On this pop-up episode, Jennifer C. Braceras, director of Independent Women’s Law Center, talks with Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley about racial disparities, police brutality, and whether Americans embrace a shared definition of “racism.”
Transcript
Beverly Hallberg:
Hey, everyone. It’s Beverly Hallberg. Welcome to a special pop-up episode of She Thinks, your favorite podcast from the Independent Women’s Forum, where we talk with women and sometimes men about the policy issues that impact you and the people you care about most. Enjoy.
Jennifer:
And we are live. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today on Facebook Live. My name is Jennifer Braceras, and I am the director of Independent Women’s Law Center, which is part of Independent Women’s Forum. I’d like to welcome, today, Jason Riley, who is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Jason is the author of Let Them In, which argues for a more free market approach to immigration, and Please Stop Helping Us, a critique of government efforts to help the black underclass. His most recent book, False Black Power, delves into the question of why political success is not translated into economic advancement for the black community. Jason is currently at work on an intellectual biography of the economist Thomas Sowell. Thank you for being here, Jason.
Jason:
Thank you.
Jennifer:
So, one of the reasons that we are excited to talk with you today is because we’re having this great national conversation on race, so to speak, and it seems that our country has sort of lost the ability to have really meaningful conversations about race and how to better the lives of black Americans. People seem to go into their respective corners. On the one hand, we have people who say we’ve completely vanquished racism in America, and we need to move on. And in the other corner, we have people who say everything is racist and anyone who thinks that racism is behind us is a white supremacist, and there’s been no progress whatsoever in America. So, I’m hoping that we can have a conversation today that gets people out of these corners and find some common grounds. What do you think? Is that possible?
Jason:
Between us, sure.
Jennifer:
Right. Well, we should probably start by laying out some terminology. I’ve found it often seems like we’re talking past each other, and conservatives and liberals don’t even mean the same thing when they use the word racist. So, I’m wondering if you think that’s true, and if you have any strategies for overcoming what might be a definitional problem.
Jason:
I do think it’s true. The word means different things to different people, and I think the definition continues to expand. Racism is defined as everything from opposing affirmative action to supporting voter ID laws. I try and personally avoid use of the term as much as I can, at least in my writing, because it has no set definition and if anything, it can serve to confuse people. So, I try and tend to avoid it, personally, and maybe more people should, as well. But if you are going to use the term, I do think it needs to be better defined so that everyone is on the same page semantically, at least.
Jennifer:
So, how do you think it should be defined? I mean, when I was growing up, I guess, I thought of prejudice maybe as the implicit bias that some older people might have or people that weren’t necessarily well intentioned, but just maybe hadn’t had an opportunity to live amongst diverse populations, whereas racism, to my mind, was sort of a deliberate, negative feeling of ill will towards a group. And then of course discrimination was something, I think, that was easier to define. It was really an act, right? An overt act of treating somebody differently because of their race. But now we seem to have conflated all of those things. So, somebody’s 90-year-old granny who might not be racially progressive is called a white supremacist or racist, as opposed to just somebody who’s maybe a little prejudiced. I don’t know if those words have sort of different meanings [inaudible 00:05:01].
Jason:
Yeah, you’re right. They have been conflated over the years, bias, prejudice, racist. Today, we hear a lot about white supremacy and systemic racism, I think, has become a very vogue-ish term. What I think people are getting at, whether they’re talking about someone defined as a racist, might be a little different from where they see racism in society. And I think I’d make a distinction between those two things, and defining someone as a racist can really boil down to whether you disagree with them on some racial issue. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of room there to simply agree to disagree on matters of race in society. One side wants to label the other side racist if they don’t share a certain agenda.
That, I think about differently from when people say, “This institution is racist,” or, “This policy is racist.” And what I think people are getting at there is they’re looking at outcomes in society and where they see racial disparities, they are saying that is the same thing as racism or something being a racist, a policy… The only reason we have racial disparities in society is due to racism. That is the argument they’re making. And that’s the main argument that I take issue with, frankly.
Jennifer:
And do you think it’s deliberate? Can’t we all just agree to talk about these things in terms of, “Policy X has a negative impact on the black community,” or, “leads to negative outcomes in the black community”? I mean, why do we have to say it’s racist, which implies intentional motive?
