People denying racism is a systemic problem in American policing repeatedly cite as “proof” a study published by Roland Fryer, which they particularly love citing because Fryer is black. The thing is though, Fryer’s study proved systemic racism in American policing. And you should know this in case anyone tries citing Fryer at you.
First, Science Is Not Just One Study
First, of course, scientific facts do not rest on single studies. You can find studies proving and disproving almost any proposition; because an enormous percentage of scientific results are false. The reproducibility project has found nearly two thirds of papers in psychology fail replication, and in methodological reliability psychology parallels or even exceeds all other social sciences, which this subject falls under. So single studies are highly unreliable here. Consequently what you want to see is what’s been reproduced, what the majority of studies find, and what’s based on a large and reliable set of data (and is peer reviewed by a legitimate science journal, of course; but I assume you’re already doing that—if you’re using crank science we have a bigger problem).
When you stick to that standard, the evidence for systemic racism in American policing is literally vast (and that list is even endorsed by the conservative Cato institute). It’s a problem in juvenile crime enforcement. It’s a problem in sentencing. It’s a problem in proactive policing. It’s a problem even in trying to effect reform. And yes, all of that has obviously gotten better since the mid-20th century but remains a persistent problem with cumulative effects. And much of that is only caused by implicit racism. Yet pick any city at random, and kick over the rock, and underneath we keep finding even explicit racism (Baltimore; Charlottesville; Chicago; Maryland; Ferguson; Minneapolis; seriously, Minneapolis; even San Francisco; and countless others). And this is all easily found. (And on and on. There is this. There is this. And so on.) If you research critically rather than just listen to racist propaganda attempting to dismiss it all, you’ll see where the evidence trend-line is.
Second, Understand what “Systemic” Means
To understand through a parallel case, consider how systemic racism lies in our enduring obsession with the criminalization of drug use. Even if (if?) we are maintaining that now for some other reason, those laws were originally implicitly designed to target racial and political minorities and continue to do so (see Yep. Criminalizing Pot Might Be a Subconscious Plot to Punish Liberals & Minorities). Just as Republican efforts to restrict voting rights are specifically designed to target racial and political minorities and continue to do so. They’re even still admitting it on paper (albeit paper they hoped we wouldn’t get to read). These are systemic efforts: racists rig the system to enact their racist will (by lying about their real motives); such that even if the system they then set up is not itself being run by racists, the system is still racist: it discriminates unjustly based on race.
Thus systemic racism isn’t just about the explicit racism of yore. It’s in many cases about systems engineered to enforce racism even if no one sustaining that system is themselves racist. Additional to that, it’s also mostly about implicit racism now (example, example, example; summary here). At this point in current events I should hope I don’t have to explain the difference between subconscious racism and conscious racism. But I will anyway, just in case. One is autonomic, the other malicious; one can’t be corrected by changing cognitive beliefs, the other can. To conflate these two creates an equivocation fallacy of the “I’m not a member of the KKK, therefore I am not a racist” variety. Which is only the most extreme version of that fallacy; a more common version is “I am not a bad person, therefore I cannot be a racist,” wherein “racist” is here conflated entirely with “cognitive racist” (wherein racism is a correlate or product of malice), the only kind of racist who is “a bad person,” when in reality most racism is noncognitive: the person exhibiting it, isn’t even aware of it, and it isn’t based on cognitive beliefs they could even articulate, much less would ever defend.
Noncognitive racism is not a correlate or product of malice, but social programming. Like when people “panic” disproportionately at the sight of a black person but can’t even explain to themselves why, or why their positive beliefs and feelings toward black people doesn’t stop this emotional reaction from occurring (see my similar discussion of noncognitive sexism). Noncognitive racism is more like all cognitive biases that plague all human brains, all of which are subconscious, and can only be consciously controlled for, not removed. One has to consciously make an effort to override or work around those inborn subconscious reactions (though racist bias is not inborn and thus can conceivably be deconditioned—just not without a long span of continual cognitive effort, so it’s effectively similar). But people can confuse this scientific fact of all brains being irrational with calling someone “irrational” as an attack on their character, just as they confuse what racism means in the same way.
Admitting your brain is irrational—that in fact it operates on all those standard cognitive errors, because it evolved to do so, and thus was genetically programmed to do so—is not equivalent to calling yourself irrational, in the sense of “a person committed to being irrational.” You can be a rational person—someone committed to watching out for and overcoming all those irrational biases—who still always has an irrational brain. That’s actually a sign of good character: the true rationalist wants to admit to this neurological problem so they can continually do something about it (yet you won’t, if you won’t even admit to the problem). Likewise with racism: you can have a racist brain without being a racist person. The effect on the system you inhabit is then to make the whole system racist, even though you never intentionally do anything racist in that system.
That’s what systemic racism means: it means that, for whatever reason (and there can be several operating simultaneously), the system itself is acting in a discriminatory way. How you experience the system, the way it distributes opportunities and setbacks, difficulties and advantages, will differ depending on what color skin you have. There can also be many other reasons it does so, making it worse: e.g. past systemic racism has helped keep more people of color in poverty, and poverty begets many other ills all on its own (see Intersectionality: A Guide for the Perplexed). But that does not replace, but compounds, the problem: even controlling for poverty, the system still treats even comparably situated people of color (which means mostly, Black and Hispanic people) differently than White people.
The causes of systemic racism can be several: some percentage of it can be caused by explicit bias in a few people operating in the system or designing it; some percentage of it can be caused by implicit bias in many people operating in the system or designing it; and some percentage of it can be “zombie” features of the system, like the criminalization of drug use, which were created for racist purposes but now are (at least possibly) continued for other reasons (police resistance to themselves being policed is an example of an unrelated system failure that just happens to also inadvertently perpetuate racism in policing; likewise how damages are assessed in court; how educational systems punish and reward students; and so on). One of the most pervasive examples of this kind of feature is the denial of systemic racism itself: sometimes that is indeed born out of racism (explicit or implicit), but often enough it is born of completely unrelated cognitive errors (such as the conflation of implicit racism and bad character, resulting in an ego-defense that denies facts in order to avoid the perceived charge), yet it has the systemic effect of sustaining racism in the whole system by doing nothing about it, or even motivating actions to thwart any effort to do anything about it (just as denying the innate irrationality of the human brain has the systemic effect of sustaining an irrational society—by again, doing nothing about it, or even actively opposing any effort to do anything about it). But no matter what the combination of causes, when you add them all up, you get statistically observable disparities across the whole system.
As I pointed out before, imagine if a video game—some first-person shooter, say—secretly but automatically inflicted damage on any character controlled by a Black player at the start of every game. It wouldn’t mean White players always win the game. Many Black players will overcome the disadvantage. But it will mean White players would win more often. Not because they are cheating. But because the system is cheating Black players. Yet White players still benefit. They have the privilege of not starting the game with docked hit points. If you interact with a system, such that every time you do, there is only a 10% chance of a disparity in treatment (every other interaction carries off fairly, but 1 in every 10 times some racist causal factor results in a worse outcome for you), overall the system is docking you a lot of hit points. Because you have to interact with the system a lot. And that shit adds up. Add the realization that luck matters more than talent in getting ahead, and you’ll start to realize how serious this is.
When it comes to policing it’s important to remember how catastrophic such implicit racism can be. It’s not just like an employer having a “gut feeling” that they don’t like or trust or get a good impression of a Black applicant as much as a comparably situated White applicant, without their being aware of the cause of this feeling—and thus we get a cumulative “hit point” cost on employability. Rather, when cops are involved, lives are destroyed or ruined. If you can’t catch a break but instead get pipelined into prison and criminality at a disproportionate rate, for example, that’s not just “not getting a job,” it’s an entire ruined life—and ironically, this is actually self-destructive to the White community, as all it does is make the crime they fear worse. But, and this is what comes to the fore in recent events, it can be even worse than that: you can be outright killed—including in death penalty states, resulting in a legacy of murder against innocent Black people. But not only there.
