggs really want other economists to not expect that he would have to prove his claims? I can’t imagine black scholars like Lowry and Fryer agreeing with that.

The reporters relay anecdotes told to them by Lisa Cook, a Michigan State University economist, of students asking her “where does this racially hostile environment come from?” They ask, “Why does this racial discrimination exist in the pinnacle of the social sciences?” Again, the premise is assumed without demonstration. To buttress her claims, Casselman and Tankersley locate an article from 1962 where Nobel Prize winning economist George Stigler contends that blacks do poorly in the workforce because they are less educated and not as ambition as white workers.

The language Stigler uses certainly looks bad in the light of almost 60 years of progress. The reporters themselves admit, “Few scholars today would use such language.” “But the ideas persist,” they continue. “Economics journals are still filled with papers that emphasize differences in education, upbringing or even IQ rather than discrimination or structural barriers.”

As readers of my blog will know, I am highly critical of research using IQ. I do not regard IQ as a valid or reliable measure of intelligence. However, research emphasizing education and upbringing is hardly indicative of the assumptions supposed to be lying behind Stigler’s 1962 article. I am a sociologist, and education and upbringing are important factors to account for in explaining the life chances of individuals. So are factors of discrimination and structure barriers. But these are factors to be demonstrated and measured, not merely asserted.

Economics is a science. The racial identity of economists brings no more to economics than it does to physics or biology. The assumption is that a white economist will shape analysis to fit with a bias, which is hardly transparent way of saying that white economists produce scholarship advancing their racial interests. What goes along with this is the idea of “unconscious implicit bias,” a phantom of the social sciences.

Validating the notion that one’s race gives them special powers of perception lies at the core of this story. The pervasiveness of postmodernist epistemology is something that those who do science—and those who depend on science in a technologically advance society—must confront. It is inherently corrupting to the enterprise of knowledge production. It weaves into the fabric of apparent scientific conclusions systemic bias, namely that of ideological standpoint. It accuses science of a race bias on the grounds that the majority of scientists are white (in a white majority society) and seeks to rectify this alleged bias with the introduction of race-conscious politics. If that sounds paradoxical, that’s because it is.

Unfortunately, many scientists are reluctant to ask whether race actually has the power to deepen scientific knowledge because for decades the cultural ground of the academy has been worked in a way that to ask such a question leaves one open to accusations of racism. Racism has become not the intentional actions of person, but the failure of persons to admit the presence of phenomena they are to take on faith. The exercise is anti-science. Under pressure from university administrators, whose interests do not always lie with facilitating the production of objective knowledge, to diversify their departments on the basis of racial identity, the injection of racial politics into science is becoming normal.