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American's Tortured Discourse on Race, Part II

Part II of a Three-Part Article

W. E. Smith, Editor, The Social Democrat

It is of course indisputable that prior to the latter part of the 20^th Century America was a systemically—and systematically—racist society, especially in the Southern states. Until the passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, along with new vigilance from federal courts in protecting the rights of racial minorities under the 14^th Amendment (including the 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision), separate and unequal treatment, if not officially sanctioned by the federal government (though often even dictated by some state governments), was certainly condoned. And I believe that this past systematic discrimination and unequal treatment, applied in many cases to people who are still living today, is undoubtedly a major factor in the disparities found in many success measures between ARBs and ARWs. In regard to those older racialized-as-“Black” Americans who lived in pre-Civil Rights America, it cannot be doubted that their chances at both education and well-compensated employment were seriously diminished as compared to the chances of ARWs. I believe it equally indisputable that their marginalization and greater poverty affected the life chances of their children.  And I believe that the only proper remedy for this is a reasonable plan of reparations (as opposed to some of the outrageous proposals made by, for example, the State of California’s recently convened commission[1]).

Consider an 80-year-old woman and man today in 2023, born in 1942 who, for the first 25 years of their lives were relegated by governments to inferior schools, barred from lucrative professions, kept out of universities, told to ride in the back of the bus, turned away from hotels, run out of upcoming suburban neighborhoods: in other words, denied full and equal participation in American life and thereby deprived, to varying degrees, of the opportunity to thrive economically, socially and culturally. This was all done with, if not the active participation of the state (as in the South) then with its tacit permission. When the U.S. Government promulgated the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 we might say that the federal government, at least, had made discrimination based on racialized identity a crime and that the federal government was no longer complicit in unfair treatment. I think we can safely say, however, that anyone born before 1968 was subjected, for at least part of their lives, to officially sanctioned unfair treatment.

For purposes of reconciliation, we will assume that the unfair treatment these citizens were subjected to, as well as the yet more egregious unfair treatment imposed upon their parents and grandparents, presented an unmistakable handicap in the run for the American Dream. We will further assume that the extent to which the net worth and income level of an ARB born in these years differs from that of an American racialized as “White” born in the same year is the result of the unfair treatment to which ARBs were subjected. The reparations amount will then be calculated as follows: the recipients will be all Americans racialized as “Black” who were citizens of the United States prior to 1968. The reparations amount will be on a sliding scale depending on how long the recipient lived under the pre-Civil Rights apartheid regime. The fullest payment will go to those who had attained the age of 18 by 1968: these beneficiaries will receive, first, a lump sum bringing their net worth up to the median net worth of ARWs born the same year (if their net worth is lower than that figure). Second, their annual incomes will be supplemented by an amount equal to the difference between their income and the median income of ARWs born in the same year if their income is lower than that amount. Payments received by those who had not yet reached adulthood in 1968 will be reduced by a fixed percentage for every non-adult year lived after 1968, so that the amount received by a person who reached the age of 18 in 1969 will be 1/18^th less than the full amount, a person born in 1970’s payment will be 2/18s less than the full amount, and so on until a person reaching the age of 18 in 1986 will receive no payment at all.

Aside from being the right thing to do, such a reparations plan, making restitution for indisputable unequal treatment, will go a long way toward eradicating the differences in wealth and income between ARBs and ARWs, when statistically aggregated together as separate groups. Consider that these lump-sum net-worth payments and income supplements for every ARB born prior to 1986 will be based upon the average net worths and incomes of ARWs who are currently 37 years old and older, a demographic which includes American society’s wealthiest cohort.

The Prevailing American Left Discourse on Race will probably, at this point, say, “We like that you’re talking reparations, though we’d like the amounts to be higher and include more people, but we still have the problem of America’s ongoing, systemic racism, reflected in disparities not only in income and wealth, but also in educational attainment, health outcomes, hiring, exposure to pollutants, police shootings, prison time and more besides.”