As I wrote once before, when Philando Castile was killed by police officer Jeronomo Yanez despite breaking no laws and complying calmly to every stated request, this was almost certainly racism in action. Because we rarely see this happen when the person in the car is White. But this was not racism because Yanez is consciously racist. He’s not, so far as I know, a supporter of the KKK or a reader of The Daily Stormer or constantly thinking of ways to keep the Black Man down or wishing he didn’t have to hide all the reasons he is sure Black people are bad. I doubt that. More likely Yanez just intuitively felt scared of people with dark skin. And this caused him to delude himself into a panicked sense of danger, resulting in the crazed, undisciplined shooting of another human being to death. Almost certainly his racist bias, an inherent panic at Black people, causing one to interpret everything Black people do as menacing, was not the product of conscious beliefs. But it’s racism all the same. If Castille had been White, statistically, Yanez probably would not have imagined himself in danger, or would have been more cautious in assessing it. His brain would have delivered him a more positive spin on what Castille might have been doing, rather than an ominous one. He’d have been more measured in his response. He wouldn’t have panicked. And Castille would still be alive. That’s how most racism works. In policing as everywhere else. But “everywhere else” usually doesn’t result in being gunned down in your own car. Or pipelined into a life of crime.
So this shit matters.
Third, No: Asians Don’t Disprove This
“But aren’t Asians all better off than white people? Why do they keep complaining about racism then?” Of course, there is already a non sequitur here: e.g. you can be rich and still targeted with racism. As long as you are being treated worse than comparably situated White people, you are on the receiving end of racism. And because that’s unfair, you get to complain about it. But this argument is also factually skewed: systemic bias has actually created the perceived “advantages” of being Asian.
United States immigration policy prioritizes education and wealth over blue collar skills and actual applicant needs (we dislike paupers and refugees and working class skillsets; but love Crazy Rich Asians), so without a land border to jump, Asians have a very hard time immigrating to the US unless they already bring wealth, or an education that generates wealth. This isn’t necessarily racist (presumably White immigrants face the same requirements). But the effect is the same: successful Asians end up here at a higher rate than our native population or any other large immigrant group. We’d see the same thing in the Black community if Africa produced the same scale of educated, wealthy immigrants to the U.S. It’s just historical happenstance that Africa is not as populous or well off as Asia (though there is of course a racist legacy as to why that is). But the upshot is: the only reason Asians “poll” as better off than White Americans is that statistically, most Asians aren’t from here, yet are the creme of the crop of where they did come from. Because we rarely let any others in.
There is also a differential in the degree of racism endured between Asians and anyone of dark skin (Blacks and Hispanics mostly; though several numerically smaller groups get the same end of the stick). American racism against Blacks and Hispanics has historically been more stalwart and severe, suppressing inter-generational wealth and status accumulation in them much more than in Asians. If you don’t believe me, set yourself the research project of looking at numerous studies of the history of racism (and even recent racism) in housing and real estate (and related ghettoizing) between Blacks and Asians. You’ll find that “zoning” Asians into ghettos died out more generations ago than for Black people; as did anything the equivalent of Jim Crowe laws. The Internment, for example, only affected the Japanese; and they (unlike Black people) received reparations (albeit nowhere near comparable to what they lost).
But even with all that in mind, if there were no Asians immigrating to the US, most likely Asians would statistically be closer to but still below Whites in wealth and education averages. Hence, still behind; but a lot better off than blacks. Simply because the racism against Asians has been less virulent and has been declining in its severity at a faster rate. Which, honestly, is illustrative of the effect of doing something about it. Yet it’s still latent and real.
Now to the Fryer Study
Roland Fryer completed his study, “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force,” for the National Bureau of Economic Research. It passed peer review and was accepted for publication in Harvard’s Journal of Political Economy. You’ll see this cited at you as disproving systemic racism in policing. It was even (infamously) misquoted in a broadcast interview by a major police official in Tulsa to that very effect. But when you actually read Fryer’s study, you get quite different results…
Fryer found that in New York City, “Black civilians are…more likely to have any force used against them conditional on being arrested. They are…more likely to have any force used against them conditional on being summonsed and…more likely conditional on having weapons or contraband found on them.” He also found these disparities worsen in daytime (when someone’s race is more visible). That’s systemic racism. He also found a national dataset confirms this pattern everywhere:
Relative to whites, blacks and Hispanics seem to have very different interactions with law enforcement—interactions that are consistent with, though definitely not proof of, some form of discrimination. Including myriad controls designed to account for civilian demographics, encounter characteristics, civilian behavior, eventual outcomes of interaction and year reduces, but cannot eliminate, racial differences in non-lethal use of force in either of the datasets analyzed.
So, even accounting for differential rates of poverty and criminality, even circumstances of encounter, People of Color are still beaten and attacked by police more than similarly situated White people. That’s one of the major conclusions of Fryer’s paper. Yet it’s being claimed it said the opposite.
“Strikingly,” Fryer said, “both the black and Hispanic coeficients are statistically similar across…income levels—suggesting that higher income minorities do not price themselves out of police use of force.” In other words, this disparity is not explained by poverty or criminality. It’s race. Even upper class people of color are being mistreated. As Fryer’s conclusion holds, “On non-lethal uses of force, there are racial differences—sometimes quite large—in police use of force, even after controlling for a large set of controls designed to account for important contextual and behavioral factors at the time of the police-civilian interaction.”
Indeed, Fryer adds, “even when we take perfectly compliant individuals and control for civilian, officer, encounter and location variables, black civilians are…more likely to have any force used against them in an interaction compared to white civilians with the same reported compliance behavior.” In fact, Fryer’s own modeling shows “the net benefit of investment in compliance is lower for blacks relative to whites,” which “is precisely what the model predicts if racial animus is an important factor in explaining racial differences in use of force.”
Fryer also found that “racial differences in police [use] of force does not seem to vary with civilian gender or officer race especially for black civilians.” So Black officers can be racists too. We already knew that (discrimination is discrimination; it doesn’t matter who is doing the discriminating), but racism deniers have a hard time grasping this one. Racism benefits White people, but is still often reinforced by Black people internalizing the same (in this case usually implicit) racism and acting in the same way, with the same biases.
The One Odd Finding
Deniers of systemic racism will ignore all those findings of the Fryer study, even pretend they aren’t in it, and instead cherry pick the one thing in it they want to hear—and even that they get wrong:
Only in Houston (not nationwide, take note) Fryer found that “Blacks are 23.5 percent less likely to be shot by police, relative to whites, in an interaction.” But…wait for it…that’s just citing the raw numbers. “Including encounter characteristics…creates more parity between blacks and non-black non-Hispanic suspects, rendering the coecient closer to 1.” In other words, the Yates quote, that “we ought to be shooting them more” is not what the Fryer study he cited said: to the contrary, it found Houston cops (and only Houston cops) were shooting Black and White suspects at exactly the same frequency, when you account for encounter characteristics—which, uhem, are written up by the shooter. And we all know how reliably cops report what actually happened. If you weren’t aware, there is a systemic lying problem in American police culture: not just in the Floyd case (evidence, evidence, evidence, evidence; indeed he had been a victim of police lies even earlier in his life) but all across the country: in the Gugino case, in the Taylor case, in the Lakey case, in the Smith case, in the Toledo case, in the Green case, in the Carroll Gardens case, in the Nichols case, in cases all over the country, from rough-and-tumble Chicago and Baltimore to free-loving San Francisco to middle-of-the-road Columbus, to the point of being well and widely documented as a systemic problem (and we knew this even before the widespread availability of video proved it). Indeed, we now know police nationwide have been hiding a lot of violence they perpetrate, especially against Black and Hispanic victims, as well as their lies and corruption generally, specifically to avoid being caught at it (indeed, American police have almost uniformly opposed any system of holding them accountable for even criminal malfeasance, much less civil). Police are commonly dishonest. They therefore cannot be trusted as witnesses any more than any other criminal.
But even if we believed cops are robotically honest, Lawful Good Paladins the lot of them, with electronic brains lacking all the standard human cognitive biases in memory and reportage, the data show parity, not “24%” less than “should” be the case. Even when Fryer adds the point that “when we include whether or not a suspect was found with a weapon” the data are slightly below parity, he adds: “though the racial differences are not significant” in statistical terms. So, still parity. And again, this assumes these claims of “he had a weapon” are all true. We know for a fact that they often are not (example, example, example, example, example, example, example).
This is the only finding of the study that racism deniers latch onto. And even that they misreport (as Yates did)—not only by getting what it said wrong, but also by confusing results from one city’s police department as if it applied to the whole nation, and only using data the police “self-report,” which we all now know is dubious. As even Fryer notes, “an important caveat to these data is that the sequence of events in a police-civilian interaction is subject to misreporting by police” and “it is plausible that there are large racial differences that exist that are masked by police misreporting.” And here we have reason to suspect. Because multiple national studies—which often also relied on the same kind of skewed source data, but again skewed in favor of making police look good—found uses of lethal force were roughly two to four times as likely for a Black person than a White person—not 24% less likely, much less parity.