Jason:
Well, I guess you’d have to ask the person using it that way. I think that there is an agenda behind identifying outcomes as racist, or policies as racist, that produce certain outcomes and not considering other factors that may lead to racially disparate outcomes. So, that’s why I think it’s used so indiscriminately, words like their use of… so indiscriminately. I think there’s an agenda behind it, but to my mind, I think racism still exists in society. I think that I won’t live to see a day when it doesn’t exist. I think sexism still exists and homophobia still exists and so forth. I think that’s human nature. That’s the tragedy of human nature, there.
But I put that in a separate category from saying that everywhere we see racial disparities, we can automatically attribute racism to the reason we have those disparities. I think that there are other factors that can cause racial disparities in society, and we don’t spend a lot of time talking about those other factors. We simply jump to the conclusion too often in our discussions that something fishy is going on, where we don’t see racial parity in outcomes. If blacks are this percentage of the population, but this percentage of the law firms’ partners or the percentage of the schools’ freshmen class, and so forth, we assume something nefarious, some third party entity up to no good must be responsible for that outcome.
And I think that’s jumping the gun, and I think that there are many reasons why we have racially disparate outcomes in society, and I think in America, increasingly, racism is probably not driving these outcomes. I don’t think racism is the barrier that it once was to black advancement in society, and that some… There are entire industries out there, I think, focused on trying to prove the opposite of that.
Jennifer:
So, you would think that people who believe the Black Lives Matter would want to get to the root causes of some of these disparities and not just cast aspersion, which sort of brings me to my next question, which also has to do with terminology and the phrase Black Lives Matter, because one can say that that is so, as a sentence, lower case, but that is very different than saying one approves of the movement Black Lives Matter. And so, there was a big deal when Vice President Pence was asked to simply say, “Black lives matter,” and he kept saying, “All lives matter.” Why do you think some people are hesitant to embrace the movement, and what’s different about the movement from the fact that black lives matter, which of course they do?
Jason:
Well, you start by asking why groups like Black Lives Matter don’t want to get at the root causes of these problems. I think they have identified the root causes of these racial disparities as racism, and they’ll trace it back to slavery and its aftermath, Jim Crow, and so forth. And so we hear a lot about the legacy of slavery and the legacy of Jim Crow when we are discussing racial inequality in the country today. So, basically, that’s what they see as the root cause of these disparities today.
I reject that analysis mainly because of what I saw happen among blacks in, say, the first 100 years after slavery versus what has happened since the 1960s when it comes to black outcomes, and what you saw in the first 100 years after slavery was a narrowing of racial gaps, whether it was educational attainment or incomes. You saw stronger black families, you saw marriage rates among blacks in the 1920s and ’30s and ’40s and ’50s that were higher than marriage rates among whites. You saw blacks gaining in education, not simply in absolute terms, but relative to white gains in education.
So, we saw a narrowing of racial gaps in this period, much closer to the institution of slavery and during Jim Crow. And so when I look at how that has, in many cases, reversed course, those trends, starting in the 1960s and continuing today, I say, well, I don’t see the logic in citing slavery and Jim Crow as the main cause unless the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow skipped a few generations and then reasserted itself. So, I’m looking for other reasons that might be to blame for the outcomes we see today.
Jennifer:
When do you think that turning point was and why do you think things changed?
Jason:
Well, I would look at the government programs of the 1960s that were put in place, and I’m talking there about Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. I think these were well-intentioned efforts to help the black underclass that simply went awry and interrupted, interfered with, the sort of self-development that was going on in the black community. Again, it was well intentioned, but I think it put in place a lot of perverse incentives that led to, primarily, and most importantly, I think led to the breakup of the black nuclear family. And I think that has been the root cause, so to speak, of many of the problems that the black community faces today. As recently as the early 1960s, two out of three black kids were raised in a home with a mother and a father. Today, more than 70% are not, and in some of our inner cities, it’s as high as 80% or 90%, and I think that factoid alone explains a lot about what’s going on with these young men shooting each other in Chicago and poverty rates and unemployment rates and all of the rap, I think, can be traced back to this disintegration of the nuclear family in the black community.
Jennifer:
So, you mentioned the shootings in Chicago, and I want to ask you about why that doesn’t raise the same kind of outrage that the George Floyd death caused. Now, obviously it was an outrageous thing that happened, and maybe it’s more outrageous because it’s government power as opposed to individuals, but why don’t the huge number of killings of black kids and adults in the inner city… Why doesn’t that register on the protest scale? Shouldn’t it?
