Race Relations and Law Enforcement
Jason L. Riley
Editorial Board Member, Wall Street Journal
Jason L. Riley is an editorial board member and
a senior editorial page writer at the Wall Street Journal, where he
writes on politics, economics, education, immigration, and race. He
is also a FOX News contributor and appears regularly on Special
Report with Bret Baier. Previously, he worked for USA Today
and the Buffalo News. He earned a bachelor’s degree in
English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the
author of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder
for Blacks to Succeed.
The following is adapted from a speech delivered on January 30,
2015, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for
Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part
of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.
Thomas Sowell once said that some books you write for pleasure,
and others you write out of a sense of duty, because there are
things to be said—and other people have better sense than to say
them. My new book, Please Stop Helping Us, falls into that latter
category. When I started out as a journalist 20 years ago, I had no
expectation of focusing on race-related topics. People like Sowell
and Shelby Steele and Walter Williams and a few other independent
black thinkers, to my mind at least, had already said what needed to
be said, had been saying it for decades, and had been saying it more
eloquently than I ever could. But over the years, and with some
prodding from those guys, it occurred to me that not enough younger
blacks were following in their footsteps. It also occurred to me
that many public policies aimed at the black underclass were just as
wrongheaded as ever. The fight wasn’t over. A new generation of
black thinkers needed to explain what’s working and what isn’t, and
why, to a new generation of readers. And the result is this book,
which I hope will help to bring more light than heat to the
discussion of race.
The book is not an autobiography or a memoir, but I do tell a few
stories about growing up black and male in the inner city. And one
of the stories involves a trip back home to Buffalo, New York, where
I was born and raised. I was visiting my older sister shortly after
I had begun working at the Wall Street Journal, and I was chatting
with her daughter, my niece, who was maybe in the second grade at
the time. I was asking her about school, her favorite subjects, that
sort of thing, when she stopped me and said, “Uncle Jason, why you
talk white?” Then she turned to her little friend who was there and
said, “Don’t my uncle sound white? Why he tryin’ to sound so smart?”
She was just teasing, of course. I smiled and they enjoyed a
little chuckle at my expense. But what she said stayed with me. I
couldn’t help thinking: Here were two young black girls, seven or
eight years old, already linking speech patterns to race and
intelligence. They already had a rather sophisticated awareness
that, as blacks, white-sounding speech was not only to be avoided in
their own speech but mocked in the speech of others.
I shouldn’t have been too surprised by this, and I wasn’t. My
siblings, along with countless other black friends and relatives,
teased me the same way when I was growing up. And other black
professionals have told similar stories. What I had forgotten is
just how early these attitudes take hold—how soon this
counterproductive thinking and behavior begins.
New York City has the largest school system in America. Eighty
percent of black kids in New York public schools are performing
below grade level. And a big part of the problem is a black
subculture that rejects attitudes and behaviors that are conducive
to academic success. Black kids read half as many books and watch
twice as much television as their white counterparts, for example.
In other words, a big part of the problem is a culture that produces
little black girls and boys who are already worried about acting and
sounding white by the time they are in second grade.
Another big part of the problem is a reluctance to speak honestly
about these cultural shortcomings. Many whites fear being called
racists. And many black leaders have a vested interest in blaming
black problems primarily on white racism, so that is the narrative
they push regardless of the reality. Racism has become an
all-purpose explanation for bad black outcomes, be they social or
economic. If you disagree and are white, you’re a bigot. If you
disagree and are black, you’re a sell-out.
The shooting death of a young black man by a white police officer
in Ferguson, Missouri, last year touched off a national discussion
about everything except the aberrant behavior of so many young black
men that results in such frequent encounters with police. We talked
about racial prejudice, poverty, unemployment, profiling, the
tensions between law enforcement and poor black communities, and so
forth. Rarely did we hear any discussion of black crime rates.
Homicide is the leading cause of death for young black men in the
U.S., and around 90 percent of the perpetrators are also black. Yet
for months we’ve had protesters nationwide pretending that our
morgues are full of young black men because cops are shooting them.
Around 98 percent of black shooting deaths do not involve police. In
fact, a cop is six times more likely to be shot by someone black
than the opposite. The protestors are pushing a false anti-cop
narrative, and everyone from the president on down has played along.
