Im-Politic: A Critical Test Failed by Critical Race Theory?

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African Americans, critical race theory, Im-Politic, Pew Research Center, racism, systemic racism

As I’ve written previously, polls did such a lousy job predicting the results of last year’s U.S. midterm election that I’m reluctant to devote to many posts to these soundings on any subject. I’m making a new exception today, though, because Pew Research Center findings that were released yesterday revealed results that appear to just demolish widespread claims that American history is a story of virtually uninterrupted systemic racism.

At this point, I need to add a qualifier I often use on Twitter: “If true.” Both because of all the evidence that polling is seriously flawed, and because the question prompting such a stunning answer isn’t exactly a model of precision or detail. But given the pervasiveness of the Critical Race Theory I alluded to above, the results can’t be completely ignored, either.

Here’s the question: “In general, would you say life in America today is better, worse, or about the same as it was 50 years ago for people like you?”

And the response that blew me away: By a 41 percent to 33 percent margin, black adults said that life five decades back was better for them and presumably other African Americans, as opposed to being worse, than at present.

Overall, many more Americans overall (58 percent to 23 percent) said life was better in the early 1970s, as opposed to being worse, than it is today. So the survey is telling us that Americans in general were more satisfied than black Americans with their lot half a century ago, which (for what it’s worth) passes both the common sense and pervasive racism tests.

In addition, “better” doesn’t necessarily mean good – also bolstering the case that thoroughgoing racism has been a constant, even relatively recently. And I’m sure there are those who will claim that Donald Trump is such a racist, and that the former President has inspired so much prejudice in his followers, that of course African Americans’ situation was better even many years before.

Think, though, about the early 1970s. Consumer inflation in America was higher than today and still rising. The unemployment picture was considerably worse. Most of the big American cities that contained so much of the country’s African-American population were in sad decline. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s had run its course, “white backlash” had reared its head, affirmative action programs hadn’t yet spread beyond the federal government, and a president widely thought to have won the White House largely through racist dog whistles was sitting in the Oval Office.

And even so, more than four in ten African American adults told Pew that, compared with today, those were the good old days? Or at least the not-so-bad old days?

Again, it’s a poll, so it certainly doesn’t justify jumping to the conclusion that all was fine and dandy with U.S. race relations then, or even close, or is now.  But unless we’re back in the embarrassingly primitive “Dewey Beats Truman” days (and who really thinks we are?), there’s at least as much reason to think that today’s Critical Race Theory crowd is missing something crucial about race in America today as is this new Pew report.     

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Those Stubborn Facts: Maybe It’s Not Systemic Racism?

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law enforcement, Memphis, police, police misconduct, police reform, policing, racism, systemic racism, Those Stubborn Facts, training, Tyre Nichols

Number of hours of training needed on average to become a U.S. police officer today: 652

 

Number of hours of training needed on average to receive a U.S. plumbing license today: 3,500

 

(Source: “US police receive less training than plumbers,” by Federica Cocco and Oliver Hawkins, Financial Times, February 2, 2023, US police receive less training than plumbers | Financial Times (ft.com) )

Im-Politic: Straight Talk on Police Racism and Violence Urgently Needed

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African Americans, Brakkton Booker, Cerelyn Davis, crime, Im-Politic, law enforcement, Memphis, police, police brutality, policing, Politico, racism, systemic racism, Tyre Nichols

OK, now I’m really confused. The widespread claims that American policing and law enforcement itself are systemically racist have been muddied enough by perhaps the most startling fact about the five Memphis, Tennessee police officers who bodycam and CCTV footage from January 7 show beating an unarmed African-American so brutally that he eventually died: These cops are all African American.

Then yesterday, I read a Friday post from Politico with the eye-catching headline: “‘Diversity alone won’t change policing’”. Moreover, this claim wasn’t simply the view of one of the racial justice advocates quoted. Author Brakkton Booker stated categorically that “What is becoming evident is that diversifying a police force does not guarantee different outcomes when Black Americans come into contact with police.”

If true, of course, that completely eviscerates the allegations of systemic racism plaguing both policing and law enforcement. For if both white and black police are regularly mistreating African Americans they encounter, then something else must be going on.

Yet the piece got even stranger when it quoted Memphis’ (African American) Police Chief Cerelyn Davis as first agreeing with the above conclusion. The death of Tyre Nichols, she said, “takes off the table that issues and problems in law enforcement is about race, and it is not.”  But then she added, “It does indicate to me that bias might be a factor also.”

What kind of bias, however? Against people like Tyre Nichols? An African American? But that would be by definition racist. Or against African American men? Sounds pretty racist to me, too. Or against young African American men? Again, kinda racist. And why would African American men like the five accused Memphis officers adopt these attitudes?

