On Black Crime and Incarceration, Race Issues, BLM, Drug Laws, Social Justice and Other Things….
My goal, when I started writing this response, was to keep it short, but as usual, I failed miserably because of my desire to be clear and comprehensive. Anyway, I’ll just quote a few of your points and try to frame responses. Here we go:
On race, I was trying to make the point that most black people aren’t engaged directly, but absolutely know and feel different about the issues than white people. I’m speaking anecdotally in the sense of say 1/1000 football player might speak out like Colin Kaepernick, but almost all of them would have a better understanding of the issues than your average white person.
As I explained in my previous response to you, I don’t think black people have a “better” understanding of race issues than “your average white person.” They simply have a different understanding of those issues, as the Pew Survey I’d quoted from in that last response illustrates. I might have agreed with you to some extent if race issues were some obscure phenomenon that only victims of racism or specialists in race were familiar with, but in 2018, race issues are all over the news every single day; they are at the very forefront of our national consciousness. This makes virtually every single American of every race familiar with some facet of the problem. Even if black people were more often the victims of racism — which, in 2018, is actually not the case, if you’re talking about racism of the egregious, overt variety, which is casually and thoughtlessly spewed against whites from every nook and cranny of our society and the internet, and not the case if you’re talking about egregious, overt racism of the sort embodied in explicit race-based preferences at all kinds of institutions but still is the case if you’re talking about more “subtle” forms of racism of the sort reflected in experiments like that one that found that resumes with typically “black” names are less likely to get follow-up calls for interviews, etc. — being a victim of racism often gives you a very skewed perspective on race issues. This is particularly the case in our society now, when so many black people are being gaslighted into believing that they are the victims of some form of pernicious white racism each and every day of their lives. Such gaslighting does not tend to make you an expert on racism. It does, however, tend to make you angry, bitter, paranoid and delusional.
And BLM is just a campaign on top of or adjacent to a movement not for racial equality, but for social justice, an extension of Martin Luther King’s unfulfilled mission.
Comparing Martin Luther King Jr.’s message to that of #BlackLivesMatter is sort of like comparing the message of Jesus Christ to that of Savonarola or the Spanish Inquisition …. meaning that, yes, there’s some common thread there, but what stands out in each case is not the common thread but rather the extent to which a noble movement was perverted. Martin Luther King Jr. preached the ideal of race-blindness, the very thing that #BlackLivesMatter and many other current race-baiters see as a form of “subtle racism.” For his vision of a future society in which race no longer matters, they substitute a vision in which race is the end-all-be-all of a person’s consciousness, or rather, of a black person’s consciousness, whereas white people’s proper consciousness of their race entails no more than contrition for centuries of oppression. (I’ve argued repeatedly and at length that the entire racial paradigm should be discarded as an unscientific and regressive manner of categorizing human beings that creates artificial divisions and amplifies racial tensions, so I’m not making an argument for “white rights” or “white pride” or anything of that sort here.)
Incarceration rates are nearly 6x higher for black people, so this cuts to the heart of the systemic argument, that the cultural-legal-historical context for those high rates is nested in that legacy, not in any predisposition to criminality.
This is something that’s often repeated, but of course, like the myth that there’s an epidemic of killings of blacks by cops going on, it doesn’t account for the actual facts or the massive disparity in crime rates by race. The myth stems from a belief that black people get put in prison for low-level drug possession, as a result of a system that deliberately criminalizes drugs disproportionately used by black people (such as marijuana) and then imposes harsh mandatory minimum sentences for such “crimes.” But here is some actual data from you, drawn from this article (which is one of many making similar points):
- “In 2013, drug offenders made up less than 16 percent of the state prison population, whereas violent felons were 54 percent of the rolls and property offenders, 19 percent.”
- “True, drug traffickers make up a larger (though declining) portion of the federal prison population: half in 2014. But federal prisons hold only 13 percent of the nation’s prison population…. Less than 1 percent of sentenced drug offenders in federal court in 2014 were convicted for simple drug possession, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, and most of those convictions were plea-bargained down from trafficking charges.”