The Hidden Significance of Even That
It’s actually more ominous when you pay more attention to that one finding for Houston in Fryer’s study. Notice how even that anomalous Houston finding mathematically supports Fryer’s other evidence of racism in policing, when we account for the use of any force, not just lethal force, and combine that with the lower frequency of Black suspects doing anything to warrant their being stopped and interacted with in the first place. Both facts Fryer’s study confirmed (and that’s all we need to establish systemic racism in American policing). But now pause for a moment to think this through…
Fryer found no evidence of a plague of unjustified shootings of White suspects. So in order for 24% fewer black people to be shot than white people except when encounter characteristics are accounted for (in other words, “justification”), encounters with White people must have been consistently more dangerous than encounters with Black people. Yet everyone thinks it’s the other way around (implicit bias at work). Why were encounters with White people so much more dangerous? Is it because cops are getting into confrontations with Black people more often than White people…and discovering they shouldn’t be, because they are stopping too many innocent Black people, while more reliably stopping White criminals? That’s the most likely explanation of Fryer’s finding. The only other possibility is that White people are more dangerous than Black people. Which is a possibility I doubt your average racism-denier would like to entertain. Yet they’d be right not to; I am not aware of any evidence for it, whereas Fryer’s own study presented evidence supporting the contrary hypothesis: police are getting into Black people’s business way too much; while only messing with White people when real shit is going down.
Fryer’s data—along with numerous other studies—confirms that’s the case: cops stop Black people more often than White people, yet they find contraband (in other words, a reason to have stopped them) more often in the White suspects. As Fryer describes this, “black stops are significantly less productive than whites and [this] is evidence for potential bias.” So even Fryer’s lethal force finding confirms systemic racism in Houston’s policing practices: they are more reliably finding dangerous criminals to confront (and thus shoot) when they are White; whereas they seem to be engaging Black suspects more randomly, and thus not efficiently zeroing in on the actually dangerous ones in the way they are with White suspects. This is corroborated by all the other tests of the “productivity” of involuntary police interactions that Fryer measures.
Fryer also ran some controls for the theory that officers are “afraid” to shoot Black suspects for fear of being called racist; he finds no evidence corroborating that hypothesis. The racial disparities he found in abuse and assault by police alone refute it. But he also tests it by finding there has been no decline in shooting Black people in Houston as attention to racist policing increased over the last twenty years. Fryer hypothesizes that the costs to an officer of any lethal shooting (regardless of target race) are so high that Houston police are much more careful about when they deploy that measure, to the point that they shoot everyone at the same rate, when accounting for all other factors, especially encounter circumstances (thus washing out all racism from their decision-making). Whereas no one cared much (until recently) about beating people up or treating them more harshly or disrespectfully, so when those actions are contemplated, racism has been allowed to flourish. Even Fryer’s theory, however, was based on already-suspect police self-reporting, so it’s not so reliable a conclusion. Which may be why studies using national data argue against his lethal force finding being typical. So one might want to do a deeper dive into the reported shootings in Houston than Fryer did—to see what actually turns out to be true, and how often discrepancies arise between independently verifiable facts and police reports (and whether more such discrepancies more often pop up when the target is Black, for example).
Another thing to consider is that, as Fryer proved, police engage in unprovoked violence with minorities more often than White people. That could cause escalation to a lethal shooting, which would even be reported in Fryer’s data as justified, and thus not show racial bias—even though in fact racial bias caused it. The “he went for my gun” excuse, and all its variants (as South Park poked fun at with the “he’s coming right at me” joke), could be because the target feared for his life because the police initiated dangerous, unprovoked violence against them—and that’s unlikely to go well for a victim when everyone believes anything police say. In other words, a lot of self defense from suspects is likely being “coded” in police reports as justified violence against suspects. Fryer’s study had no means of detecting this. One would have to engage a closer look to rule it out.
But as I already noted, Fryer’s one finding that police shoot more white people than black people before accounting for things like encounter escalation, could also be because police are more reliably stopping criminal suspects when they are White. And indeed, it could be several of these things at the same time, all adding up to the net effect observed in the data by Fryer. Including a finding found in another limited set of data (discussed among other studies here) that in some datasets police shoot at the same rate regardless of race but force interactions twice as often with racial minorities (despite evidence of that being counter-productive rather than justified), resulting in minorities facing an unjustly higher risk of being shot by police.
For instance, supporting the racism-initiated escalation hypothesis, Fryer proves a disproportionate number of Blacks are being assaulted by police, and that the measurable benefit of a Black person’s compliance with police is lower than it is for White people; which must necessarily cause more escalation that leads to a lethal shooting. So the fact that Houston cops are still catching (and thus shooting) White violent offenders more reliably than Black ones could mask racism in the very sequence of events that leads to the lethal shooting of Black suspects. Fryer’s data won’t show this, either.
Yet we see this very dynamic playing out in protests these last couple of months: police are usually the ones causing the escalation that leads to what they then report as “being attacked,” which results in their escalating the violence to levels resulting in injury or death. All too often (and we have many documented cases) it is indeed the police who are causing this, not the people they are attacking (this has been extensively and repeatedly documented for years and is now a standard doctrine in evidence-based policing: see summaries at The Marshall Project, FiveThirtyEight, CU Commons, and The Washington Post). Fryer also mentions this as a possible cause of his own data.
I would suggest this explains even a reverse finding in Fryer, that with lethal shootings in Houston, “the only statistically significant differences by race demonstrate that black officers are more likely to shoot unarmed whites, relative to white officers.” That could be because white people are less likely to cooperate with a black officer, causing an escalation that results in a lethal shooting. Thus what looks like black-on-white racism, could just be more white-on-black racism—combined with American police culture’s obsession with resorting to lethal violence generally: even unarmed White people are far more likely to be murdered by police in America than any other country; in some cases as much as thirty times more likely (this is a serious problem even White racists should be worried about: see summaries in Business Insider, The Washington Post, and Quartz). In other words, American cops just love thrashing and killing people; their racism in doing so is almost lost in that much larger aberrant signal.
So even if you don’t care about racism, the rampant nationwide corruption and propensity for violence in American police should concern you (see my many links to countless examples of both above). It harms even White people. A lot.
Don’t Confuse Statistics for Geography
Another factor Fryer’s study does not address (nor any does so far as I know) is geography: almost all the violent crime in the United States that makes us a disturbing outlier as a nation in the First World occurs in a very small number of neighborhoods (in fact, in areas and networks even smaller than neighborhoods). And I don’t mean cities; one section of one neighborhood within a city might contain nearly all the violent crime shown in statistics for that city. So when you look at, for example, “violent crime in Chicago,” you are not, in fact, looking at violent crime in Chicago. You are looking at violent crime in a tiny little area of Chicago, such that if you didn’t include it in your stats, Chicago would look like any low-crime European city.
This creates a problem when we try to say, for example, “Black people engage in more violent crime than White people,” because that’s actually not true when you control for neighborhood. Very few Black neighborhoods, even fewer integrated neighborhoods, contain the crime that these small number of violent outlier neighborhoods across the county do, yet those neighborhoods generate most of our nation’s violent crime. It just so happens, of course, that those few anomalous neighborhoods are predominately Black: because White America ghettoized Black populations throughout the 20th century. Indeed, usually deliberately (and if you don’t believe that, do some honest research on the history of racism in housing and zoning in the United States; or just read A Bayesian Analysis of the Winling-Michney Thesis on Redlining).
But this leads to implicit racism by a common human cognitive error we formally call the Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent: “The worst neighborhoods are Black, therefore Black people are worse than White people.” That doesn’t follow. “If all the cats in the Gumdrop Forrest are feral, and Jonesy is a cat, therefore Jonesy is probably feral” doesn’t follow—because there are far more domesticated cats outside the Gumdrop Forest than all the cats within it in it, so it’s actually the other way around.
So you can’t just “control” for rates of violent crime by Black people when assessing likelihood of a Black person being shot, as Fryer did. Fryer made no control for neighborhood of incident. What we need to know is where Black people are being shot. If cops assume all Black people they meet anywhere are dangerous, simply because there is one dangerous black neighborhood in town, this will result in a disproportion of shootings of Black people who aren’t even a part of the “dangerous” population they are being presumed to be a part of. That’s racism by definition: assuming they “come from there” because they are Black.
If, for instance, an unusual number of shootings of Black people occur outside high-crime neighborhoods, and this happens more often than for White people, you’ve found racism. Even if the overall rate is lower. No one has checked this yet. And yet it needs to be checked, because it more accurately describes public perception: that all Black people are being punished for the behavior of a few Black people in a small number of ghettos created by centuries of White power. This is reflected in Fryer’s own finding of racist application of uses of nonlethal force and of involuntary encounters generally. When police choose to interact with someone, their decision, Fryer documents, exhibits a racist trend overall; in addition to those encounters being more likely to result in violence from the police based on race, as Fryer found even after controlling for all other factors.