Unless this is a problem peculiar to Memphis? Or Baltimore (where three of the five policemen implicated but eventually cleared in the 2015 death of another young African American man in their custody were black)?  Yet this development would be pretty strange, too, given, for example, that not only is Memphis’ police chief black, but so is 58 percent of the entire force.   

In fact, how common or rare are unjustified black police killings of other blacks? Does anyone know? Has anyone bothered to look? Not that I can determine.

The racial justice advocate mentioned above, Rashad Robinson, who heads a group called Color of Change, did provide one potentially useful insight when he told Booker “Policing will not get better without diversity, but diversity alone will not change policing. Something like this doesn’t exist without a culture that allows, rewards it, protects it.”

But just as Memphis Chief Davis needs to explain exactly what kind of non-racial “bias” may be at work here, Robinson needs to elaborate on the “culture” he finds so problematic. Is it one that fosters needless violence against suspects no matter  their identity? Yet if so, how come even this apparently happens so seldom?

Specifically, as of 2019, about ten million Americans were being arrested annually. According to an organization called Mapping Police Violence, however, the number of Americans killed by police last year was 1,186. And as best as I could tell, only 219 of all backgrounds were unarmed. (The interactive search engine isn’t easy to work). It’s terrible that anyone who’s unarmed is killed by police, but a number this absolutely and relatively infinitesimal (and don’t forget – people encountered by police can resist violently even when they’re not armed) shouldn’t scream “nation-wide culture of violence” to anyone.

All of which makes me wonder: Is America experiencing a crisis of policing? Or one of talking about policing sensibly?

Im-Politic: A Bad Week in Court…for the Race-Mongers

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African Americans, Ahmaud Arbery, Andrew Coffee, anti-semitism, Charlottesville, citizens arrest, criminal justice, Florida, fugitive slave laws, Georgia, Im-Politic, Kenosha, Kyle Rittenhouse, racism, self-defense, systemic racism, Unite the Right, vigilantism, white supremacists

It’s been a very bad week for those Americans (and others) convinced that their country’s entire society, and especially its criminal justice system, remain so thoroughly infected with racism that nothing less than multiple amputations and lobotomies are required.

As a result, it’s been a very good week for those Americans (and others) trying to grapple rigorously with the racism that has historically stained that criminal justice system and larger society, culture, and economy, and with its lingering effects in all their complexity.

For this time period has seen no fewer than three race-infused trials conclude with verdicts that thoroughly debunk claims of bigotry racism in that justice system so pervasive as to be systemic.

The first and most publicized resulted in murder convictions for three white Georgians who killed an African American man jogging through a neighborhood in the southeastern corner of the state. The trio of whites blamed their attack on Ahmaud Arbery on his resistance to their attempts to carry out a citizen’s arrest prompted by suspicions of his involvement in several local burglaries.

But the nearly all-white jury ultimately agreed with the prosecutor’s observation that the attackers’ actions were utterly illegal vigilantism even by the recklessly indulgent standards of a state law that, like many counterparts, is rooted in a history of genuinely shameful fugitive slave statutes – and that was repealed this past May. For none of the defendants saw Arbery engage even in any dodgy act, and possessed no evidence of his possible guilt.

Arbery’s family and others argued that the killing took much too long to be investigated, and their charges of attempted cover-up by some local officials seems to have been vindicated by the eventual decisions of area prosecutors and judges to recuse themselves from the trial. So there’s a strong case to be made that justice was delayed. But in this instance, it’s clear that it wasn’t denied.

The second trial attracted less attention, but appears no less important. This past Tuesday, more than a dozen white racist and anti-semitic leaders and their organizations, which organized the tumultuous 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that claimed one life, were found guilty of breaking state law by conspiring to intimidate, harass, or harm counter-protestors and local residents. The verdict by the majority white jury awarded the plaintiffs $26 million in compensatory and punitive damages, and the defendants are almost certain to be tried on the federal charges (of conspiring to commit racially motivated violence) on which the jury failed to reach a decision.

The third trial has received almost no national attention, but is especially interesting given widespread arguments that acquitted Kenosha, Wisconsin shooter Kyle Rittenhouse would have been found guilty of some form of homicide had he been black. (See, e.g., here and here.) This third trial is especially interesting because the verdict actually did acquit on self-defense charges an African American who killed an intruder into his home and attempted to slay another. Special bonus: The two intruders were cops.

The defendant, Andrew Coffee IV, didn’t get off scot free. The Vero Beach, Florida jurors found him guilty of illegally possessing a firearm. (He was found guilty of felony battery and evading arrest in 2013.) But his position that he didn’t realize that the intruders were law enforcement officers, and didn’t hear the SWAT team in question so identify itself, carried the day on the main charge. And here’s a fun fact – Coffee’s acquittal came the same day as Rittenhouse’s.