The question once again, though, is not whether ARBs perform less well, when statistically aggregated together as a racialized group, on various success measures (this is indisputable) but first, whether an ongoing, systemic racism is the cause of these disparities; and secondly (and the response to this question will depend upon our response to the first) what, if anything, should be done about such disparities. Since my aim here is an article, not a book, I will more closely consider just two additional areas where ARBs, when aggregated together as a group, are claimed to receive unequal treatment: fatal police shootings and education. But before moving on to these particular cases, I’d like to dispose of one great fallacy of thinking which is a major factor in the funhouse quality of the Left’s Prevailing Discourse on Race: that is what seems a willful determination, first, to conflate individuals with the entire racialized group some wish to place them in and, second, to conflate the past with the present, so that any harm done any member of a racialized group other than those racialized as “White” (ARWs) is assigned not only to all living members of that racialized group, but to all members of that racialized group forever in time. The crucial foundation of this mode of thinking is, first, to essentialize race, a made-up concept, and assign everyone to a racialized group. We then treat this group as a corporate body which undergoes everything together and which, like a corporation but unlike single human beings, has an inter-generational lifespan. So if a person racialized as “Black” is shot by police it is seen as an attack upon all people racialized as “Black”: though if a person racialized as “White” is killed unjustly by the police (as in the case of Daniel Shaver, on which more below), it is not seen as an attack on all people racialized as “White” but merely a case of bad policing—or perhaps as an attack on all people. Further, an injustice or barbarity committed against a person racialized other than “White” at any time in the past, even hundreds of years ago, is considered an attack upon all people racialized that way today. Thus, many ARBs today speak as if they personally have been treated badly by slavery and appear to resent this non-fact bitterly: an absurd notion, yet one reinforced constantly by the American Left’s current twisted discourse on race. Make no mistake, I believe that race-based slavery in the United States was a barbaric nightmare: I simply do not think that anyone living today is suffering from it. I also think the Viking raids of the 8^th and 9^th centuries were a barbaric nightmare; but I don’t resent Danes and Norwegians because their ancestors swooped down on my ancestors’ villages, raping the women, burning the crops, killing the men and taking the others away into slavery. By essentializing race, the Prevailing Left Discourse creates worlds of false feelings and false resentments.  And also false accusations: just as all people racialized as “Black” living today (ARBs) are told by the prevailing Left race discourse that slavery is a harm that was inflicted upon them, this discourse also tells all people racialized as “White” that they are somehow responsible for things done either by their ancestors several generations ago or by people to whom they are not even related other than having been put in the same racialized category by those who wish to racialize humanity. Our increasingly multi-racial society can render some odd conundrums when we attempt to apply this type of thinking: consider the children of, for example, one racialized-as-“White” parent and one racialized-as-“Black” parent: should they resent themselves for inflicting slavery upon themselves?

The area of the Prevailing Left Race Discourse perhaps most characterized by wild claims, incoherence and unexamined assumptions is policing, especially in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minnepolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Although Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison was unable to present any evidence that Chauvin’s actions were motivated by racial factors, Floyd’s murder has been coopted all over the world as proof positive of lethal racism in American law enforcement. It is a common assumption among the Prevailing Left Race Discourse that police officers racialized as “White” are in constant search of people racialized as “Black” so that they can gun them down in cold blood. Unfortunately, there is little evidence to support this contention. An extensive 2016 study by Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer (himself racialized as “Black”), examining several data sets found, to his surprise, that ARBs were not more likely to be shot by police than ARWs after controlling for circumstances of the police-citizen interaction (Freyer actually found, in his data sets, that ARBs were less likely to experience lethal force in interactions with police). Evidence such as this does not of course stop the Prevailing Discourse crowd from referencing the disproportionate number of ARBs killed by police, when aggregated nationally, and without further reference or refinement, as proof that American police are gunning for Americans with darker skins. Never mentioned in the Prevailing Left Discourse, of course, is the simple fact that Americans racialized as “Black” commit violent crimes at multiples the rate of Americans racialized as “White.”[2] This fact is important, because significantly higher rates of violent criminal activity among ARBs mean more interaction with police who are attempting to apprehend potentially armed and dangerous criminals. If police shot a fixed percentage of all suspects, without regard to racialized categories, they would end up shooting many more ARBs simply because they are having a wildly disproportionate number of interactions with violent criminal suspects within this racialized group. I should add that Fryer’s conclusions have been contested: I am not a statistician and cannot judge the facts on my own; however, if there were truly a disproportionate level of police killings of ARBs as glaring and “systemic” as the BLM crowd would have us believe, one would think that the evidence would be so pervasive and conclusive as not to be the subject of fine-toothed debate between rival academics.