Back to That Systemic Racism Thing
The whole idea of systemic racism is that not everyone in a system need be racist for the system to be. That’s practically the definition of systemic racism. So, suppose only 10% of every police force is racist. Indeed, let’s assume, even cognitively racist. Although most racism is noncognitive, we do also have a lot of evidence of explicit racism in police departments in every part of the country: we just got a shocking example in Wilmington this week; but we have many others. Just see my earlier links on specific police departments (Baltimore etc.); when investigated for racism, usually tons of it turns up.
So let’s say, just to illustrate a point, that this is everywhere: most cops have zero racism, but 10% are full-on “let’s kill the n****rs” style racists. This could explain all the racial disparities in the data. But then everything those cops do is protected by 100% of the police force. As we saw with George Floyd: one officer committed the murder, while numerous officers did nothing about it; and the department even tried lying about what happened until video came out exposing them. That latter action need not be racist at all, it’s rather simply generic corruption: cops back each other with lies, report-faking, and intensive intra-group peer pressure no matter what crimes they commit against whoever, regardless of race or anything else (see the many links I gave above of exactly this kind of corruption and lying from police departments all across America). The effect, however, is to maintain a racist system: we get that 10% disparity in treatment of citizens by race from the whole system, and nothing is ever done about it. In this scenario, in every case, a whole police department is causing this disparity, even though only 10% of it is cognitively racist.
That’s a simplistic model meant only to reflect the point of what people mean by a “system” being racist without the people in it all being racist. In reality, most racism in police departments is noncognitive; and most if it is not “pure” (it doesn’t cause a racist decision in 100% of interactions), but has to be triggered by a confluence of events that override officer judgment. So it’s not 10% bad cops; it’s more like 90% of cops acting on unknowingly racist instincts 10% of the time—and then 100% of cops covering that up for reasons having not to do with racism but rampant, nationally standardized police corruption. The effect is the same: a system that sustains different treatment of people by race.
When White people “deny” systemic racism exists, they might have all sorts of generic motives that don’t have to do with race (ego; political groupthink; a fear of having to do something about any problem in society should they dare admit it exists). They might also be emotionally “triggered” by the race question to want to deny systemic police abuse and corruption altogether (which are not race-specific but are demonstrably rampant, and harm even White people), so they don’t even take action on that (which does not require them to believe in racism at all, yet would help Black people as well as White if they did anything about it). But that’s precisely systemic racism at work: the evidence is overwhelming that it exists, yet by denying it exists (regardless of why), it is given “cover” and thus allowed to flourish, unchecked, unpoliced. The system becomes racist because we let it. So stop letting it.
Or if you don’t believe in racism, please get angry about all this massive nationwide evidence of police corruption, violence, and abuse of power. Believe it affects White people equally. I don’t care. I’d rather you did something about it. Sso whatever delusion you must entertain to motivate you, go to it. Because if you care about democracy, if you care about government overreach and assaults on Constitutional liberties, you sure as hell should care about this. Because, after all…
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
There seems to be a selection effect on the data that Fryer decided to study in the first place. Police departments that have a more serious problem with racism did not even participate in the study.
Does Fryer look into cases where Black people are stopped by police and no force is used (non-lethal or lethal). Under that circumstance you would have police engaged in racial profiling without it resulting in a report detailing whether force was used.
Moreover, there are cases where police touch their gun or pull out their gun (without pointing it) when facing a particular person and it is not reported as use of force. Thus those kinds of actions by officers cannot be analyzed for racial bias.
Lastly, America’s fascination with guns makes police more deadly to American citizens compared to Europe. The fact that any America can shoot any officer dead in seconds means that police are trained to be more aggressive resulting in an increased use of both non-lethal and lethal force.
First point, correct. Police departments frequently refuse to cooperate with research like this or make the relevant data really hard to get. The Obama administration made some small headway on this, but nowhere near well enough. In fact Fryer was able to get what data he could in part because of that. But it’s still deeply problematic data, albeit entirely in the police’s favor.
Second point, sort of. He discusses some of that data, and mentions other research that has as well. I link to more here. This is part of what he is talking about with the “productivity” measure of “stops.” Numerous studies show there are way more “stops” of black people, yet with significantly lower productivity. Fryer confirms this.
Third point, also correct. As Fryer himself notes (and I quoted him noting it) a lot of bias could be erased by the way police record incidents. He did not himself look at “respectfulness” (that wasn’t in his data) but other studies have, which I linked to above, which have found what you mean (increased harshness and aggressiveness, decreased respectfulness, all falling short of reportable violence, against black interactants).
Fourth, yes, it’s a vicious cycle. Americans are themselves particularly violent and prone to resolving any issue with violence (it’s why we have a mass shooter problem). But even considering that, the wrong reaction is to escalate the violence, yet that’s what police do. That only escalates violence against them, which they then use as an excuse to escalate their violence against the public, and so on. It creates the “at war with our citizens” mentality even a lot of cops are now denouncing as a problem on their own side (I included several links on this as well).
I’m not sure what this topic has to do with History & religion. Also, you may want to check the book: “The War on Cops”.
Where does it say this is about history or religion? Or that I only write about history or religion?
You must be confused.
Meanwhile, tu quoque is a fallacy. My article isn’t about problems faced by police. So that there are such problems is irrelevant to everything I just wrote. That you would attempt to use that as an excuse to ignore what I did demonstrate is disturbing. You need to do a reliability test on your epistemology. It’s broken.
Very good review!
First, I should point out that you give the Asian model minority myth entirely too much credit, for two key reasons. One: The myth is circular. People just assume that Asians have endured exactly as much racism as blacks or Hispanics, despite that being literally what the argument is being asserted to prove. If Asians had endured less than blacks (like, say, never being the primary targets of an entire system of apartheid), then it is possible that they could rebound in a way that others could not. The comparison becomes bankrupt if it isn’t an apples to apples comparison, yet I have literally never once seen any one even try to defend that, not even in scholarly attempts to do so. It’s just another racist uncle argument that has faux legitimacy. Second: It’s not even true; or, more accurately, the effect is more than eliminated by proper controls. When you take into account everything from the disproportionate clustering of Asians in a few high-income areas in the country to differential family sizes onward, individual Asians actually look on average worse than whites. Viet and other Indochinese immigrants really help drive this point home: they have welfare receipt rates, poverty rates, high school graduation rates, etc. comparable to blacks. That’s the difference between self-selected immigrants (and their descendants) and a cross-sectional group. The argument is so debunked in sociological circles that it actually serves as a shorthand for someone being incompetent when they bring it up.
Second: The Fryer study reminds me a lot of the attempt to invoke the Ceci et al. study that people dishonestly cherry-pick to rebut the overwhelming evidence of bias in STEM, despite the fact that the authors are totally clear that at least the mommy track is still real so even citing this outlier study still does not indicate that there are no structural barriers. I was discussing with an anti-feminist one time who proudly and snidely cited me an AAUW study (which in effect said “It’s not just discrimination, there are other factors”) as proof that there was no discrimination, then had to scramble like a greased pig to excuses when I pointed out not only who published the study but also that it not only rebutted what he claimed it said but also handed me yet more ammo.
This is one of Dr Carrier’s strongest articles. And very timely.
Just out of curiosity, was this inspired by Sam Harris recently citing the Fryar study as an attempt to downplay systemic racism?
No. I haven’t heard anything as to what Harris has said on this issue. I heard after I published that he did some sort of podcast on it (?). But not what it contained. Could you elaborate?
You’re right that Sam Harris recently made a podcast talking about black lives matter.
I have not listened to the whole thing and dear god I don’t want to be accused of taking him out of context.
But in his poscast he used this exact same Fryer study in the ways which you explicitly explained were wrong.
He talks about how the disproportionate attacks on black and brown people are not racist because black and brown people are just as likely to shoot at minorities.
He then uses that to say that black people are more likely to be resistant and violent to police officers despite the fact that the very same study claims the opposite.
And he uses it to say that white people are more likely to be killed by police officers. All while dishonestly talking about a myriad of other points related to the BLM movement.
Seriously, for all his calmness and smooth-talking he is hardly better than right-wing hacks. I suppose this should hardly be a surprise anymore especially after Charles Murray. My opinion of him was never too high but it keeps on sinking lower and lower.