As noted above, these results don’t mean that African Americans have never gotten horrifically raw deals from the American criminal justice system, or even that no such injustices take place today. (I’ve written about the latter issue, e.g., here.) But these three verdicts – which all came in states belonging to the old Confederacy – cannot possibly have taken place in a country still determined to suppress the rights of blacks (and other minorities). Instead, they took place in a country where, as noted by an African American lawyer quoted here, such outcomes are possible, if not yet often enough, in the first place – and always have been.

Im-Politic: A Cop Owed an Apology from Biden

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Biden, Biden administration, civil rights, criminal justice, Democrats, George Floyd, Im-Politic, Jacob Blake, Justice Department, Kamala Harris, Kenosha riots, law enforcement, Michael Graveley, police brutality, police shootings, policing, Rusten Sheskey, systemic racism, Wisconsin

I think it’s more than fair to say that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris owe Rusten Sheskey an apology. Not that they’re the only ones (by a long shot). But I also think it’s fair to say that the President and Vice President are in a special category – even above LeBron James.

Who’s this Sheskey character, you may wonder? He’s the Kenosha, Wisconsin policeman whose allegedly unjustified and indeed racist shooting of James Blake ignited several days of rioting in that city during late August of the “George Floyd summer” of 2020.

By early January, however, it was becoming clear that these accusations – which were also swallowed whole and spread by the women’s and men’s pro basketball leagues (including Los Angeles Laker superstar James), Major League Baseball, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, and pro tennis  – were baseless.

That month, Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Graveley, a Democrat, declared that Sheskey had committed no crime when shooting Blake. And he made it obvious why. Blake had resisted arrest when Sheskey and other offices attempted to apprehend him (on felony third-degree sexual assault and misdemeanor trespassing and disorderly conduct charges). He admitted he was carrying a knife.

And Graveley’s official report said that tasering had failed to subdue Blake; that Blake “had the opened knife in his right hand and was attempting to escape from Officer Sheskey’s grasp and enter the driver’s side of [his] SUV”; that both Sheskey and a colleague stated that “in the moment before Officer Sheskey opened fire, Jacob Blake twisted his body, moving his right hand with the knife towards Officer Sheskey”: and that “Two citizen witnesses saw Jacob Blake’s body turn in a manner that appears consistent with what the officers described.”

Indeed, the Kenosha D.A. added, “Officer Sheskey felt he was about to be stabbed.”

Even though this decision had preceded their inaugurations by about three weeks, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris should have issued apologies right then and there. Why? Because right after the shooting, they rushed to judgment and claimed that the evidence available met the prosecution standard.

Acccording to Biden, “We should make sure when all the facts are in and then a decision be made, but based on its appearance, unless they can show something different than what everybody saw, it looks like an overuse of force.”

One of his campaign spokesmen elaborated later:

“He believes that, based on everything he has seen, charges appear warranted, but that there should be a full investigation to ensure all the facts are known first. It is essential that officers in situations like this are held accountable, under due process.”

That’s better than the first statement, which appeared to argue that the burden of proof rested with Sheskey and his lawyers. But if candidate Biden really believed that “all the facts” weren’t in, why make any judgements at all?

Moreover, Mr. Biden lumped the Blake shooting in with other instances of what he considered racist brutality by police:

“[T]his morning, the nation wakes up yet again with grief and outrage that yet another black American is a victim of excessive force,” he said. “This calls for an immediate, full and transparent investigation and the officers must be held accountable….Equal justice has not been real for Black Americans and so many others.”

Harris also referred to the need for a “thorough investigation” but then went on at length to make clear she, too, had already come to major and incriminating conclusions. Specifically,

“based on what I’ve seen, it seems that the officer should be charged. The man was going to his car. He didn’t appear to be armed. And if he was not armed, the use of force that was seven bullets coming out of a gun at close range in the back of the man, I don’t see how anybody could reason that that was justifiable.”

Added Harris, (who oddly acknowledged that Blake might have been resisting arrest, in apparent contradiction to her above claim that he was merely “going to his car”) “Everybody should be afforded due process – I agree with that completely. But here’s the thing, in America we know these cases keep happening. And we have had too many Black men in America who have been the subject of this kind of conduct and it’s got to stop.”

In other words, according to both candidates, Blake’s shooting not only looked like an excessive use of force. It looked like a racist use of force.

And maybe that’s why Mr. Biden and Harris didn’t apologize for attacking Sheskey’s supposed recklessness with his gun. Maybe they were awaiting the results of a Justice Department probe focused on whether Sheskey’s actions added up to a civil rights crime under federal law.

Yet the investigation, launched by the Trump Justice Department later in August, 2020, reached its conclusion this past Friday. The verdict (of the Biden Justice Department)?

