Amor Mundi, July 17th 2016

07-17-2016

You Were Looking in a Different Direction

Christopher Lebron writes in The Stone about an imagined conversation with someone who doesn’t understand the importance of Black Lives Matter. Over and again Lebron - who will be speaking at the Arendt Center Conference “Real Talk” in October - tries to explain why he and others believe that in contemporary America, Black Lives Do Not Matter; in trying to speak to people who don’t understand him, Lebron rightly takes up the challenge of politics, of persuading people who disagree with him.

“Here’s one way of making sense of the misfire between us. You are with me when I am making my general comments about America’s foundational aspects. You are likely still with me on the observations about slavery. You may begin to edge away from our shared space of critical judgment somewhere around Jim Crow, but the horrors of lynching may persuade you to stay. The place, or the time rather, I mostly likely lose you is 1964. In your mind, our celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. made the world right in helping to usher in the era of formal equality when he cornered Lyndon B. Johnson into pushing for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In your mind, that moment introduced a new world order in which blacks could no longer be victims. The law had set them free and listed the bad things that people could no longer do. Moreover, it said that those people would be held responsible for the bad things they did. Thus, even if bad things happened to black people, the law would settle all accounts; therefore, no one could ever claim again that blacks were at the special mercy of racism. You, at this point, are sure that my proposition cannot be true since it fails to correspond. As I said, I see the mistake I’ve made, but it’s not in my construction of the truth. It is in presuming that you and I were ever speaking about the same thing. And the reason we weren’t speaking about the same thing is that we were not looking in the same direction; thus, our basis for correspondence is mismatched. The direction I was looking toward was the internal life of a black person in America. The very real anxieties and fears we have in whether our ambitions are as secure as any other American’s. Whether our opportunities are equal. Whether our health care is of sufficient quality. Whether our college degrees are of equal worth. Whether our spouses will make it home from the grocery store. Whether our children will one day counsel a parent that everything will be O.K. while someone is slumped over in the car seat in front of her, bleeding to death after being shot by a police officer. You were looking in an altogether different direction. You were looking in the direction of your own innocence. Though you bought a house in an entirely segregated neighborhood, it’s not your fault the schools are better where you live. Though you have only one black friend, it’s not your fault because your friends are your co-workers and your company or university is doing poorly on diversity. Though it’s a shame that this black man or woman died (pick one, any one), it’s not your fault that the police officer you pay with your tax dollars and who is sworn to protect you did so at the expense of an unnecessary killing. And none of these are your fault because that day in 1964 made it all right – the law said what could not happen, and thus, it must not be happening. Your sense of America is predicated on the assumption of a reliable and stable democratic system. We cannot possibly speak about the same thing given these conditions. That is a problem. A core idea of democratic life is consensus citizens coming to a wide agreement on contentious issues. Americans disagree on all kinds of issues, but this one, whether black lives matter, is genuinely special and momentous. We have the facts: systemic racial inequality and rampant police-perpetrated killings. Then we have the observation of those facts seen from our distinct perspectives. Everything depends on you and I not only agreeing in our judgment but also taking up the proper positions to get genuine buy-in for the sake of justice. If you insist on standing where you do while I stand where I stand, there will never be agreement that black lives don’t matter in America.”

Form more information visit: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/11/opinion/race-truth-and-our-two-realities.html

Legislation Not Feelings

John McWhorter takes Hillary Clinton to task for calling for a national conversation on race. McWhorter says he is not opposed to dialogue, but has little faith it will lead anywhere. What is more, he fears the call for conversation and listening is one-sided:

“But it was hard not to notice that her idea of a “conversation” is rather one directional: What she thinks we need to listen to is what most would consider the “black” side of things. We should listen to black families on having to counsel their boys to be extra careful in interactions with the police, to Black Lives Matter. We should listen to the police as well, she said — but notably, here Mrs. Clinton specified the five officers killed in Dallas protecting protesters, seeming to exclude cops generally. All of this is good advice, but it leaves out quite a bit. If they were asked, many cops would say that they felt threatened, and even abused, in the dangerous neighborhoods — quite often black ones — where they are assigned. Other people would observe that white men are killed by cops as well, even though the national media rarely covers them. In general, in a real conversation on race, quite a few whites would probably complain that they were weary of being called racists, or disapprove of affirmative action, or think we exaggerate the harm of the Confederate battle flag. To the extent that a call for a “conversation” on race omits mention of views like these, in favor of the idea that the conversation will “unite” us, it implies that these controversial views will be corrected (or silenced), that they will inevitably melt away in the face of logic or morality if only we all sit down and converse respectfully. Mrs. Clinton allowed that the conversation would be “hard,” mind you — but the thrust of her point is that America needs to take a deep breath and hear black America out.” McWhorter suggests that after 50 years of such a conversation, we may need less talk and more action: “What if, instead of calling for a conversation, Mrs. Clinton had called for revitalized support for vocational schooling to help get poor black people into solid jobs that don’t require a college degree? Or an end to the war on drugs, which furnishes a black market that tempts underserved black men away from legal work. Or ensuring cheap, universal access to long-acting reversible contraceptives, to help poor women (who praise these devices) control when they start families. Or phonics-based reading programs, which are proved to be the key to teaching poor kids how to read. All poor black kids should have access to them just as they get free breakfasts. These narrow policy proposals may not have the emotional reach of a conversation, and in and of themselves they will not stop the next Philando Castile either. But they would do more for black America than any amount of formulaic dialogues, or exploring the subtle contours of whites’ inner feelings about black people. Maybe there could be compromise: Let’s have a national conversation, but make it about legislation, not feelings.”