Jason:
Well, if you look at the protesters or the activists or the civil rights groups that are out there raising the profile on police incidents that go awry, they have no real agenda, or they have no real incentive, I should say, to raise this black on black killing to the same level. The activists are out there pushing an agenda, and you raise money by pushing the narrative that they’re pushing, which is that your George Floyds or your Eric Garners or your Michael Browns happen all the time in the black community. That’s the narrative that they push because I think that’s the way for them to stay relevant and raise money. Pointing out black on black crime in Chicago, weekend and week out and in the summertime, is not going to have the same effect. So, I don’t think it’s a matter of these activists not caring about what’s going on in Chicago. It’s a matter of emphasis, and you emphasize one thing instead of another because it helps you to push a certain agenda.
Jennifer:
Aren’t there other leaders, though, that should be speaking out about this? I mean, the elected officials that represent these communities, where are they on this issue?
Jason:
Well, again, you have to look at what their agenda is. In [inaudible 00:15:43] if you’re a politician, your agenda is to get reelected, which often involves telling people what they want to hear, and telling people that they are mostly responsible for the predicament they’re in or the circumstances they face, the problems they have, is not necessarily a big vote getter, versus telling someone that other people are responsible for your problems and I have a government program or solution that will come to the rescue here, so vote for me.
Jennifer:
So, let’s talk a little bit more specifically about law enforcement and policing in the wake of the George Floyd killing. There seems to be, on the one hand, conservatives who say there’s no racial bias in law enforcement, and others who say that racial bias explains everything bad that happens in law enforcement, and that just doesn’t seem to be true. I’ve looked at some of Roland Fryer’s research, which I know you’ve published in the Wall Street Journal, and you’ve talked about it in your writing. And that seems to indicate that race does not… He’s an economist at Harvard, for people who don’t know, and he’s studied this, and his research seems to indicate that race doesn’t seem to be a factor in police killings and excessive force, but at lower levels of maybe inappropriate force or negative interactions with the police, he says implicit bias does play a role. What do you make of that research?
Jason:
Well, I would just correct you on the last point there. Fryer finds that when it comes to lethal use of force, he found no racial bias in policing.
Jennifer:
Right. I’m sorry. That’s what I meant to say.
Jason:
But when it came to nonlethal force, he saw that blacks were disproportionately subjected to nonlethal force… shoving, use of a nightstick, something like that… but he was hesitant to attribute that to police bias. Again, he found a racial disparity, but he said, “You have to control for what the person is suspected of before you can automatically attribute a disparity to bias,” and so he did not take it that far, and others have not taken it that far.
And it’s important to point out here that Fryer is no outlier here. There have been other studies that show the same thing that his study showed in terms of the lack of police bias when it comes to shootings and so forth. But my problem with our conversation here that we’re having nationally is that it is about policing. I mean, if we’re worried about… We’re having a conversation as if the biggest problem in these communities is police behavior. There’s not police behavior that is driving the black homicide rate in this country. Police are involved in a tiny percentage, 1%, 2%, 3% of black homicides each year. In Chicago last year, for example, there were close to 500 homicides. 500 homicides in Chicago last year. Three involved police. I mean, nationally, last year, there were something like 7,400, 7,300 black homicides in the country. A little over 200 involved police. We’re talking tiny percentages, year-end having a conversation as if what happened to George Floyd happens all the time everywhere to black people every day, and it’s not something that comports with the data that we have.
Jennifer:
Right. In fact, you could argue that police disparately enforce the laws in the inner cities, and that if anything, blacks are victims of under policing in the inner cities.
Jason:
Yes, you could make that argument. I mean, police are in these communities because that is where the 911 calls originate. Most of the people in these communities are law abiding. You’re talking about a minority of a minority that is responsible for all of this violent crime in these communities, and if you want to reduce the number of police interactions with people in these communities, what we need to do and be focused on are the crime rates, and we don’t talk a lot about black crime rates. We break down police behavior by race, but not criminal behavior by race, and if you talk about one without talking about the other, you are not giving people the full story, the full picture. And we have people out there protesting in the streets. We have athletes refusing to kneel because they have become convinced that there is some epidemic going out there, but the data has shown just the opposite.