“[A] team of experienced federal prosecutors determined that insufficient evidence exists to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the KPD [Kenosha Police Department] officer willfully violated the federal criminal civil rights statutes. Accordingly, the review of this incident has been closed without a federal prosecution.”

So what we have is a determination by a Wisconsin Democratic prosecutor that there was no reason even to indict Sheskey for over-aggressiveness in shooting Blake, and a determination by the Biden Justice Department that there was no reason to indict him for racist behavior. Now what we need is some contrition from the President and the Vice President (not to mention LeBron.) Otherwise, we’ll have another reason, on top of, for example, the botched Afghanistan withdrawal and the Border Crisis, to believe that the concept of accountability is foreign to the Biden-Harris administration.

Im-Politic: Don’t Forget About All the Systemic Anti-Racism

Tags

affirmative action, African Americans, critical race theory, government contracting, higher education, Ibram Xendi, Im-Politic, minorities, race relations, racial justice, set asides, Small Business Administration, systemic racism

There’s a big concept that’s been utterly and conspicuously missing in the floods of verbiage sloshing across the nation about systemic racism, and it’s badly distorting the picture of how bigoted America and all its institutions remain. Think of it as “systemic anti-racism.” So far, it seems as good a term as any for all the official and unofficial efforts launched and maintained over the course of decades to help victims of discrimination overcome its lingering effects. And they have been legion.

Oddly, the unofficial programs seem to be by far the best known. Surely they’ve been the highest profile, and the most prominent have been the affirmative action policies long in effect throughout American higher education. This post discusses a study indicating just how many minority students have been provided with opportunities to attend colleges and universities by revealing how significantly state government bans on these programs since the 1990s have reduced the shares of “underrepresented” youth in the student bodies of their public institutions.

And if these data don’t convince you, here’s the verdict on such programs from no less than Ibram Kendi, one of the nation’s leading propounders of critical race theory – which of course contends that systemic racism still defines much and even most of American life: “Affirmative action programs in education have been demonstrated to increase diversity and increase access specifically for underrepresented groups.” (There’s evidence, though, according to the aforementioned CBS News post, that such underrepresentation has worsened since the 1970s at the most selective colleges.)

Yet the reach of affirmative action and related initiatives has extended far beyond the campus. As this history of the idea puts it (all the while emphasizing how fuzzy and confusing it’s long been):

“The actual programs that come under the general heading of affirmative action are a diverse lot; they include policies affecting college and university admissions, private-sector employment, government contracting, disbursement of scholarships and grants, legislative districting, and jury selection. Numerous affirmative-action programs have been enacted into law at local, state, and federal levels. In addition to programs that have been mandated by law, many private corporations and universities have developed affirmative-action programs voluntarily.”

The federal government’s measures have been especially impressive. Since 1961, because of an executive order issued by President John F. Kennedy, Washington has not only required all companies doing business with Washington to end racial discrimination in their own hiring practices (a policy with roots in the immediate pre-World War II period), but to promote equal opportunity in employment actively, and to document such practices and their effects in detail. Penalties for non-compliance were severe.

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson expanded these obligations with a directive that all federal contractors and subcontractors act to expand opportunities for minorities.

The Johnson years also saw the first small-scale federal efforts to use the Small Business Administration (SBA) “to award contracts to firms willing to locate in urban areas and hire unemployed individuals, largely African Americans, or sponsor minority-owned businesses by providing capital or management assistance.” These practices were strengthened and expanded during the 1970s until in 1978, Congress expressly authorized the agency to focus such activity on “socially and economically disadvantaged small business concerns” (as the statute states) or “on businesses that are least 51% owned by one or more socially and economically disadvantaged individuals and whose management and daily operations are controlled by such individual(s)” (according to a history prepared by the Library of Congress).

It’s important to note that the SBA has also used this authority to help such businesses win contracts throughout the federal bureaucracy. In addition, every federal agency that authorized to buy any product from the private sector is required to operate an Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization whose mandate includes ensuring that minority-owned small businesses “are treated fairly and that they have an opportunity to compete and be selected for a fair amount of the agency’s contract dollars.”

And don’t forget “set asides” – which means that a certain number of federal contracts are either reserved completely for minority-owned businesses or businesses “in historically underutilized business zones” (including in economically depressed areas with big minority populations), or that such businesses be given preferential pricing in the contracting process. To cite one example, since 2015, Congress has required the Transportation Department’s Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program (which exists separately from the above SBA operations) to award a specified percent of its contracts to companies defined as having dealt with “ongoing discrimination and the continuing effects of past discrimination in federally-assisted highway, transit, airport, and highway safety financial assistance transportation contracting markets nationwide.”

Nor is the federal government the only level of government in America offering such preferences. As of 2016, the National Council of State Legislatures reported that “At least 38 states, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico have state-level MBE development programs involving certification for participation in state government procurement….” And such policies are in place in many U.S. cities, too.