Any candid debate on race and criminal justice in this country
would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly
disproportionate number of crimes. Blacks constitute about 13
percent of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 they committed
more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for
most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault, and property
crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the
population. So long as blacks are committing such an outsized amount
of crime, young black men will be viewed suspiciously and tensions
between police and crime-ridden communities will persist. The U.S.
criminal justice system, currently headed by a black attorney
general who reports to a black president, is a reflection of this
reality, not its cause. If we want to change negative perceptions of
young black men, we must change the behavior that is driving those
perceptions. But pointing this out has become almost taboo. How can
we even begin to address problems if we won’t discuss them honestly?
“High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a
matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination,” wrote the late
Harvard Law professor William Stuntz. “The trends reached their peak
not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not
in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of
civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control
of city governments.”
The Left wants to blame these outcomes on racial animus and
poverty, but back in the 1940s and ’50s, when racial discrimination
was legal and black poverty was much higher than today, the black
crime rate was lower. The Left wants to blame these outcomes on “the
system,” but blacks have long been part of running that system.
Black crime and incarceration rates spiked in the 1970s and ’80s in
cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia under
black mayors and black police chiefs. Some of the most violent
cities in the U.S. today are run by blacks.
Some insist that our jails and prisons are teeming with young
black men due primarily to racist drug laws, but the reality is that
the drug laws are neither racist nor driving the black incarceration
rate. It’s worth remembering that the harsher penalties for crack
cocaine offenses that were passed in the 1980s were supported by
most of the Congressional Black Caucus, including Rep. Charles
Rangel of Harlem, who at the time headed the House Select Committee
on Narcotics Abuse and Control. Crack was destroying black
communities and many black political leaders wanted dealers to face
longer sentences. In other words, black legislators in Washington
led the effort to impose tougher drug laws, a fact often forgotten
by critics today.
When these laws passed, even their opponents didn’t claim that
they were racist. Those charges came later, as the racially
disparate impact of the laws became apparent. What’s been lost in
the discussion is whether these laws leave law-abiding blacks better
off. Do you make life in the ghetto harder or easier by sending
thugs home sooner rather than later? Liberal elites would have us
deny what black ghetto residents know to be the truth. These
communities aren’t dangerous because of racist cops or judges or
sentencing guidelines. They’re dangerous mainly due to black
criminals preying on black victims.
Nor is the racial disparity in prison inmates explained by the
enforcement of drug laws. Blacks are about 37.5 percent of the
population in state prisons, which house nearly 90 percent of the
nation’s inmates. Remove drug offenders from that population and the
percentage of black prisoners only drops to 37 percent. What drives
black incarceration rates are violent offenses, not drug offenses.
Blacks commit violent crimes at seven to ten times the rate that
whites do. The fact that their victims tend to be of the same race
suggests that young black men in the ghetto live in danger of being
shot by each other, not cops. Nor is this a function of blacks being
picked on by cops who are “over-policing” certain neighborhoods.
Research has long shown that the rate at which blacks are arrested
is nearly identical to the rate at which crime victims identify
blacks as their assailants. The police are in these communities
because that’s where the 911 calls originate.
If liberals want to help reverse these crime trends, they would
do better to focus less on supposed racial animus and more on ghetto
attitudes towards school, work, marriage, and child-rearing. As
recently as the early 1960s, two out of three black children were
raised in two-parent households. Today, more than 70 percent are
not, and the number can reach as high as 80 or 90 percent in our
inner cities. For decades, studies have shown that the likelihood of
teen pregnancy, drug abuse, dropping out of school and other bad
social outcomes increases dramatically when fathers aren’t around.
One of the most comprehensive studies ever undertaken in this regard
concluded that black boys without a father are 68 percent more
likely to be incarcerated than those with a father—that overall, the
most critical factor affecting the prospect of young males
encountering the criminal justice system is the presence of a father
in the home. All other factors, including family income, are much
less important.
As political scientist James Q. Wilson said, if crime is to a
significant degree caused by weak character, if weak character is
more likely among children of unmarried mothers, if there are no
fathers who will help raise their children, acquire jobs, and
protect their neighborhoods, if boys become young men with no
preparation for work, if school achievement is regarded as a sign of
having sold out—if all these things are true, then the chances of
reducing the crime rate among low income blacks anytime soon is
slim.
Many on the Left sincerely want to help the black underclass. The
problem is that liberals believe bigger government is the best way
to help. But having looked at the track record of government
policies aimed at helping the black underclass, I’m skeptical.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon
Johnson’s commencement speech at Howard University. Johnson had
signed the Civil Rights Act a year earlier and would sign the Voting
Rights Act two months later. And he used the speech to talk about
what the government should do next on behalf of blacks. These two
laws marked merely the end of the beginning, he said:
That beginning is freedom; and the barriers to that freedom are
tumbling down. Freedom is the right to share, share fully and
equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a
public place, to go to school. . . . But freedom is not enough.