If Sam Harris said all those things, he is indeed sucking as a philosopher. Again. Sad.
(But per the following comment, I didn’t listen to that podcast, so whether he said any of that might be questionable.)
Hi Mike! I just listened to the entire podcast. I paid particular attention to the Fryer section—listened to that section twice. I may have missed something, however it seems to me that Sam didn’t actually say any of the things you said that he said.
Note: The following comment is in response to another comment that was deleted at that comment author’s request. The gist of which comment was that the Castille shooting was in various ways and in some sense justified because Castille was a marijuana user and “looked like” a robbery suspect, and some of the jury acquitting his murderer were themselves minorities.
Are you kidding?
First: How did the officer making such a quick identification have any justification to think that this was a suspect? Answer: He did not. By the officer’s own admission, “The two occupants just look like people that were involved in a robbery. The driver looks more like one of our suspects, just because of the wide-set nose. I couldn’t get a good look at the passenger”. So he couldn’t even clearly see one of the two passengers, indicating that his ability to clearly identify the features of the other should have been deeply suspect. And the only thing he did see, again by his own admission, was one point of comparison.
This should not lead to a traffic stop. Anywhere. White or black, I should not be subjected to a traffic stop because my hair is the same length as someone else.
Ah, but you might say! The officer can still pull you over for any number of things you do illegally, right? Right, and that is a huge problem, one even Scalia conceded may be an issue but punted to Congress about. We allow officers to pull people over because the traffic laws are purposefully vague, which then lets them circumvent needing to actually identify suspects with proper methodologies. Note that, instead of restricting officers and forcing them to work around their bias, this systemic factor actually gives them maximal autonomy and judgment and thus allows biased decisions to take root.
Second: Marijuana should be legal. It should not interfere with concealed carry at all. Whatever we agree about concealed carry policies, it should have nothing to do with what someone does with their own time. I am skeptical about concealed carry, but as an anarchist I do believe that people have a right to possess and use firearms within reason and that society must show a strong case for them being limited.
Certainly, a man should not die because he was high on weed and had a broken tail light. While the NRA was venal on this score, another Second Amendment group noted, “Exercising our right to bear arms should not translate to a death sentence over something so trivial as a traffic stop for a broken tail light, and we are going to watch this case with a magnifying glass”. Yep. Exactly.
Worse, what evidence is there that he was high? He had a mason jar of weed in the car? He had THC in his system but as the expert witness for the prosecution noted (you know, the side that would want to punt a cop case and thus has much less incentive to lie) that hardly indicated any level of intoxication. He had smoked weed some time before. Shocking! It is absolutely incredible that you literally repeat the defense’s argument unalloyed, with no skepticism and no recognition that this makes what you are saying exceedingly dishonest.
Third: Even the officer’s testimony doesn’t really back you up. As a local publication pointed out, nothing he said, even in retrospect when he was able to look back at what he knew more calmly and was in a position where he had to make the strongest case he could for his defense, indicated he ever came close to seeing a firearm. Only a year later during court was he suddenly sure. Remember how Richard pointed to how officers make blatant lies to protect themselves no matter what they did? Good example here.
Fourth: You say that Castile was high and could not navigate through the encounter well. Ummm, citation needed? Not only is it not at all established that he was intoxicated, and the account given sounds to me like a man trying to get his wallet so he can properly give ID to an officer who should indeed be asking for it (and telling the officer that he owns a gun so as to avoid that problem), but so the hell what? We as citizens should not be expected to be able to drop and give law enforcement officers ten any time they so choose. It is the duty of law enforcement to be able to recognize that they will be dealing with people who are drunk, or high, or scared, or not in their right mind, and not have them die as a result.
To use an example that may be inflammatory, it was also illegal for certain folks in the 1930s in Germany to not have identification on them. You are engaging in apologetics for authoritarianism. Castile was not convicted of a crime yet he was shot.
It is incredible that you don’t seem to believe that, if Castile were white, he likely would have lived. Yes, technically Castile was committing a crime in that he owned and used marijuana. It is repulsive, however, that you do not admit that the drug war is racist nonsense. You do realize that the reason we still have those draconian rules on the books is precisely so it can be used exactly this way, to police people of color, right? It is incontrovertible that it has this effect and it is incontrovertible that this was the intent of actions of individuals like Nixon.
Finally: Who cares if there were black jurors? You do realize Richard already addressed this, right? He pointed out that black people can be biased too. Their race is irrelevant.
Right: Your first point is reflected in Fryer’s finding that racism increases in daytime—precisely when it is easier to identify the race of a person you are following or pulling over. As Fryer notes, this corroborates his finding of racial bias.
Also, it’s a valid point that a police officer should view stopping someone as inherently dangerous to the person stopped, and thus have more than a hunch as reason to do it. They should assess whether the risk to the citizen is worthwhile (without circularly assuming the civvy is a perp). Instead, they evaluate it as what risk or danger it poses to themselves, and not the civilian. Which elevates their own risk of panic, which increases the risk of their escalating to a violent outcome. This is part of the “mindset” problem that begets a lot of police violence in America (and why it is so vastly worse here than other First World countries, as I link to several articles discussing). This is a problem that kills plenty of innocent white people as well.
It’s also worth pointing out as you did that even having marijuana illegal precipitates a tremendous scale of injustice, ruination, violence and death (indeed, almost all America’s gang, violent crime, incarceration, and criminal pipelining problem is caused by Prohibition). I doubt it was a factor in Castille’s death however (the police officer was just making up excuses in court to taint a biased jury; in reality, any trained officer knows smelling marijuana decreases risk of violence, as it reduces reaction time, panic response, and aggressiveness). A rational person would not jump to “he wants to avoid getting busted for marijuana therefore he is going to shoot me” from “he just calmly told me in advance he has a gun.” The latter is entirely incongruous with the former. So some sort of bias subverted the officer’s rational judgment. It’s obvious what bias that was.
I’m also really saddened to see the NRA did not step up to Castille’s defense. They never do when it’s black people whose right to bear arms is violated. It’s how we know the NRA is really just a racist organization in thrall to the interests of white power.
I was actually responding to the gentleman upthread about Castile, not you. Don’t know how what happened! Obviously agreed fully.
Yes. Totally got that. I was just making my agreement with you clear and expanding on some of what you said. (Note the comment in question has been deleted at the poster’s request, but I already knew who you were responding to before that.)
After such a thought provoking article, the last paragraph is really just dishonest. Not to sound like an NRA shill, but like them or not they are the arguably the biggest defender of gun rights here and blacks in the country are arguably more affected by strict gun laws than any other group, so perhaps there is something to be said about that. Furthermore, they have defended black people (Josephine Byrd, Shaneen Allen and Otis McDonald, to name a few) so to say never is just false, and by your bar, its how we know they are not a racist organization.
You’re late to the party. See upthread where I point out the problem with assertions like this.
As I wrote in response to the now-deleted comment:
Philando Castile lied about his marijuana use on his Concealed Carry Weapon permit, which is illegal.
That’s not a shooting offense. Nor what caused him to be shot. So it’s not relevant to anything I am saying here.
He was high while in possession of a firearm and driving a car, which is illegal.
Which actually makes him less threatening (if you know anything about marijuana). But it’s also still murder to shoot someone for having marijuana and lying about it. So you aren’t making any relevant point here. Castille was not shot for “having marijuana and lying about it.”
He was stopped because he matched a suspect in an armed robbery.
That’s what cops always say. It’s not relevant to my point.
Philando didn’t specify that he had a legal firearm, only that he had one.
That’s not relevant. Had Castille been white, I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts the officer would have realized an armed robber wouldn’t tell him he had a gun before going for it; he’d just go for it. He’d thus wait to see what he want for before shooting. Instead the officer panicked (you can visibly see it in the video: it was not controlled fire, but blind panic fire). Castille never went for his gun. And never had a moment to answer that he was going for his permit. This is what I’m talking about.
As Fryer found, even had Castille perfected his compliance behavior (which should not be required anywhere other than an oppressive police state), it’s still unlikely it would have saved him. Fryer’s data show the benefits of increased compliance in respect to outcome remains lower if you are black than if you are white. This is precisely the problem.
And yes, the officer could have perfected his approach as well (better commands, following a sounder procedure, etc.). But that is again not relevant to my point: that had Castille been white, odds are, the situation would have gone down differently with no other factors changed. This is supported by Fryer’s data with respect to compliance productivity.
The single most salient detail is the abject panic the officer fired his weapon in, which is displayed on video: he lost his shit. The question is: why would an officer lose his shit, rather than engage his weapon in a controlled and skilled manner? There is only really one answer here.