The obverse of the “White police out to murder Black Americans” is the idea that police would never inflict the kind of treatment that was inflicted upon George Floyd or Eric Garner upon a person racialized as “White.” Perhaps people that believe this, however, have not seen the body-camera footage of the 2017 murder of unarmed Daniel Shaver (racialized as “White”) by Mesa, Arizona, police while he helplessly crawled along a hotel corridor, attempting, in a significantly inebriated state, to follow their angry instructions. (That footage is on Youtube if you have the stomach for it.) Nor are they aware, perhaps, of the 2016 killing of racialized-as-"White" Tony Timpa, who died in circumstances closely resembing those of the deaths of Garner and Floyd: Dallas police officer Dustin Dillard pinned Timpa to the ground using his body weight for 14 minutes while the already restrained, mentally ill Timpa continually complained that he was in pain and about to die. And the meme of racism as the major if not sole explanation of unjustified police killings was jolted by the gruesome beating death of FedEx driver Tyre Nichols (racialized as “Black”) in January of 2023 by five Memphis police officers also racialized as “Black.”[3]

None of this is offered as proof, of course, that Americans racialized as “Black” don’t experience greater levels of police misconduct than ARWs. In fact, Harvard researcher Roland Fryer did find that people racialized as “Black” were substantially more likely, given similar circumstances accounting for the police-citizen interaction, to experience non-lethal use of force at the hands of police. This conclusion is mirrored in data from New York City after the implementation of “broken-window,” “zero-tolerance,” or “order-maintenance” policing in the 1990s. According to criminologists Michael White and Henry Fradella, the practice quickly veered from aggressive policing of observable offenses to the interdiction of potential future offenses. Officers began to be rated and promoted based on a “numbers game,” with an “exclusive” focus on “stops and arrests.” In the vast majority of cases no wrongdoing was found: the percentage of NYPD stops which led to arrests remained constant from year to year, at between five and six percent. White and Fradella quote one officer as saying, “We frisk 20, maybe 30 people a day. Are they all by the book? Of course not.” New York City’s stop and frisk mania reached its peak in 2011, when the city’s citizens were stopped a total of 685,724 times. A calculation from the arrest rate, hovering between five and six percent, yields the conclusion that at least 644,580 of the people detained and harassed by the NYPD that year were committing no crime when they were subjected to the indignity of detention and possible pawing by police officers. And the abuse was continual and unrelenting: 45% of surveyed respondents reported having been stopped at least nine times! With a focus on the city's inner-city, high-crime neighborhoods, it is no surprise that most of the victims of these unconstitutional stops were ARBs and ARLs.

Much of the anger that boiled over in Ferguson, MO, after the Michael Brown killing, and nationally after George Floyd’s murder, was stoked by these constant lower-level encroachments by police upon the civil rights of ARBs. Police misconduct against anyone is shameful and unacceptable; for this reason, I have advocated (on The Social Democrat site) for community police supervision boards with standing legal counsel, subpoena power, and an unqualified authority to dismiss officers such boards deem unsuitable to work in their neighborhoods. TSD also advocates for the return to the more strict standards for stop and frisk prevailing before the 1968 Terry v. Ohio ruling (see Terry v. Ohio and the Making of the American Police State, also on TSD) and the end of criminal prosecution for mere possession of recreational drugs (this latter measure would radically reduce the reasons for police interaction with all American citizens, thereby going a long way to solving the problem of non-lethal abuse). And while evidence suggests that some officers treat citizens other than those racialized as “White” with less respect; the Daniel Shaver video should make it plain that ARWs can also bear the brunt of brutal police treatment; I myself, who am racialized as “White,” personally have experienced police treatment worthy of a South American dictatorship.