Police use of force, not only with regard to black suspects, but nationwide, has fallen dramatically over the past half century, including in our big cities with large black populations. There’s just irrefutable data showing that, and it doesn’t get the attention it deserves. This debate is not put in the perspective or in the context that it needs to be put into for people to understand, and when you give people a lot of misinformation, we get protests in the streets.
And again, my biggest problem here is that it could backfire and it could backfire in a way that leaves these communities with less effective policing. If we start scapegoating this entire profession based on a few bad actors, you’re going to see, I think, police pull back, become less proactive, stay in their cars, not interact with the community, and that’s going to give the criminals the run of the place, and we’re going to end up with more dead black people.
Jennifer:
Yeah. I don’t really understand the whole defund the police movement. I mean, at the fringes, there are people who actually want to abolish the police and send in social workers, which is just an absurdity, but there are lots of people who are less extreme than that who want to decimate police budgets, either… I don’t know… to punish the police or to reallocate those resources to other social services. It seems to me that that will just hurt the very communities that need the most help.
Jason:
Absolutely. And Fryer’s research, again, has shown this, that when you scapegoat entire police departments, police react, and they react in a way that makes them less likely to interact with the community, and that leads to more violent crime and more dead people in these communities.
And I would say that this defund, reallocate the resources movement is not coming from the black community itself. It’s coming from people trying to speak on behalf of the black community, but the polling that I’ve seen shows that most blacks do not want the police defunded. If anything, they want a greater police presence in these communities. So, it’s another example of the activists not speaking on behalf of the people they claim to. And there’s a long history of this, not just with regard to policing. In the field of education, something you’re very familiar with, most blacks, and blacks with school-aged children in particular, are huge supporters of school choice, including charter schools. The NAACP is opposed to charter schools. Blacks were not in favor of busing back in the ’70s, but the NAACP was. Of course, their kids were not on those buses.
So, there’s a long history here of the media turning to activists to speak on behalf of the black community, and those activists having their own agenda, which does not comport with the agenda of the black community.
Jennifer:
We actually posted a meme at IWF said that made me laugh, but it was so true. It said, “Privilege is tweeting to defund the police from your summer home in a town where you’ve never had to call them.”
Jason:
That’s an excellent point. And again, when the media wants to put something into context, it has no problem doing so. And if I could just use an example of… Let’s say an illegal immigrant commits a violent act. Shoots someone, or is driving drunk and kills someone. The media will report this. They will tell you that shootings are down dramatically since the early 1990s. Violent crime is down. They will tell you that that immigrants, on balance, do not drive crime rates, that these are exceptions, not the rules. We shouldn’t jump the gun here. They will go out of their way to put what just happened in context, and rightly so, in my opinion, but we get no context when it comes to a police shooting, even though it is extremely rare. It is not commonplace.
In fact, there’s data in New York City, where I’m based, going back to the early 1970s of police use of force, and back in 1971, police shot more than 300 people a year. 20 years later, in the early 1990s, that was down to around 100. Last year, it was down to about 30. I believe the exact number is 34 in the latest year we have on record. So, you’re talking about an 85%, 90% reduction in police use of force in the nation’s largest city with the nation’s largest police force since the early 1970s, and you have a Black Lives Movement predicated on exactly the reverse narrative.
Jennifer:
Right, that things are getting worse rather than better.
Jason:
It’s as if the facts don’t matter at all. We have viral videos on social media, and so when these things happen, they get more attention than they used to, but that doesn’t mean they’re happening more often, and the media coverage has led us to believe that there is an epidemic going on out there.
Jennifer:
So, we have a question here that I’d like to pose to you from one of our viewers. She says, “How does the frequency of police interactions with black men compared to other racial groups reinforce the belief that black men are targeted more often, even if it doesn’t lead to a fatal outcome. Perhaps what drives the acceptance of misinformation about fatal shootings by police is the plausibility, based on personal experience.” And she mentions at the end of her comment Senator Tim Scott, who’s talked about… He’s a senator from South Carolina, as you know, who’s talked about being pulled over, I think, seven times in one year. Perhaps that’s fueling the misinformation, and not that it’s misinformation that that happens, but that was, personal experiences lead people to believe the worst?
Jason:
Sure, but we all behave this way. There’s a perception out there that only white people cross the street when they see young black men coming toward them at night, or only white people don’t get on the elevator with young black men, or don’t switch subway cars and so forth. That’s nonsense. Black people behave the same way. Jesse Jackson famously said many years ago, “When I look over my shoulder walking down the street late at night and I see white people instead of young black people follow me, I have a sense of relief.”