That’s not a shooting offense. Nor what caused him to be shot. So it’s not relevant to anything I am saying here.
Which actually makes him less threatening (if you know anything about marijuana). But it’s also still murder to shoot someone for having marijuana and lying about it. So you aren’t making any relevant point here. Castille was not shot for “having marijuana and lying about it.”
That’s what cops always say. It’s not relevant to my point.
That’s not relevant. Had Castille been white, I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts the officer would have realized an armed robber wouldn’t tell him he had a gun before going for it; he’d just go for it. He’d thus wait to see what he want for before shooting. Instead the officer panicked (you can visibly see it in the video: it was not controlled fire, but blind panic fire). Castille never went for his gun. And never had a moment to answer that he was going for his permit. This is what I’m talking about.
As Fryer found, even had Castille perfected his compliance behavior (which should not be required anywhere other than an oppressive police state), it’s still unlikely it would have saved him. Fryer’s data show the benefits of increased compliance in respect to outcome remains lower if you are black than if you are white. This is precisely the problem.
And yes, the officer could have perfected his approach as well (better commands, following a sounder procedure, etc.). But that is again not relevant to my point: that had Castille been white, odds are, the situation would have gone down differently with no other factors changed. This is supported by Fryer’s data with respect to compliance productivity.
The single most salient detail is the abject panic the officer fired his weapon in, which is displayed on video: he lost his shit. The question is: why would an officer lose his shit, rather than engage his weapon in a controlled and skilled manner? There is only really one answer here.
I’m surprised that people are using Fryer’s study to show that systemic police racism doesn’t exist when the paper explicitly states that blacks and Hispanics are more likely than whites to experience force in police interactions, even when you control for the relevant variables. So according to this study, systemic police racism against blacks and Hispanics is real. What the study did not find is racial discrimination in terms of police shootings, which is one aspect of police-civilian interactions (and the most important one).
Regarding sentencing disparities, black males typically receive longer sentences than white males for the same crimes, however, black females receive shorter sentences than white males https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-differences-sentencing. This gender gap is about six times as large as the racial disparity even when you control for pre-charge characteristics (including arrest offense and criminal history) https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1985377. So the court system is predominantly driven by gender bias rather than racial bias.
Moreover, I’m surprised you denied that blacks engage in more violent crime than whites when you control for crime location. I don’t agree here as I don’t think location is relevant when comparing crime rate between racial groups. It doesn’t matter if the crime is occurring in a small or large number of places – the rate is what counts here.
Here are the data:
Blacks commit violent crimes at a higher rate (per capita) than any other racial croup https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/table-43, including hate crimes https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2017/tables/table-9.xls, and they account for most of the homicides despite only making up 13% of the population, which is a shocking statistic https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-3.xls.
Another interesting fact is that there are more black (hate) supremacist groups than white (hate) supremacist groups, per capita https://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/17/us/hate-groups-us-map-trnd/index.html.
Fryer controls for relative criminality by race. As well as by poverty status (which explains almost all the disparity). It thus never matters to any point I make.
And “number of groups” substituted for “number of members of groups” is a statistical con I really hope you meant as a joke. No rational person would ever mistake that for an argument.
Your other points are also non sequiturs.
The second study you cite actually says “Black men in the U.S. are incarcerated at a rate over six times that of white men and over ten times that of black women,” yet the ratio of incarceration by gender overall is 15:1. Which means black women are being incarcerated at a higher rate than white women (if you don’t see why, just do some simple math here: if black women were incarcerated at the same rate, the ratio to black men should be fifteen to one, not ten to one—it can only be ten to one if a lot more black women are being jailed than white women).
And I’m sure you know the main reason for the gender gap at all is that men are far more prone to violence (men commit violent crimes at ten times the rate of women; and indeed likewise other crimes, as men are more prone to risk taking, and exhibit a notably higher rate of psychopathy). But there is indeed a bias against men (for all races) in sentencing length (women of all races get around 20-30% shorter sentences on average, as your own cited studies show). That’s not relevant to whether there is also a racial bias, the only subject of my article. So I can’t fathom why you even mention it.
You also conflated two unrelated things: incarceration rate (the first study you cited) and length of sentencing (the second study you cited). Yet you just acted as if these were measuring the same things. I can’t fathom why you’d make that mistake. The gender gap in the latter is actually quite small, especially given how rarely women even commit crimes to begin with (and thus how few end up in jail in the first place).
Meanwhile, “it doesn’t matter if the crime is occurring in a small or large number of places – the rate is what counts here” is false. You must not understand how statistics work (your errors I noted above further support that conclusion).
It is a fact that almost all violent crime is clustered in a small number of neighborhoods. Thus neighborhood is determinative, not race. This is statistics 101. If you subtract all the people in those neighborhoods, there is no significant “criminality disparity” by race left over. So it’s clearly not actually race that’s the causal factor; that is, rather, a confounding variable: it is by historical accident those neighborhoods are predominately black: the causal story is thus the history of those neighborhoods, as black people not in them, don’t evince the same causal effect; while neighborhoods in the high-crime set that aren’t predominately black do, thus confirming the cause is neighborhood, not race.
To put it another way, you made the rookie mistake of assuming that the “rate” for “all” black people is the same as the “rate” for specified sets of black people: the rate of criminality is so much higher in the crime-zone neighborhoods and so much of American violent crime is concentrated there, that it would be mathematically impossible for that rate to be the same outside those neighborhoods. You thus missed the entire point I was making. And made a fundamental math error instead.
The criminality disparity is also no simple statistic, and you’d do well to learn how math works, to correctly understand the actual data, and why it is that way (e.g. poverty begets crime; so why are so many more black people poor?).
You should start with the base rate: what is the probability that a random black person you meet is, say, a murderer? Even if every murder in the US was committed by a black man (and you know that’s not true), and every murder was committed by a different man (when in fact many murders are committed by the same people, so the number of offenders is much lower than the number of offenses), there are on average only 15,000 homicides in the U.S. each year. There are approximately 44 million black people, for roughly 22 million males, of whom over 16 million are adults. So with our most inflated numbers possible, the probability that a black man you meet at random is a killer is less than 1 in 1000 (and in fact quite a lot less, once we correct our absurd numerical assumptions back toward reality).
That’s already a fairly low probability. And if you only look at those same odds outside the few crime-zone neighborhoods where almost all U.S. violent crime occurs, it will be many times lower than that, and indeed unlikely to substantially differ from that of any other race. Hence the point: it’s the neighborhoods you should be worried about, not the race.
The reason I cited the first study was to show that the justice system is not always biased against black people. For example, when comparing white males with black females, the bias favors black females. You seem to agree with this and that’s the only point I was making.
Regarding the second study, I definitely cited the wrong one. I had in mind a study that controlled for variables, that confirmed the gender bias in terms of sentencing times in the Justice System, which is what the first study addresses. From what I see, the second study I cited doesn’t even addresses gender bias. I intended to provide further evidence (with the right study) for the first study. Apologies for the confusion. I will look for the study.
Concerning the crime rates of black people, allow me to re state what I meant. I was specifically responding to your doubt of the following statement: “black people engage in more violent crime than white people”. What I’m saying is that this is true as the FBI data clearly confirms that. You said that this is not true when you control for neighborhood, because it’s not their “blackness” that’s causing the high crime rate. But that’s not relevant here nor was I running a diagnosis on what’s causing black people to engage in more crime than white people. You have the cause (neighborhood, poverty, etc.) and you have the effect (crime rate). I’m focusing on the effect because that’s what the statement (you doubted) is referring to. I never used the word “all” nor did I say that black people were inherently criminal.
I’m sure the things you mentioned are important reasons for the black crime rate. However, I remember watching a video of Obama a while a go where he was saying that the absence of fathers from the home is also a strong predictor of whether a young person would end up committing crime in the future. But I must admit, I’m not that informed on this issue.
You are being illogical. Black women receive bias compared to white women. That’s systemic racism. That gender helps all women has no effect on that conclusion. It is literally false to claim “the justice system is not always biased against black people” by observing “comparing white males with black females, the bias favors black females.” That’s an invalid comparison. You seem not to know how math works. Bias by race only exists by race. Other biases operating at the same time has no effect on that. Thus only a comparison between black and white women is relevant—if what you want to know is the bias by race. And when we look for bias by race, we see bias is all against being black, even for women.
“I had in mind a study…” Citation?