Unfortunately, the narrative of “police out to kill black people” has taken such a hold among the American Left that it is almost de rigeur for many even highly educated, middle- or upper-class ARBs to opine that they live in constant worry that they or their sons or daughters won’t make it home alive. Yet cases of a law-abiding ARBs shot or killed by racialized-as-“White” police are extremely rare: Philando Castile, who told the officer who stopped his car he had a gun and was shot while reaching for his wallet (there was testimony that he ignored the nervous officer’s instructions not to do so); adolescent Tamir Rice, tragically shot and killed in Cleveland by officer Timothy Loehman in 2014, was reported aiming a lethal-looking airsoft pistol at random people at a rec center; or more recently, Elijah McCain, whom police detained for the non-crime of wearing winter clothes in the summer and died after being injected by attending EMTs with an overdose of a powerful sedative.[4] Neither Castile, Rice nor McCain were committing a crime and only McCain resisted arrest, but most of the high-profile cases of police shootings of ARBs involved men involved in criminal activity and violently resisting arrest (Michael Brown charged officer Darren Wilson and attempted to wrest his gun away and shoot him, this after violently shaking down a local shopkeeper; Eric Garner was illegally selling cigarettes on the sidewalk and after refusing to provide ID so that he could be booked resisted arrest; George Floyd had just passed counterfeit money to a shopkeeper and also violently resisted arrest). None of this is to say that the proper penalty for assault on a police officer, robbing a store, selling contraband cigarettes, resisting arrest or passing counterfeit currency should be the death penalty, executed on the spot at the discretion of the arresting officer. Absent a credible claim of self-defense, these officers were subject to charges of murder and at least one of them, Derek Chauvin, is now serving a 21-year prison sentence. My point is that the narrative that nice, law-abiding ARBs should live in constant fear that a police officier racialized as “White” will gun him or her or their children down at any moment is absurd. According to the most recent data,[5]  with 10,470 ARB murder victims in 2022, about 9,423 ARBs, or 90 percent, were killed by other ARB private citizens. Meanwhile, fatal police shootings have held steady for several years now at something over 1,000 per year, the majority of these against Americans racialized as “White” and a couple hundred per year ARB. Looked at statistically, the chance of an ARB being fatally shot by police is 5.7 out of one million,[6] while the chance of an ARB being killed by another ARB private citizen is about 95 out of one million, 16 times higher. Therefore, to state the blindingly obvious, the far greatest danger to the safety of any ARB is being shot and killed by another ARB, with the chance of being killed by police extremely remote. And if one is not breaking the law and/or resisting arrest, the chance of being killed by a police officer in America today appears to be virtually nil: though, admittedly, not zero, due to human error (Castile: the officer misjudged Castile’s actions and/or Castile did not hear or ignored the officer’s instructions; Tamir Rice: he didn’t hear or ignored police instructions and was unfortunately armed with a toy gun that looked exactly like the real thing); or improper police procedure (Breonna Taylor: police did not adequately announce their presence, resulting in Kenneth Walker firing on them from inside Taylor’s apartment and they returning fire). If BLM and their fellow travelers were really concerned about saving the lives of people racialized as “Black,” it would seem that the most effective use of their time, resources and energy would be a vigorous lobbying to find means to reduce the 10,000-plus per-year murders of ARBs at the hands of other ARBs.

I find myself concluding that evidence supports claims of some degree of unequal treatment upon Americans racialized as “Black,” but that the Prevailing Discourse has wildly mischaracterized the problem. I am aware of no solid evidence, as already noted, that police are more likely to use lethal force against a suspect racialized as “Black” under similar circumstances. There is good evidence, however, that ARBs, to a disproportionate extent residents of high-crime urban neighborhoods, especially when “broken windows” policing models are in force, are more likely to be subject to non-lethal force than Americans racialized as “White” when both groups are aggregated nationally. Whether this greater level non-lethal force is due to simple racism, however, may be impossible to conclude. Since we don’t have examples of dense, urban, high-crime neighborhoods populated chiefly by people racialized as “White,” we don’t have a similarly situated group to use as a control. If there were neighborhoods where the majority of residents were racialized as “White”; and such residents were committing violent crimes at multiples the rates of others, we could look at the level of abusive policing in these neighborhoods and compare it to that happening in majority ARB neighborhoods with similar levels of criminal activity. Since no such neighborhoods exist, however, it is impossible to make true comparisons in this area. Greater non-lethal abuse may be correlated, in other words, with policing in dense, high-crime neighborhoods, not with race. Operationally, it should make little difference. All police misconduct is deplorable, including unconstitutional stops, and as already noted, we need highly empowered community policing boards, a tighter interpretation of the 4^th Amendment and no criminal prosecution of simple drug possession.