This is a very old, old story, but the point is that we can’t discuss this without discussing black crime rates, particularly black violent crime rates, in America. Black violent crime rates are seven to 10 times higher than white violent crime rates in this country. Blacks are about 12% of the population in America, 12% or 13%, yet commit more than half of all murders in the US. So long as those statistics are what they are, poor black communities are going to draw police attention. If we want to do something about that, we need to talk about the crime rates, and it is the crime rates that are driving those perceptions. It’s why Tim Scott gets questioned. It’s why, when I was a young black man, many, many, many, many years ago, I also got pulled over, and any black person of a certain age will tell you the same story. It is based on the crime rates, and we need to talk and do something about those crime rates if we want to change these stereotypes. They’re based on reality.
Jennifer:
So, I know you’re a father of three. What do you tell your children about police and racism and police brutality?
Jason:
I tell them the same thing my father told me. “Stay out of trouble.”
Jennifer:
Okay. But he isn’t causing trouble, right? He’s just driving to work.
Jason:
I’m sorry?
Jennifer:
I mean, Senator Tim Scott isn’t causing any trouble. He’s just driving to work.
Jason:
I was just driving to work, too, or driving to school when I was in college and got pulled over for no reason. It’s annoying. Life isn’t fair.
I’m sure young Arab men hate getting profiled, too, but they know why they’re getting profiled. So, again, these stereotypes are based on patterns of behavior among certain groups, and we can’t ignore that or pretend that it doesn’t matter. If I’m in a subway car and a bunch of young black men looking a certain way get in, I don’t have time to get to know them personally to make sure they’re okay. I play the odds. I go with probability. I switch cars and I make sure I get home at night to my three kids, and that’s what everyone does. And it’s commonsensical. Black people do it, white people do it. We can’t pretend that violent crime is evenly distributed in society among all groups or among all genders. It just isn’t, and that’s the reality out there, and that’s the reality that the police need to respond to.
Jennifer:
But so, you would tell your kids just, “If you get pulled over, that’s just a burden you have to bear because of the . . .[inaudible].”
Jason:
It’s not their fault, but what is the alternative? I mean, here in New York, when we had stop and frisk policies, we had a judge that looked at the percentages of certain groups that were getting stopped and not others, and based on that, said, “We can’t have this because all groups are not getting stopped at the same rate, so something fishy is going on.” But how ridiculous would it be for police to go around stopping elderly Asian women in Chinatown at the same rate that they’re stopping young black men in the South Bronx? Is that a smart use of police resources? Is that going to make the city safer? You have to have the police policing neighborhoods where crime is most likely to happen, and where it does in fact happen. Again, the police are responding to where the 911 calls come from, and they come from these communities. That’s why the police are these communities as much as they are.
Jennifer:
But then you have Mayor Bloomberg apologizing for this policy. I mean, obviously because he was running for president. But how much do politicians have to prostrate themselves on the altar of this narrative if they know what you’re saying is true?
Jason:
Well, I’m not a politician. I don’t know, but the Black Lives Matter movement does seem to be ascendant, along with progressives in general, in the Democratic Party, and we’re watching them pull people we used to think of as moderates further and further to the left. So, this is a conversation I think that the Democratic Party is going to have to have, and with its leadership, and decide how long they’re going to let this go on, equating Jefferson Davis with Thomas Jefferson, promoting this sort of 1619 Project mentality.
Now reparations, again, is all the rage. I don’t know how far, how long, people on the left are going to let this go on. My fear is that there’s going to be a backlash among whites and that it could be quite ugly, and again, we’ve seen a lot of this before, militant black movements followed by an uptick in militant white movements. We saw it after the Black Power movement in the 1960s and early ’70s, with the White Power movement that came along in the ’80s. So, the country has seen all this before, and that’s what I fear that we’re headed in the direction of something we’ve seen in the past. It doesn’t end well.
Jennifer:
Well, I certainly hope that doesn’t happen. I certainly hope we can all just take a deep breath and try to have some civilized conversations about this. And there’s so much to unpack in what you said. I could probably have you back for another two hours, but we are out of time, and on that note, I do want to thank you for talking with us today, and I want to wish you and your family a very happy Independence Day.
Jason:
Thank you. You, too.
Jennifer:
Thanks so much. Thanks for joining us, everybody. Until next time.