- “Contrary to the deincarceration movement, blacks do not dominate federal drug prosecutions. Hispanics were 48 percent of drug offenders sentenced in federal court in 2013, blacks were 27 percent, and whites 22 percent.”
- “Even on the state level, drug-possession convicts are relatively rare. In 2013, only 3.6 percent of state prisoners were serving time for drug possession, often the result of a plea bargain, compared with 12 percent of prisoners convicted for trafficking. Virtually all the possession offenders had long prior arrest and conviction records.”
- “It is not marijuana-smoking that lands a skewed number of black men in prison but their elevated rates of violent and property crime. A 2011 study of California and New York arrest data led by Pennsylvania State University criminologist Darrell Steffensmeier found that blacks commit homicide at 11 times the rate of whites and robbery at 12 times the rate of whites. Such disparities are repeated in city-level data. In New York City, blacks commit over 75 percent of all shootings, according to the victims of and witnesses to those shootings, though they are only 23 percent of the city’s population. They commit 70 percent of all robberies. Whites, by contrast, commit under 2 percent of all shootings and 4 percent of all robberies, though they are 34 percent of the city’s population. In the 75 largest county jurisdictions in 2009, blacks were 62 percent of robbery defendants, 61 percent of weapons offenders, 57 percent of murder defendants, and 50 percent of forgery cases, even though nationwide, blacks are 12 percent of the population. They dominated the drug-trafficking cases more than possession cases. Blacks made up 53 percent of all state trafficking defendants in 2009, whites made up 22 percent, and Hispanics 23 percent, whereas in possession prosecutions, blacks were 39 percent of defendants, whites 34 percent, and Hispanics 26 percent.”
Let me be 100% clear: in marshaling these statistics, I’m not in any way suggesting that blacks have some innate propensity to commit crimes. So much of the mindless vitriol and pointless politicization in this area of research stems from a false dichotomy that either blacks are incarcerated at a disproportionately high rate because of white racism or else blacks are incarcerated at a disproportionately high rate because they’re just born “super-predators,” to use Ms. Clinton’s term. Of course, neither is the case.
At the root of the problem is black poverty. Poor people commit crimes at a much higher rate than others, and poor people living in urban environments have the highest crime rate due to the fact that they are densely clustered together, creating both the opportunity for crime and a dysfunctional cultural environment that inevitably takes shape in dense concentrations (such as urban “housing projects”) of the poor, poorly educated, broken families, substance abusers and the like (see, e.g., here: “Where we live also makes a difference for our likelihood of committing crime. We saw earlier that big cities have a much higher homicide rate than small towns. This trend exists for violent crime and property crime more generally. Urban areas have high crime rates in part because they are poor, but poverty by itself does not completely explain the urban-rural difference in crime, since many rural areas are poor as well. A key factor that explains the higher crime rates of urban areas is their greater population density (Stark 1987). When many people live close together, they come into contact with one another more often. This fact means that teenagers and young adults have more peers to influence them to commit crime, and it also means that potential criminals have more targets (people and homes) for their criminal activity. Urban areas also have many bars, convenience stores, and other businesses that can become targets for potential criminals, and bars, taverns, and other settings for drinking can obviously become settings where tempers flare and violence ensues.”)
This is why when you actually compare the crime rates of white urban poor people and black urban poor people, you get similar numbers. For example, according to the DOJ, “[p]oor urban blacks (51.3 per 1,000) had rates of violence similar to poor urban whites (56.4 per 1,000).” However, as this article reports, “[a] poor black family … is much more likely than a poor white one to live in a neighborhood where many other families are poor, too, creating what sociologists call the ‘double burden’ of poverty.’ ”
When you connect these dots, what you get is a much higher crime rate (and a much higher rate of all the other kinds of familiar, expected dysfunction) for blacks than for whites. This, and not “racism” of any sort, is the elephant in the room, and I’ve argued at length and ad nauseum on Medium and elsewhere that until black poverty is addressed, all these heated “racism” discussions are doing nothing more than making racial tensions worse. I’ve also argued that the only practical way to address black poverty is through full integration of black people into mainstream society at every level (schools, neighborhoods, churches, workplaces, families, etc.). When that happens — just as it’s happened repeatedly with other groups of former “outsiders,” such as Catholics (Irish, Italians, etc.), Asians, Slavs, Jews, etc. — all anti-black discrimination will very quickly come to an end, just as discrimination against these other groups largely dissipated with integration. But as long as there’s this regressive meme out there radicalizing and racializing blacks and telling black people they’re different, and they’re America’s perpetual victims, and they’re poor because of racism, including subtle and institutional and system and implicit forms of racism that are pandemic and virtually ineradicable, a self-destructive and segregationist mindset is fostered, and no real integration is possible.