I don’t want to present an overly rosy view of the American race relations scene. As many of the sources above make clear, the scope for using racial preferences in higher education admissions and in government contracting has been steadily narrowed by the courts. Some of these government programs were underperforming even before these restrictions came into force. None of them seem to have made a satisfactory impact on the nation-wide racial wealth gap yet (especially lately). And prejudice continues to mar policing in many areas of the country. So race relations Nirvana is still a long way off.

Nor is my purpose in this column to make the case either for or against any of them. (For the record, I’m generally supportive.) And no one should come away from this post thinking that it’s examined or listed all of these preferential programs exhaustively. 

What I am emphasizing here is that these efforts to overcome historical racial injustice show that the inadequacy of progress hasn’t been for lack of trying -at least to a noteworthy extent. As a result, they call into question the extent to which American racism today is still actually systemic. As a result, any teaching of race relations in the schools, or government or private business efforts to raise employees’ awareness of racial issues, or even any discussions or press coverage of these subjects, would do well to include discussions of these systemic anti-racist policie. Otherwise, it would seem fair to criticize them as systemically biased.

Im-Politic: Evidence of a Backlash Against Woke Education

Tags

Black Lives Matter, Democrats, education, gender, history, identity politics, Im-Politic, Josh Kraushaar, National Journal, parents, Parents Defending Education, racism, Republicans, schools, students, systemic racism, teachers, Virginia, white privilege, woke capitalism, wokeness

If you, like me, are worried sick by the prospect of Woke ideology totally poisoning all of America’s major institutions, you just got some great news in a new poll. Commissioned by an organization called Parents Defending Education, it indicates that you’ve got plenty of company when it comes to how this fact-free propaganda is increasingly shaping what the nation’s children learn in school.

Not that the case is airtight. For example, the sponsoring organization is avowedly worked up about “indoctrination in the classroom,” so it’s anything but a neutral, passive observer. And its sample seems to skew somewhat too heavily Republican.

But before you conclude that the poll therefore gives far too much weight to conservatives or traditionalists or racists or homophobes or however you care to describe opponents of these new programs (like the New York Times‘ race-mongering 1619 Project), think about this: Fully two-thirds of respondents placed some value on “promoting social equity” in the classroom. Moreover, nearly 45 percent give “the Black Lives Matter Movement” very or somewhat favorable marks, versus very or somewhat favorable ratings from just over 48 percent  – which closely mirrors how this group of groups have fared in other polls.

The respondents, however, strongly disagreed with the ways that Woke propagandists have been defining social (and racial) equity and the role of educators. Specifically:

>Eighty percent “oppose the use of classrooms to promote political activism to students….”

>By a whopping 87 percent to six percent, respondents agreed that teachers should present students “with multiple perspectives on contentious political and social issues….”

>Fifty-five percent attached no importance on teachers placing a “greater emphasis on race and gender,” including about a third of Democrats.

>Seventy percent opposed schools “teaching their students that their race was the most important thing about them.”

>Seventy-four percent opposed “teaching students that white people are inherently privileged and black and other people of color are inherently oppressed.”

>Sixty-nine percent opposed teaching students “that America was founded on racism and is structurally racist.”

>Fifty-nine percent were against reorienting history classes to “focus on race and power and promote social justice,” with 50 percent opposing this idea strongly.

>By a 75 percent to 18 percent margin, respondents opposed “teaching there is no such thing as biological sex, and that people should choose whatever gender they prefer for themselves.”

>Proposals that schools hire “diversity, equity and inclusion consultants or administrators to train teachers,” were rejected by a 51 to 37 percent margin.

Moreover, respondents saw the propaganda problem growing:

“When asked whether their local K-12 school has increased or decreased its emphasis on issues of race, gender, and activism in the last two years, 52% said it had increased a lot or a little. Only 2% said it had decreased. Similarly, 57% said their local schools had become more political, with only 4% saying less political.”

In his writeup of the survey, National Journal reporter Josh Kraushaar correctly observed that the education versus propaganda issue hasn’t yet been tested significantly where it counts most – in local or state elections. But he also observes that Republican strategists smell a big winner along these lines, and I’m encouraged by the fact that such divisive drivel polls so poorly on a national basis after at least a year of it being promoted actively and synergistically by a major American political party (including the current President), the Mainstream Media, the academic world, the entertainment industry (including sports), and Wall Street and Big Business.

Kraushaar also notes that this year’s Virginia Governor’s race could provide highly suggestive evidence. Although campaigns rarely turn on a single issue, U.S. history makes clear how combustible the mixture of race and education in particular is (just think of the school desegregation battles in North and South alike). So having been a major political battleground in recent decades – because of its steady transition from (moderate) Republican mainstay to (also moderate) Democratic strong point – the Old Dominion could soon become known as a socio-cultural battleground with comparably high stakes.  