The Black Lives Matter movement, though founded upon the unsupportable assumption that police officers racialized as “White” are more likely, under similar circumstances, to use lethal force against a person racialized as “Black” than a person racialized as “White,” may have served a vital purpose in alerting the public to the problem of police misconduct and the excessive use of force in American policing. Unfortunately, in racializing the problem they have missed the opportunity to address a crisis that affects all Americans. Consider that while 944 Americans racialized as “Black” were fatally shot by police in the U.S. between 2017 and 2020, police fatally shot 1,800 people racialized as “White” within that same time period, or nearly twice as many. (For too many police officers, one might say, “White” lives may not matter very much, either.) It is true that there is a disproportion: ARBs make up half as many police shooting victims as ARWs, yet there are nearly five times as many ARWs in America as ARBs. But as noted earlier, this is most certainly explained by the fact that ARBs, in the aggregate, commit violent crimes at many times the rate of ARWs, leading to a great many more interactions with police in situations where gunfire is likely to be a factor. When we push the discourse that excessive police violence is chiefly a race problem, we completely ignore the possibly unnecessary deaths of the about 450 Americans racialized as “White” who are shot to death each year by the police: we nullify these people, ignore them and their suffering—people like Daniel Shaver—because they were not of the racialized group with which the media is now fascinated. We also give ARB officers who abuse their authority (for example, the ARB officers who killed Tyre Nichols) a pass. And, after all, if the problem is framed as one of disproportion, it could be solved by merely directing the police to shoot 2,700 more ARWs each year, thereby bringing the proportions into line. America’s problem with fatal police shootings is a problem not of racial disproportion but of fatal police shootings. Consider that in 2022, when American police fatally shot 1,097 people, police in England and Wales fatally shot two: yes, you read that right, two. American policing in general would appear to be excessively violent, and Americans of every racialized group are paying the price. The framing of excessive police violence as chiefly a race problem is an essentially false narrative, and thereby to be avoided on purely moral grounds by all people interested in honest discourse rather than propaganda; further, being false, and so easily contested, it brings the entire cause of demanding better policing into disrepute. Finally, by framing the issue as a race narrative, Black Lives Matter and their mouthpieces in politics and the press fail to mobilize the ARW population, who are told they are the collective perpetrators of this problem rather than, in absolute numbers, its greatest victims.

Is a systemic racism evident in America policing? There are about 60 million interactions between police and citizens per year in the United States, or about 300 million between 2018 and today. Within that time frame, there have been, let’s say,  six or eight high-profile claims of unjustified killings of people racialized as “Black” by police. Setting aside whether every one of these killings was actually unjustified (in many of the cases, juries exonerated the officers involved), we’re looking at six or eight cases out of 300 million police-citizen interactions. I in no way want to minimize the gravity of even one unnecessary killing (whatever the racialized categories involved), but I simply make the point here that, as in other areas of the Prevailing Discourse, what is portrayed as a systemic problem (Americans racialized as “Black” being unnecessarily shot by police) is instead a highly rare occurrence (one in 40 - 50 million police-citizen interactions). High profile cases like that of Erol Garner and George Floyd are, in a sense, the exceptions that prove the rule: the rule being that in 300 million police-citizen interactions, roughly 299,999,992 of them resulted in no unjustified use of lethal force (that we are aware of, anyway) against an ARB. One could only conclude from this that, systemically speaking, police-citizen interactions in the U.S. are almost entirely non-lethal: though, as already stated, 1,000 fatal shootings per year is still too many.