On social justice, at least we should be able to agree that the usage of the term has changed over time and space, just as the term “Social Justice Warrior” went from having it’s own history and positive connotations to a pejorative overnight in 2011. I had a short section on Social Justice in my Peterson critique. I’ll also agree that there is such a thing as ‘social justice warrior’ culture that behaves in the way you describe. I try to distance myself from that too. However, the concept of social justice precedes all of that, and has specific legitimate meaning in sociology, which no one seems to know or care about. So yeah, its subject to being a vicious abstraction, but I use it correctly- I just get misread for it.
I read your section on “Social Justice” in the Jordan Peterson article (I’m planning to read that whole article in the coming days), and I read the passage above as well, and I agree with you that the notion of “social justice” has changed over time, and social justice doesn’t necessarily have to mean what it currently means in the context of a typical “SJW.” But you have to understand that if you use the term, it has a certain present-day connotation that’s inevitably going to lead to misunderstandings. In addition, I still do have issues with even the broader notion of social justice you describe, and those issues are ones I think I addressed in my previous response to you (i.e., the Matthew Arnold issue, the Edmund Burke issue and the issue of sapping national morale and bringing out our worst instincts and our fissiparous tendencies, etc.).
On drugs, I contend there is an objective truth to the issue. That is to say, to take the position of legalization, whatever one’s motivations, is objectively right, based on facts. I say this because academically the war-on-drugs has been disproven hundreds of times over. It’s a big scam locked into path dependence. We both understand this. We’ve both attained a reasonable view from facts, even though there are still people like Jeff Sessions who think prohibition is good. However the difference between us here is that I have also used lots of different substances in very positive ways. It’s been a life long study. So I can personally attest that it being a “superficial short-cut” is only true for some people in some cases. It’s not an accurate way to describe drug culture, only the abuse of it, which is only one part of the picture.
I have no particular reason to doubt that you’ve personally used drugs in a way that’s not a “superficial short-cut,” but I’d say that the vast majority of drug use by people does fall into that category. For that reason, there is a public interest in dampening down incidence of drug use. Moreover, when you consider a drug like crack or heroin, the desire to ban such drugs is not merely driven by some sort of anti-black agenda or conspiracy, the express comments by people within the Nixon administration notwithstanding. Parents don’t want their kids growing up addicts. Moreover, the view that some sort of uniquely American racist agenda is the source of the War on Drugs runs into a simple, glaring problem: virtually all nations in the world, most of which have no substantial black population, ban the vast majority of the same drugs the U.S. bans, and even with regard to comparatively “benign” drugs like marijuana, it’s still illegal is most countries.
So, I just don’t see how you can say that your opinion in favor of legalization (which I happen to share) is “objectively right” in the same sense in which the climate change debate must have an “objective truth” to it. There is no “fact” of the matter here. I would contend that the way most people use drugs is harmful to their well-being, broadly conceived. Using drugs in an intelligent, responsible way requires either mentoring and supervision or an already elevated consciousness. Now, I happen to believe that people should be permitted to make their own mistakes and suffer the consequences, which is why I’m all for legalization, but I also see the countervailing interest a nation has in ensuring that we don’t have millions of junkies out there to contend with. There is a legitimate national interest in things like economic productivity and the health of the citizenry. If you favor any sort of socialized medicine, or even just Medicare for the poor, there’s also a significant national interest in keeping down the costs of dealing with the health issues many drug users will inevitably experience. With all of that in mind, I just don’t see how you get to any sort of “objectivity” on this issue. Again, part of the error I think SJWs make is that they’re so sure of themselves and have the fanatic’s faith that God is on their side. A bit of skepticism in this respect is a healthy thing.