Yes. It is. It is relevant in exactly the way I have now explained to you twice. Still you don’t comprehend. I can’t help you further. If you fail to understand a simple mathematical point after multiple different explanations, you are failing. Go bone up on your sixth grade math and then come back and try harder to understand what I have twice explained to you already.
But I’ve already AGREED that there’s racial bias in the justice system. And I don’t think it’s illogical to say that it’s not always biased against black females. Imagine a scenario where a white male and a black female go to court over some dispute (for example, a married couple that is going through a divorce, maybe they’re fighting over child support, etc). It’s more likely that the court will side with the woman due to the gender bias (maybe if the case is a close enough).
The gender bias is stronger than the racial bias in the justice system. The article I cited supports this and you’ve already acknowledged it. So I don’t see why we should waste anymore time on an issue that we basically agree on.
But it doesn’t seem that we’ll come to an agreement with regard to crime rate, but I’m confident that if we were to consult a criminology graduate, they would agree with me.
I’m going to state my position one last time.
If our objective is to investigate which racial group engages in the most crime (per capita), the situational factors that cause the various crime rates are not relevant for this conversation. My assertion is that black people as a group engage in more crime compared to any other racial group in America. To test this, we would have to compare the crime rates of the entire black, white, Hispanic, and Asian populations. And when we do that, the results show that the black population engages in the most crime. It’s that simple. I’m not suggesting that any race is inherently more or less prone to crime nor am I saying that the crime rates are representative of the majority of each group.
I know that I’m mathematically challenged but I don’t think this is a math issue. That’s all I have to say on this topic. I don’t understand why there always has to be tension when people of opposing views discuss social issues.
I think at this point you’ve just lost the narrative. You aren’t listening to what I said, and nothing you are saying here is responding to anything I said.
Until you listen, you will not learn.
Carlo, while your tone is civil, I must once again note how disingenuous it seems to everyone in light of your supposed concern about anti-white sentiment that you are so willing to repeat fundamentally racist myths. Rich cut you a lot of slack. I won’t.
First, you obliquely mention the problem of black absentee fathers. And this is a real problem!
Now, let’s try to revisit the maxim you agreed made sense last time: treat black folks like they’re people.
Might there be some reason why black fathers are absent? Like, they’re not just Bond villains or soap opera characters, they’re human beings?
Hey, remember how Richard talked about the impact of super shitty neighborhoods on crime?
This is incredibly well-supported, by the way. Sampson is just one of countless many scholars who have repeated what is now the consensus in the field: race vanishes as a predictive factor for crime when you control for urbanicity and socioeconomic status. I can get you plenty of cites and links if you’d like. (This utterly falsifies any conservative cultural thesis, by the way, which is why basically since Stephen Steinberg utterly destroyed Sowell in the literature that that argument has only been made by hacks and people being hacks, like Sowell when he isn’t in proper academic mode or liars working for the Heritage Foundation – but I repeat myself).
Well, the fact that so much crime is consolidated in just a few neighborhoods should first of all tell you that any cultural factor you want to cite is largely irrelevant. Of course the rates of problems like black absentee fatherism, out-of-wedlock birth, and all the other conservative boogeymen vary by geography and other factors, but they’re never quite as consolidated as one would expect by a cultural explanation. That tells us right away that at best it’s reverse causal.
Which would be your conclusion right away if you weren’t operating from the framework of a casual bigot.
You might have wondered if black men are incarcerated at disproportionate rates, for example, to say nothing of being injured or killed by cops (or on the job, or in gang violence they didn’t choose to have in their communities and lives even if they ended up joining a gang, or…) And, lo and behold, that’s a big part of it! End the racist, stupid, senseless drug war and you can help solve the problem tomorrow.
The black absentee father problem is obviously related to the marriageable black men problem, and even incredibly conservative and apolitical scholars all immediately point to these factors.
Now, why did Obama mention this factor?
One could say he was sucking up to conservatives and centrists. He did a lot of that.
One could also say that he was talking about problems of personal responsibility in a community. After all, maybe individuals can try to create change even when society is resisting it. But let’s be clear then: those individuals are going above and beyond. They are not doing what is just normal and expected.
It gets worse, though.
Let’s say for a second that any of this was actually cultural.
So what?
That shouldn’t mean anything to you unless you think that black folks are actually predisposed (basically, biologically, though supernaturally could work too I guess) to bad culture.
Otherwise, as Steinberg pointed out in The Ethnic Myth and numerous other settings, positing a cultural explanation is a question, not an explanation. Sociological inquiry has to ask why that culture emerged.
Well, this takes us all the way back to the Moynihan Report. That is famous for having started introducing cultural explanations, but since it was made by liberals who weren’t stanning for bigotry and inequality, they pointed out that even insofar as they found bona fide cultural problems, those stemmed from a history of slavery. They go down the line and point out everything from how slave families got used to totally dysfunctional family structures (because their families could be up and moved at any point, and then after Reconstruction could be lynched or forced to move at any point, among numerous other reasons).
In other words, cultural explanations are institutional racism, or at least a legacy of institutional racism, unless you’re a racist.
If we have no reason to expect that black folks would, barring some kind of historical violence to them, have any difference in competence or criminality or behavior, then we would then expect that such gaps must have come from an illegitimate source.
Even if that source was in the past, so modern whites and modern institutions could not be held accountable for it, they can be held accountable for perpetuating rather than fixing those inequalities.
Now, time for some more corrections, all of which I am doing literally off the top of my head not because I am a genius but because you did so little research that it takes a first-year sociology student to point out why you keep making these mistakes.
You say that location doesn’t have anything to do with race and crime, conceptually. Buh-what? [citation needed]. You should never expect that. And, in fact, it does! Like, of course it does! Have you ever been to a city?
Think about it from a mathematical perspective for just a second. You’re a criminal node. You want to interact with target nodes. Where do you have more targets? The city.
Blacks are disproportionately in urban centers. So they are disproportionately likely to be in environments that make it easier to commit crime (because communities are more fragmented and anonymous as a result of scale factors) and because there are more targets.
This is actually something you can figure out from complete common sense and public mythology. Just think about the racialization of ghettos and how dangerous cities can be. Put those facts together and you have a totally non-racial explanation for crime based entirely on locality.
You know how Japan, a hugely affluent and somewhat homogeneous culture with those nice values that all the conservative bigots in America, has a huge public rape and molestation problem? High urbanicity is a big part of it.
Next, you mention the black supremacist versus white supremacist group issue. Never mind that per capita comparisons are bankrupt when the groups are not meaningfully comparable (you know, because of variations in wealth and income that are just mind-boggling). Never mind that one of these two groups isn’t targeted by disproportionately white cops every day. (Imagine how big a fit the Tea Party and their ilk would throw if they got the attention the average black man does!)
Remember that fact that you totally conceded that white mass shooters are at least proportional to their share of the population and that terrorism in general is vastly disproportionately the (white Christian) right-wing?
Yeah. So in other words, these supposedly more frequent black hate groups commit a lot less crimes.
Maybe that’s because groups like the New Black Panthers and the Black Israelites mostly run their mouths and ruin discussion boards while Nazis actually kill people?
You’re dangerously close to repeating a Nazi myth, by the way. One about black and white hate crime rates. A myth that, among other things, ignores that blacks and whites don’t actually encounter each other at the same rate for the same reason that my fingers encounter my body a lot more often than my body encounters my fingers (since blacks are geographically consolidated, they are likely to intermingle with whites at the edge of their enclaves, but not all whites will be intermingling with them).
Or the fact that your absolutely nonsensical, and in fact vile, distinction between people-in-a-group and people-not-in-a-group is basically Dinesh D’Souza’s argument for supposedly rational discrimination (where he reasons that if a cabby sees a black man, that cabby shouldn’t pick that black man up, because statistically the black man is more dangerous, even though individuals aren’t statistics so this is actually Dinesh justifying every rando on the planet deciding to treat people with collective guilt based on whatever statistic they may or may not have heard on Facebook, because he’s a criminal liar).
I can keep going, but I hope the point is clear. You actually have no idea what you’re talking about. Someone is selling you bad stats (I’m guessing the alt-right: read the Color of Crime recently)? The attempts to justify racial discrepancies in this country require Gish gallops (yes, what you did was a gallop, whether you realize it or not, because unpacking why everything you said is incompetent hack work takes someone giving you a free class in criminology) because they are as bankrupt as creationism.
That should worry you, dude. The fact that you never seem to find the overwhelming consensus (like, say, all the studies that find even stronger effects than Fryer did) and always find the few sources that can kind of look like they support the right-wing argument if you squint and look at them funny should scare you.
