Dear Ms. Hooker:
Thanks for reading my article and for your detailed response to it. While, of course, I don’t agree with many of your points, I very much appreciate that you took the time to read what I wrote, to think about it, to engage and respond to it intelligently and, most importantly, not to resort to the kinds of silly name-calling and bottom-feeder insults that are all-too-common on Medium and elsewhere at this point. If more people learned the fine art of disagreeing respectfully, our political dialogue would be very different from and much better than what we see all around us today. So please take that in the spirit in which it’s offered: a sincere thank-you.
Taking up the substance of your comments, obviously I don’t believe that black people can’t be responsible with guns or that black people are going to read an article and then immediately go arm themselves to the hilt and start shooting anyone. My focus was more on the total hypocrisy of a newspaper that has repeatedly and unequivocally spoken out in favor of gun control (which I personally support, though I respect those who don’t) applying a totally different standard when it comes to guns in the hands of black people. I understand that newspapers don’t speak with a single voice and that publications like The Washington Post have both liberal and some conservative writers on staff. But these newspapers also tend to have a clear editorial perspective and aren’t willing to go beyond certain boundaries. Do you think, for instance, that the Washington Post would ever run a piece telling white people to go get armed? I could be wrong, but I certainly don’t.
This isn’t about the First Amendment. I never questioned The Washington Post’s right to publish the piece. It’s not quite “shouting fire in a crowded movie theater,” even if does go in that general direction. My problem is with (i) hypocrisy (as detailed above); and (ii) irresponsibility. On that second issue, although you’re right that most black people aren’t going to go read the article and then arm themselves and start committing crimes with their newfound guns, the issue is that there is already an overly adversarial relationship between black people and law enforcement, between black people and white people, between black people and America. With regard to some issues, there are some very good reasons for that adversarial relationship that are rooted in American history and well known to most of us. But there are other issues — such as the alleged epidemic of cops killing blacks — where the “epidemic” is a product of sensationalizing, ratings-driven, media-fueled clickbait rather than real facts, as the idea that cops are disproportionately killing blacks has been repeatedly debunked by the best statistical evidence. And, despite American history being what it is, there is no particular reason that black-white relations should be going down the toilet now the way they are even as actual anti-black racism is receding more and more. I’ve argued that, in fact, our aggressive anti-racism campaign is counterproductive and making matters much worse:
So in that light, and in light of the black crime and crime victimization numbers being what they are (as documented in the article you responded to), I do think that The Washington Post is doing a disservice to everyone in telling black people they should be arming themselves against “white supremacy.” As I documented in the article, “homicide is the leading cause of death for black males between the ages of 15 and 34,” and “93% of black victims are killed by other blacks,” so “white supremacy” is definitely NOT the biggest danger to blacks today.
In addition, I don’t actually know what “white supremacy” means in 2018, and I suspect most of the people who use those words don’t know either. They have some vague notion that there’s “systemic” or “institutional” racism going on, but when pressed for details, they come up woefully short. They muster anecdotal evidence about some high-profile police shootings or the recent Starbucks fiasco, or they start talking about police shootings against blacks in general (debunked by the actual evidence, as I noted above) or the buzzword phenomenon of “mass incarceration” of blacks (also debunked), or they talk about “unconscious” or “implicit bias” (again, debunked). There are, of course, remaining prejudices in the minds of white people, such as evidenced by the well-publicized experiment in which employers given identical resumes, some with typically black names vs. some with typically white names, were significantly more likely to offer callbacks to the “white” resumes. But those prejudices aren’t evidence of some ubiquitous phenomenon of “white supremacy” so much as they’re evidence of the fact that white people (and black people as well) still largely see the black people in their midst as poorer, more uneducated, more “thuggish,” etc. This isn’t due to hateful racism so much as it’s due to the reality of disproportionate black poverty, and until that reality is addressed, the prejudices people have aren’t going to go away. But the way to address that problem isn’t to arm black people against “white supremacy.” “White supremacy” isn’t really keeping too many people down in 2018. Today, the major force keeping blacks down is the unfortunate strain of anti-intellectualism and the demonization of high achievement coupled with the glorification of street life present within black culture, a phenomenon sociologists call “cool-pose culture,” which I discuss in more detail here:
So, with all of that in mind, my question is simply this: what does encouraging blacks to arm themselves against “white supremacy” accomplish, exactly? How are guns going to protect them against “white supremacy”? Statistically speaking, guns are far more likely to result in some unfortunate and entirely avoidable incident than in protecting anyone against some ill-defined, pervasive force known as “white supremacy.”
Those are my basic critiques of the piece in The Washington Post, and I think those critiques do make sense, your criticisms notwithstanding. Hope that explains more of where I’m coming from. Again, thanks for reading and for your response.