Form more information visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/14/opinion/what-clinton-should-have-said-about-race.html

The Facts About Race and Policing

The facts around police treatment of black Americans seem pretty clear. It is hard to watch the videotaped evidence of the shootings of Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and others, and not understand that some police officers - whether out of prejudiced-induced fear or whatever other reasons - have wrongly killed black Americans. The videotapes are facts; they don’t prove systemic racism, but they certainly suggest a real problem. Last week the Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. has published a paper, AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF RACIAL DIFFERENCES IN POLICE USE OF FORCE. Fryer tries to provide some factual data to the question of whether police use force more frequently against blacks. His answer is, Yes, the police do use force more against blacks than against others. At the same time, Fryer finds also that the one kind of force that the police don’t use more against blacks is lethal force from gunshots. In the New York Times, Quoctrung Bui and Amanda Cox looked at Fryer’s data and wrote:

“A new study confirms that black men and women are treated differently in the hands of law enforcement. They are more likely to be touched, handcuffed, pushed to the ground or pepper-sprayed by a police officer, even after accounting for how, where and when they encounter the police. But when it comes to the most lethal form of force — police shootings — the study finds no racial bias. “It is the most surprising result of my career,” said Roland G. Fryer Jr., the author of the study and a professor of economics at Harvard. The study examined more than 1,000 shootings in 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida and California. The result contradicts the image of police shootings that many Americans hold after the killings (some captured on video) of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.; Tamir Rice in Cleveland; Walter Scott in South Carolina; Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La.; and Philando Castile in Minnesota. The study did not say whether the most egregious examples — those at the heart of the nation’s debate on police shootings — are free of racial bias. Instead, it examined a larger pool of shootings, including nonfatal ones. The counterintuitive results provoked debate after the study was posted on Monday, mostly about the volume of police encounters and the scope of the data. Mr. Fryer emphasizes that the work is not the definitive analysis of police shootings, and that more data would be needed to understand the country as a whole. This work focused only on what happens once the police have stopped civilians, not on the risk of being stopped at all. Other research has shown that blacks are more likely to be stopped by the police.”

Fryer’s study has become a political hot potato. Some ideological conservatives have argued that Fryer’s study shows that the police do not have a problem with race, something the study does not show. Ideological liberals have tried to dismiss Fryer’s study, a working paper. An entry on Snopes spends pages parsing whether the Fryer’s paper should be called a “study” as the Times does since it is a “working paper” and has not yet been peer-reviewed. Another approach is to ask why we so desperately want such data, especially given that the visual facts of unjustified killings of black American is so real? In his study, Fryer writes about video evidence of police violence in scare quotes, as if evidence we see is not real. Why do we put more faith in social science data than in our own common sense? These are important questions and as Hannah Arendt worried, the increasing demand for social science data makes it difficult to trust in a commonly shared public world. When truth is something that we can’t access through our senses, we begin to distrust the world. Only science, or social science, can expose the hidden truths. But that means that we are all at the mercy of those scientists. That may help explain the anger that has been vented at Fryer for publishing his study. Following upon the original essay on Fryer’s study, the Times ran a second feature with Fryer answering questions from readers.

“Wendy Maland from Chicago put it this way: “The question isn’t — once police identify you as a potential criminal, how are you treated? — the question is — who is being treated as a criminal?” Mr. Fryer: I agree that blacks are more likely to be stopped, more likely to be harassed and more likely to be arrested. Ideally we would be able to set up an experiment to understand potential differences before an encounter. Unfortunately, that would require us to randomly assign civilian race in encounters of police, which isn’t possible! Given this limitation, we need to make the best out of available data. There are two important things I want to note: 1. The types of encounters that lead to police shootings in the videos that we have all seen are not the most common that actually occur in the data. In Houston, for instance, most of the officer-involved shootings come from calls for service resulting from burglaries or violent crimes, not from chasing down people with broken taillights. 2. I totally agree that deciding who to stop in a police stop is highly problematic and there certainly may be racial bias in that decision. So let’s think about the officer-involved shootings in which there’s a robbery in progress or a violent crime. Those are less likely to be plagued by selection bias in the decision of who to harass or stop. Analyzing only those cases yields similar results. Moreover, when we analyze only cases in which the officer-involved shooting began with a routine stop or a traffic stop, we do not find bias. But these results are susceptible to your point that there’s more traffic stops of blacks.”

Form more information visit: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399.pdf