Im-Politic: Biden’s Big George Floyd Fail

Tags

African Americans, Biden, Chauvin trial, criminal justice, Derek Chauvin, George Floyd, Im-Politic, Jimmy Carter, law enforcement, police, police brutality, Soviet Union, systemic racism

Back in 1978, President Jimmy Carter felt he had a big problem. He wanted to use an upcoming speech to send a major message to Moscow about the future of his policy toward the Soviet Union, but his main foreign policy advisers were split. His White House national security chief urged him to take a tougher line across-the-board, but his Secretary of State backed a more nuanced approach.

According to some of his aides, he finally dealt with the problem by taking the preparatory memos each of them wrote, stapling them together, and using the resulting contradictory document as the basis of the address. Not surprisngly, Carter simply succeeded in sowing confusion throughout the nation and around the world, and reinforcing a growing perception that he was a fatally indecisive leader.

What really happened is still up in the air. (See here for the background and a good description of some of the major conflicting accounts). But I dredge up this episode because President Biden’s remarks yesterday about the verdict in the “George Floyd trial” struck me as equally incoherent and troubling – at best.

It seems clear that the President was trying to walk an unquestionably fine line. On the one hand, he was trying to make the case that although former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering Floyd during an arrest, serious racial problems still plagued American law enforcement. On the other hand, he obviously recognized the dangers of describing all or even most or even lots of policemen and women as disgraceful racists in whom the nation – and especially minority Americans – should place no trust.

But it should also be clear that Mr. Biden’s apparent balancing act merited a solid “F.” He did state that “most men and women who wear the badge serve their communities honorably” and even that exceptions were “few.”

Those contentions, though, were exceptions themselves, for much more of the text consisted of a description of American law enforcement that not only included the systemic racism charge, but that accused the system literally of waging war on minorities.

What else can be concluded from his contentions about “the fear so many people of color live with every day when they go to sleep at night and pray for the safety of themselves and their loved ones”?

And about the need to “ensure that Black and brown people or anyone…don’t fear the interactions with law enforcement, that they don’t have to wake up knowing that they can lose their very life in the course of just living their life. They don’t have to worry about whether their sons or daughters will come home after a grocery store run or just walking down the street or driving their car or playing in the park or just sleeping at home”?

And about the imperative of “acknowledging and confronting, head on, systemic racism and the racial disparities that exist in policing and in our criminal justice system more broadly”?

Let’s leave aside for now the strong evidence that African Americans “want police to spend same amount of or more time in their area” – a share that stood at 81 percent according to a Gallup survey last summer. (For some other polling data powerfully challenging the systemic racism narrative, see this post.)

The most charitable conclusion possible is that Mr. Biden believes that this criminal justice system is systemically (meaning “deliberately?” “pervasively”? Both?) racist even though most of its foot soldiers – who interact with minorities the most often by far – somehow aren’t. That’s not exactly a resounding testament to his reasoning or analytical skills, or to his common sense.

Cynics could understandably decide that the President chose to pay a bit of lip service to cops before aggressively embracing the systemic racism school of thought in hopes of making everyone from politically moderate voters to his own party’s far Left happy.

And what’s to be made of a President who demonstrates absolutely no awareness that the views he’s expressing have little grounding in reality?

Near the end of his talk, Mr. Biden rightly warned about the threat posed by “those who will seek to exploit the raw emotions of the moment — agitators and extremists who have no interest in social justice; who seek to carry out violence, destroy property, to fan the flames of hate and division; who will do everything in their power to stop this country’s march toward racial justice. We can’t let them succeed.”

No sane person could accuse the President of supporting or fostering most of these outrages. But when it comes to “fanning the flames of hate and division,” his George Floyd remarks came uncomfortably close.

Im-Politic: Unwitting Evidence that Criminal Justice Racism Hasn’t Been Systemic Lately

Tags

criminal justice, Ekow Yankah, Im-Politic, incarceration, Keith Humphreys, police, police brutality, policing, prison reform, racism, systemic racism, Washington Post

It’s hard to imagine anything more ordinary in the national media these days than an item making or reporting the claim that the American criminal justice system is plagued with systemic racism. Much harder to imagine: such an article containing evidence powerfully refuting that charge. But that’s exactly what appeared in the Washington Post Outlook section today.

Authors Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University narcotics policy specialist and Ekow N. Yankah, a law professor at New York City’s Yeshiva University tell readers near the beginning of their essay that “the criminal justice system is suffused with racial biases that harm African Americans and Hispanics while favoring Whites.”