“They (the NRA) never do (step up to defence) when it’s black people whose right to bear arms is violated.”
Otis McDonald v Chicago, Shaneen Allen cases refute the “never” part of that statement.
So, you can’t really use the “never” to justify saying “the NRA is really just a racist organization in thrall to the interests of the white power.”
You can say its your opinion, you can bring other evidence to support your point, but you can’t site the “never” in this case.
True, it’s not “never,” but “rarely.”
The NRA wasn’t defending Otis McDonald, for example. He was defended by the SAF, which was formed by people who split with the NRA for partly this reason (they didn’t think the NRA was consistently defending gun rights). The McDonald case and NRA case were merged by the courts, not the NRA. The NRA thus became involved in the case by accident. (They were tangentially involved earlier when they represented a whole group of mostly white citizens, which just happened to also include McDonald.)
Similarly, the NRA only took the Allen case because it was going to set a new precedent threatening white gun owners (whereas most cases don’t set new law and thus don’t inspire NRA interest; except when the interested parties are white, usually).
For a complete take on the NRAs relationship with race see this article at The Trace.
Do you have a source for your claim that ““black people engage in more violent crime than white people,” because that’s actually not true when you control for neighborhood”?
I read your one source when it came to neighborhood but it didn’t seem to answer that question.
Best regards,
M.G.
I’m not sure I understand your question.
The fact is that most violent crime traces to a few neighborhoods. When you remove those populations from the statistics, US crime levels look the same as other relatively low-crime first world nations. No one has presented any evidence that there is a statistically significant difference by race in that remaining (overwhelming majority) population (i.e. the population not in the high-crime neighborhoods), much less after controlling for income level (since poverty correlates with race and crime independently).
So what information in all of that are you seeking?
Richard, I would be interested in your thorts upon the following:
https://www.unz.com/article/biological-realism-can-help-blacks-more-than-socialism/
I don’t read random word walls.
Can you ask a more specific question?
Unz is an incompetent racist apologist who has no qualifications to be doing any of the work he does. His one use is that even he can see why the Nazis’ IQ-race connections are so utterly poor that they need to be rebutted.
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/06/late-monday-smackdown-no-ron-unz-does-not-tell-it-straight-why-do-you-ask.html . He’s also sucked up to actual Nazis. Like, straight up Holocaust denial.
You are citing a crank. Why?
Of course, just read the title and think for a second.
How the hell are the two mutually exclusive?
I can grant that blacks and whites have different abilities. For now, I will grant the racists their idiocy.
Does that mean blacks should make less money?
Why? They can’t help their talents. They didn’t pick them.
Certainly, we should invest more into the educational resources for groups who struggle, right? So if blacks have lower IQs on average, since we give a crap about our neighbors, we should invest more into them!
This is actually how ethical psychometry is done, by the way, which is why psychological consensus is that the racists are not only wrong (see the APA among many, many other statements) but also deeply unethical and dishonest researchers. From Myers-Briggs (yes, with all of its serious problems) to IQ to any other test you want to mention, the idea that you give a test to someone and then think of their abilities as fixed and not worth investing into is vile.
In other words, every racist argument for inequality hinges on one hidden assumption: that we should care less about our black neighbors.
Which is the argument they circularly want you to buy, basically.
Which tells you the argument is vile rationalization to support the position they already had for dumb emotional reasons: “I don’t care about black people, they’re dirty, so I don’t want to fund them”.
Now that we’ve established that, biological realism and socialism are totally compatible.
One can buy both, reject both, or buy one and reject the other.
Socialists don’t think that we should not give care and aid to people with serious mental disabilities and problems like Down’s, after all. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.
Or we could agree that there is no biological basis in race (you know, the rational thing to do) but still think capitalism is the tits.
It’s trivial to think of ways of reconciling the two ideas. Hell, I can think of some weirdo alternative universe racist (and some on the alt-left come close to this) who advocates for socialist ethno-states.
Unz is saying something actually more stupid as “Maybe black people would be benefited more by ice cream than cars?”
No, they wouldn’t, ice cream is not as important as a car, but porque no los dos?
In reality, he’s saying something as stupid as “Maybe black people should believe in fairies over cars”.
Socialism is complicated, but at the least some socialist institutions as even fairly centrist people define it obviously work (and, yes, even reasonable economists have often conceded this in their technical work). Just like cars are problematic and may even need to be replaced, socialism is at the least something we need some of. But even if you disagree, you’re like someone saying we should get rid of cars for the ecological cost: that doesn’t make ice cream any better.
The fact that Unz can make this kind of claim with a straight face should, again, tell you you’re dealing with a crank. They can’t keep separate topics distinct in their presentation.
Oh, and just one more note for why the entire biological essentialism thing is bullshit that no one believes.
Two words: Asians. Women.
Pretty much everyone agrees that Asians seem to have higher IQs. (Well, I mean, among those groups you take scores for. In the West. Study people like the buraku, ethnic Koreans, etc. in Japan, groups that are at the bottom of their racial caste structure, and you’ll see the same effects. In America, Indochinese immigrants more closely resemble black and Hispanic communities because of the poverty).
So why are racists not demanding that Asians (and Ashkenazi Jews but let’s not even go there) run everything?
When you get anything besides sputtering irrelevancies or attempts to dodge the question, it usually comes down to either “We are” (in the case of Asians – but they’re not, none of these people are fomenting for every Senator and President to be Asian, they want a white ethno-state for God’s sakes) or “Being smarter doesn’t mean they’re better”.
Wait a minute. So if Ashkenazi Jews being smarter doesn’t mean they’re superior, then how the hell can we conclude that lower black IQ is bad?
Whooopsie. Almost like bigots and their boosters (like Unz) aren’t rational. By definitionflynn women folSimilarly, Flynn (you know, the guy who does IQ research and still singlehandedly showed that the entire racist and sexist industry around it was claptrap) found that women have higher IQs.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/women-have-higher-iq-scores-than-men-james-flynn_n_1677963 (yes I know it is HuffPost but look it up, it is reported consistently the same everywhere).
I confronted a “race realist” alt-righter misognist about this point. He screeched that Flynn’s data sucked (without having looked at it and despite Flynn being, even as the racists have to concede, far more influential than folks like Rushton and Lynn – also not a demonstrated liar and fraud) and then made some irrelevant whining before retreating. They all do.
This one is particularly funny because it also shows that sexism so depressed women’s abilities that they actually were intrinsically smarter but denied this ability by society. Worse, race-IQ advocates love to crow about how well-correlated IQ is with success (while whining when you bring up EQ despite it being actually much better correlated – yes the EQ literature has a ton of problems with it but then again IQ is absolute garbage as an attempt to find g because g is a stupid idea so who cares), but here that actually holds: Women are less likely to be criminal, more educated, and smarter.
Oops! Seems like we should demand women be the master race.
Nazis don’t even want women to be in public. They want tradwives. They certainly don’t want women running businesses and political seats in proportion to their superior education and IQ. They bring up black criminality but make whining excuses for male criminality. If we’re going to profile blacks, we better profile men.
All this to say that no one is a race realist. Anywhere. Ever. Literally none.
A lot of cretins, cranks, jerks, grifters and bigots think they are. And a lot of other people, folks like Sam Harris, take them seriously.
But if any of them were consistent, they would consistently go down the line and evaluate every group in the same monolithic, stereotyping, dehumanizing way.
Yet, weirdly enough, when it comes to white men, they can see their individuality, humanity and their potential.
Again, almost like all of this is an ad hoc excuse for not wanting to do anything about living in a world that got screwed up by racism.
Find better sources. Do better. Please.
I’m not going to argue that systematic racism doesn’t exist. But are you willing to see and acknowledge that people often (and systemically would suggest) label everything they see as racism even when there is no evidence for it or the evidence is weak?
For example I’ve heard someone claim that the Republican’s insistence to show proof an ID (proof of citizenship) was another example of racism against blacks. It is obvious that they are trying to keep illegal aliens from casting a ballot in U.S. elections.
My response to that is while racism is a problem in this country, not EVERYTHING is racism and not EVERYTHING is ABOUT YOU!
And then there are the assertions that COVID-19 is another example of systemic racism. What a stretch.
As with any issue or topic people shouldn’t take a side or view point and lose their ability to think objectively.
I think it hurts the cause (so to speak) when people label everything as racism and often end up sounding racists themselves (in the process).
Certainly. That’s true for literally everything in the universe. But that some people overclaim x does not mean there is no x. I only write about the x that actually exists.
It seems Sean Hannity has hauled Fryer’s study out for another go round.