One final point on the Prevailing Left Discourse on Race and Policing. The amount of energy that was mobilized for the George Floyd protests was like nothing seen in this country since the 1960s. Just think what could be done if that kind of energy could be mobilized for problems like millions working for substandard wages and shut out of unions; lack of adequate career paths for non-college-bound youth; poor to no housing options in many locales; lack of affordable health and dental care for millions more; the lack of action on the crisis of global warming; the crisis of rampant gun violence, especially in our cities; the useless and inhumane criminal prosecution of those who turn to pyschoactive substances to ease their burdens in life—or if that energy could be turned toward building livable, car-free cities—instead of the largely ginned-up idea of a racist police systemically shooting Americans racialized as “Black” at every opportunity. I am not saying that George Floyd’s death was in any way justified, or that it should not have been protested—and more importantly, prosecuted—but that other issues are being ignored. By hyperbolically framing Floyd’s murder as an existential threat to all Americans racialized as “Black,” and by suggesting against all evidence that such behavior by police is widespread, BLM leaders have managed to create a sense of crisis which has obliterated discussion of problems of much greater reach and import (in terms of the number of people, no matter how racialized, they affect) than rare police killings. And by pushing the narrative, typically without any evidence, that such killings are motivated by racism, the BLM movement has created a lot of toxic hatred and anger which is making civilized life in the United States ever more tenuous.

The second, and last, of the many incoherent memes of the Prevailing Discourse on Race I’ll consider here is the idea that students racialized as “Black” are behind in academics because not enough money is being spent in schools where they are in the majority. The cry is constantly heard that children racialized as “Black” can’t possibly be expected to excel academically in their woefully underfunded schools. Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter (himself racialized as “Black”) deals with this issue in his Woke Racism (2021); his review of a couple of full-length studies of ARB academic underachievement should convince anyone that the Prevailing Discourse does not have the answer here, as in so many other areas. I would just like to add a personal reflection based on something woefully missing from the Prevailing Discourse on Race. I was born in 1955 and began public elementary school in 1961. According to the Digest of Education Statistics, average per pupil spending in the U.S. in 1961, in 2018 dollars, was $4,357. In 1965-66, when I was in the 5^th Grade, average per pupil spending in 2018 dollars was $5,190. In 1973, when I graduated public high school, average per pupil spending, inflation-adjusted, was $7,162.

Moving forward to 2017, the last year on my Digest of Education Statistics chart, average per-pupil spending in the U.S. was $15,424: more than three times per pupil, inflation adjusted, than when I was in the 1^st Grade and more than double per pupil than when I graduated high school! Yet at the end of elementary school I read competently, performed all arithmetical functions with ease and had a basic understanding of history and science. I scored relatively well on SATs and went on to college in the Maryland state university system. It’s true, our technology was rudimentary: mainly books, often as old and beat up as those now held up as proof that children can’t possibly learn in today’s “underfunded” schools. But the fact is, all someone really needs at a basic public school level is books, old or new; competent teachers; a curriculum designed to impart the basic intellectual skills of reading and maths along with a base of general knowledge; a home environment conducive to good mental health; and the motivation to learn. What’s more telling, many of the highest-spending school districts in the nation are in majority-non-ARW cities: in 2019 Baltimore spent $17,493 per pupil; Washington, D.C. $24,537 (almost six times my 6^th Grade spending); Boston a whopping $31,397 and Oakland, CA, $17,426. For anyone willing to use a modicum of common sense, it should be clear that the reason students racialized as “Black” are underperforming in education and in life is clearly not a lack of money being spent on schools. Common sense, however, is not a feature of the Prevailing Discourse on Race. That Discourse is echoed on the United Negro College Fund website: “Students of color (ouch, that term!) are often concentrated in schools with fewer resources. Schools with 90 percent or more students of color (ouch!) spend $733 less per student per year than schools with 90 percent or more white (ouch, that term!) students.” We now have the culprit: 733 dollars! But consider: if we take $733 from the 2017 national per-pupil spending average of $15,424, we get $14,691—still more than twice what was spent on my education as a senior in high school (all in inflation adjusted dollars) and more than three times what was spent on my 1^st Grade education! A little griping over the 5 percent less spent on schools where non-ARW children are concentrated ($733 is roughly 5 percent of $15,424) might be understandable; but to claim that for this reason those children can’t be expected to master the basics of elementary and secondary education is ludicrous.