They go on to deplore “continuing, pervasive discrimination against African Americans in the criminal justice system and huge disparities in incarceration.” They note that “Blacks…are five times more likely to be imprisoned than Whites.” And they insist that “Race-based critiques of mass incarceration remain essential….”

But weirdly, what the authors themselves recognize as new and important in the national debate about race relations and law enforcement is the official research they report that in jails, which are operated mainly by local governments, “since 2000, the rate of being jailed increased 41 percent among Whites while declining 22 percent among African Americans.”

Further, “Beginning in 2017, the White rate of being jailed surpassed that of Hispanics for the first time in living memory. And in 2018, Whites became 50 percent of the jail population, particularly notable because Whites represent a lower proportion of the U.S. population than they have in centuries.”

As for prisons, which are operated by the states and the federal government, “parallel racial dynamics are evident. The White rate of imprisonment is down only 12 percent in this century, whereas the Hispanic rate has fallen 18 percent and the Black rate is down a remarkable 40 percent. The trend of African Americans leaving prison is accelerating, dropping Black imprisonment rates to levels not seen in 30 years.”

These statistics, remarkable – and neglected – as they are, by no means prove conclusively that racism isn’t too common in American law enforcement, at every level. Indeed, as I wrote last August:

“My own personal conversations with black friends have helped convince me (despite my deep mistrust of the evidentiary value of anecdotes) that there is a tendency on the part of a non-negligible number of police officers across the country to view African American men in particular with special suspicion, and to act on these suspicions. South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott’s alleged experiences in this respect carry weight with me, too.”

There’s also no shortage of statistical evidence pointing to discriminatory policing and sentencing.

But at or close to the heart of the systemic criminal justice racism charges is the insistence that America’s police and prosecutors and courts consistently and on a national level, all else equal, go after and actually lock up more blacks (and other minorities) than whites. And authors Humphreys and Yankah have made clear – unwittingly, it seems – that

>the exact opposite has been happening;

>that it’s been happening for at least two decades; and

>it continued even after the election as President of one Donald J. Trump, who has not only often been called one of America’s most racist chief executives (including by no less than current President Biden), but whose bigotry is widely supposed to have inspired ever more brazen and terrible brutality by racist cops.

In other words, the data that’s arguably most important show that whatever racism has stained American law enforcement is fading away. If true, hopefully reports describing and amplifying that encouraging trend will become commonplace in the national media, too.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Sorry, but Little Evidence Yet That Trump-onomics Left Blacks Behind

Tags

African Americans, Barack Obama, Biden, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Donald Trump, Economic Policy Institute, Federal Reserve, Labor Department, Labor Force Participation Rate, median household income, median weekly earnings, racial economic justice, racial wealth gap, systemic racism, Tracy Jan, unemployment rate, Washington Post, Wuhan virus, {What's Left of) Our Economy

No one should be surprised, much less outraged, if President Biden spends the next year – or four! – blaming the Trump administration for every problem that remains with or emerges in the American economy, or any other dimension of national life. After all, problems do linger from presidency to presidency, and at least as important, it’s the politically expedient road to take — as much history shows.

Less justifiable are journalistic displays of such behavior. But if Tracy Jan’s January 22 Washington Post piece on African Americans and the economy is any indication, not only are four more years of blame-casting in store, but four more years of whoppingly inaccurate and indeed one-sided blame-casting are in store.

Actually, Jan’s article isn’t quite as slanted as the headline, which proclaims “The Trump Economy Left Black Americans Behind.” Readers are told right off the bat, for example, that racial economic gaps have persisted for decades, and that consequently “many black voters” have been “skeptical of the Democratic Party to represent their interests.” The author adds that “unemployment rates for Black people were at a historic low before the coronavirus shutdown, as Trump frequently reminded voters.”

But her dominant themes are that the CCP Virus pandemic has hit black America much harder economically than white, that therefore racial economic disparities have widened during the pandemic, that Trump’s mismanagement of the response was to blame, and that this CCP Virus period failure is enough to warrant labeling his entire term in office a racial economic justice flop.

I’d grade that first claim as largely accurate, as made clear by the impressive evidence Jan cites; the second claim as largely accurate, too; the third claim as more controversial, since it assumes that another President would have fared much better; and the fourth a wild stretch at best.

In fact, even if it is kosher to view 2020 developments as decisive in evaluating the Trump racial economic justice record, and the full range of policies that produced it, it’s important to note that two key indicators showed that the racial economic gap actually narrowed last year – median weekly earnings of full-time workers, and the headline unemployment rate.

Here are the (Labor Department) data for the former, going back to 2009 – the start of the Obama administration, which hasn’t been accused of having a particularly poor racial economic justice record. The numbers are in pre-inflation dollars, and because they come out quarterly, it’s possible to present the figures for the beginnings and ends of the Obama and Trump administrations, and for the CCP Virus period specifically. The ratios between the two are shown as well. 

