John McWhorter on cop-on-black violence:
Funny thing – nothing makes this clearer than the Washington Post database of cop murders. Just pour a cup of coffee and look at what it shows, month after month, year after year. As South Park’s Cartman would put it, “Just, like, just, just look at it. Just look at it.”
Yet, the enlightened take on the issue serenely sails along as if that database proves that cops ice black men regularly while white men only end up in their line of fire now and then by accident. The database reveals a serious problem with cops and murder, period, quite race-neutrally. [It Bears Mentioning]
If I’m to judge from the picture that accompanies his post, McWhorter is black. Let’s switch to Andrew Sullivan for a moment, who provided the link to McWhorter’s piece:
Whenever I find myself embroiled in an argument about police shootings, I ask my friends a simple question to get a handle on where they’re coming from. I ask them quite simply how many unarmed black men were killed by the cops last year. Don’t read on, and test yourself: what’s your rough guess?
Done? Good. The answers from my friends range, but I’d say the most common is somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000. We have, after all, been made much more aware of stories of these horrible killings, and the vividness of some of the videos have tapped into our psyches, as well they might. The correct answer, which usually results in a round of shame-faced jaw drops, is 17. Check it out yourself, under “Search the database”. There’s lots to explore there.
Almost all of these friends are educated, often beyond grad school, are interested in public affairs, and many marched last summer. Yet their understanding of the scale of the problem — and it is a problem — is off by hundreds and thousands. There have been some polls on this distorted perspective. In one, around 20 percent of those who described themselves as “very liberal” estimated 10,000 or more police killings of unarmed black men a year. Politics skews perspective on this, but even those who count themselves as conservative or very conservative vastly over-estimate the number. Around 20 percent of those self-identifying as “very conservative” said police killed 1,000 or more in 2019, with 4 percent saying the number was more than 10,000.
While 17 is greater than 0, it’s a lot less than I would have guessed – so color me red, too. But what about the documented misproportions of black deaths by cop? Back to McWhorter:
But the disproportion … !
Yes, yes – but please see my post on Derek Chauvin on that issue, which in no way disproves anything I have written. Black people are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by cops, and exactly 2.5 times more likely to be poor, and data shows that poverty makes you more likely to encounter the cops, as even intuition confirms. This is why somewhat more black people are killed by cops than what our proportion in the population would predict.
Accounts of this issue that pretend people like me have not presented figures like this – i.e. most mainstream media discussions — are out of court, even if their authors feel it’s their duty to pull people’s eyes away from “irreligious” ideas. Ignore the numbers and, even if you are writing about descendants of African slaves, you are simply plain wrong.
[Bold mine]
And it’s worth noting that the tradition-without-honor of the poverty-stricken taking it in the shorts from whatever passes for the law is far older than the trope that the black community is being targeted for being black.
That is, if you’re poor and disrespected, and thus lacking political power and defensive weaponry, your interactions with cops who may be upholding unjust laws that hurt the poor will be prone to violence; the eagerness of activists to attribute black deaths by cops to racism, rather than the far more complex problem of poverty and its interactions with racism, mental health, physical health, and many other factors, may in effect abuse those in poverty yet again. It’s a difficult situation to assess, and I, not being a social worker professional, refuse to go any further at the moment, but to express my unease with what appears to be the mischaracterization of the situation, unintentional as it may be, by activists and, according to McWhorter, journalists alike.
Nor is this to deny the existence of racism in the police force. I’m sure they’re there. The cops fired in Minneapolis a couple of years ago for decorating their precinct Christmas tree in an inappropriate manner probably qualify. We can easily go back through history to the American Civil War and attribute black community problems to white behaviors: the Tulsa riots, segregation, redlining, profiling.
But McWhorter’s insistence on data rather than emotion as an explanatory force is highly important. Assuming his analysis is correct, it suggests that alleviating poverty may be more effective than protesting police brutality – although both may be necessary. It may be an argument in favor of Universal Basic Income.
And it suggests that each case of police killing needs to be assessed on its own merits. Attempting to claim all cases of black death at the hands of cops under the rubric of law enforcement racism when each case is different may discourage all the good cops, result in the protection of criminals, and misguide our efforts at improvement.
I hope McWhorter’s analysis can be repeated and verified.