                               non-hispanic white     non-hispanic black ratio     white-black

2Q 2009:                          757                                 592                             1.28:1

1Q 2017:                          894                                 679                             1.32:1

2Q 2017:                          886                                 689                             1.29:1

1Q 2020:                          980                                 775                             1.26:1

4Q 2020:                       1,007                                 792                             1.27:1

As made clear by the ratio numbers, even counting the pandemic period, weekly pay for the typical black full-time worker rose at a faster rate during the one Trump term than during the two Obama terms. Indeed, during the Obama presidency, the typical black full-time worker fell further behind his or her white counterpart. And between the final pre-virus period last year (the first quarter of 2020) and the final quarter of the year, the gap widened minimally.

The headline unemployment rates that come out monthly (also from the Labor Department) permit an even more precise comparison of the Obama and Trump records, and of the Trump record during the CCP Virus period. And as made clear below, the story they tell (including the ratios presented in the right hand column) isn’t terribly different from that of the weekly pay figures.

                               non-hispanic white     non-hispanic black     white-black

Feb. 09:                              7.6                            13.7                       0.55:1

Jan. 17:                               4.2                             7.4                        0.57:1

Feb. 17:                              4.0                             8.0                        0.50:1

Feb. 20:                              3.5                             6.0                        0.58:1

Dec. 20:                             6.0                             9.9                        0.60:1

The white headline unemployment rate started the Obama years – as the last, post-financial crisis Great Recession was still worsening – at only 55 percent of the rate for blacks. By the final month of his tenure, the white rate had risen to 57 percent of the black rate, meaning that the gap had narrowed slightly. It narrowed significantly faster during the pre-pandemic Trump years, sinces during the former President’s first full month in office, the white rate stood at half the black rate, and hit 58 percent last February, the final full pre-virus month). During the pandemic in 2020, the white-black ratio narrowed even further.

Jan’s narrative is much stronger for data called the Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR), which gives a more accurate picture of the national employment scene because it reveals and takes into account how many adult Americans have become so discouraged in their search for work that they’ve just given up. The higher the LFPR (also tracked by the Labor Department), the fewer the number of these discouraged workers and vice versa.

                              non-hispanic white     non-hispanic black    white-black

Feb. 09:                            66.2                            62.9                     1.05:1

Jan. 17:                             62.8                            62.2                     1.01:1

Feb. 17:                            62.8                            62.2                     1.01:1

Feb. 20:                            63.2                            63.1                     1.00:1

Dec. 20:                           61.6                            59.8                      1.03:1

These statistics are released monthly (as part of the overall jobs reports) and, as you can see, tend to change only very slowly. But as shown by the dramatic (by these standards) LFPR drop for blacks, the pandemic period has been a stunning exception to the detriment of African Americans. Until then, though, the Obama and Trump results weren’t notably different, especially considering that the former was President twice as long as the latter.

Lots of other relevant statistics only go through 2019, and they don’t exactly scream “Trump failure,” either. Check out one dataset that’s attracted special, and deserved attention – the racial wealth gap. As noted by two other Post writers last year, “More wealth makes for more a comfortable, safer living. And, more importantly, it is passed on to the next generation. Their parents’ wealth gives many white children a boost at birth, an advantage many of their black peers lack.” And my post on the subject at that time expressed full agreement.

The official wealth gap figures come from the Federal Reserve, and are issued only every three years. But since last June (when I first reported on them), we’ve gotten the results (for median households in inflation-adjusted dollars) for 2019. As shown below, they report that although the Obama years saw considerable backsliding, the Trump years showed even greater progress in narrowing disparities:

                               non-hispanic white     non-hispanic black     white-black 

2010:                               144.3                              17.6                    8.20:1

2013:                               146.4                              13.6                  10.76:1

2016:                               181.9                              18.2                    9.99:1

2019:                               188.2                              24.1                    7.81:1

By contrast, the after-inflation dollar median household income numbers (which measure what’s earned each year versus what’s owned in toto) show pre-virus backsliding under Trump. (Here I’m using Labor Department figures as presented by the Economic Policy Institute — definitely a part of “MAGA World” — because they take into account some recent methodological changes made by the Labor Department.)  

                              non-hispanic white     non-hispanic black     white-to-black

2009:                             67,352                         40,231                      1.67:1

2016:                             69,292                         42,684                      1.62:1

2019:                             76,057                         46,073                      1.65:1

Biden has four years to show his racial economic justice stuff, and all Americans should hope that he makes further progress. But where Jan (and so many others) seem to be expecting a major improvement over his predecessors’ record, it seems just as legitimate to wonder if he’ll wind up matching it – even after the results for CCP Virus-ridden 2020 are in.