. . . You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled
by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of
a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the
others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely
fair. . . . The next and the more profound stage of the battle
for civil rights [is] . . . not just equality as a right and a
theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
But what if Johnson was mistaken? What if there are limits to
what government can do beyond removing barriers to freedom? What if
the best that we can hope for from our elected officials are
policies that promote equal opportunity? What if public policy
makers risk creating more problems and barriers to progress when the
goal is equal outcomes?
The civil rights struggles of the mid-20th century exemplified
liberalism at its best. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965
Voting Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination in employment and
education and ensured the ability of blacks to register and vote.
All Americans can be proud of these accomplishments. But what about
the social policy and thinking that arose from the ruins of Jim
Crow? Good intentions aside, which efforts have facilitated black
advancement, and which efforts have impeded it?
In 1988, right around the 25th anniversary of the Great Society,
Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer published a book called the
The Limits of Social Policy. Glazer analyzed Great Society
programs from the perspective of someone who believed that
government action was the best way to improve the lot of blacks. But
his assessment humbled him. He concluded that in many ways, the
Great Society programs were causing just as many problems as they
were solving—that good intentions aren’t enough.
Unlike Nathan Glazer, many policy makers today are still riding
high on good intentions. They don’t seem particularly interested in
reconsidering what has been tried, even though 50 years into the war
on poverty the result isn’t pretty. While gains have been made,
significant racial disparities remain in some areas and black
retrogression has occurred in others. The black-white poverty gap
has widened over the past decade and the black poverty rate is no
longer falling. The black-white disparity in incarceration rates
today is larger than it was in 1960. And the black unemployment rate
has, on average, been double the white rate for five decades.
Confronted with these statistics, liberals continue to push for
more of the same solutions. Last year, President Obama announced yet
another federal initiative aimed at helping blacks—an increase in
preschool education, even though studies (including those released
by his own administration) have shown no significant impacts in
education from such programs. He said that he wants to increase
reading proficiency and graduation rates for minority students, yet
he opposes school voucher programs that are doing both. He continues
to call for job-training programs of the sort that study after study
has shown to be ineffective.
Fred Siegel, an expert on urban public policy, has written
extensively about the liberal flight from evidence and empiricism
that began in the 1960s. The Left, wracked by guilt over America’s
diabolical treatment of blacks, decided to hold them to different
standards of behavior. Blacks, Siegel writes, were invited to enter
the larger society on their own terms. Schools, which had helped
poor whites, ceased incorporating poor blacks from the South into
the mainstream culture. Discipline as a prerequisite for adult
success was displaced by the authentic self-expression of the
ill-educated. Blacks were not culturally deprived but simply
differently-abled—more spontaneous and expressive and so forth.
Liberals tried to improve conditions for blacks without passing
judgment on antisocial black culture. And this sort of thinking
continues to this day. Walter Williams once wrote that he’s glad he
grew up in the 1940s and ’50s, before it became fashionable for
white people to like black people. He received a more honest
assessment of his strengths and weaknesses, he says, than black kids
today are likely to receive from white teachers and employers who
are more interested in being politically correct.
After George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of
Trayvon Martin, President Obama explained the black response to the
verdict this way. Blacks understand, he said, that some of the
violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods is born out of
a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and
dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to that
history. In other words, Obama was doing exactly what the Left has
been conditioning blacks to do since the 1960s, which is to blame
black pathology on the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
This is a dodge. That legacy is not holding down blacks half as
much as the legacy of efforts to help. Underprivileged blacks have
become playthings for intellectuals and politicians who care more
about reveling in their good intentions or winning votes than
advocating behaviors and attitudes that have allowed other groups to
get ahead. Meanwhile, the civil rights movement has become an
industry that does little more than monetize white guilt. Martin
Luther King and his contemporaries demanded black self-improvement
despite the abundant and overt racism of their day. King’s
self-styled successors, living in an era when public policy bends
over backwards to accommodate blacks, insist that blacks cannot be
held responsible for their plight so long as someone, somewhere in
white America, is still prejudiced.
The more fundamental problem with these well-meaning liberal
efforts is that they have succeeded, tragically, in convincing
blacks to see themselves first and foremost as victims. Today there
is no greater impediment to black advancement than the self-pitying
mindset that permeates black culture. White liberals think they are
helping blacks by romanticizing bad behavior. And black liberals are
all too happy to hustle guilty whites.
Blacks ultimately must help themselves. They must develop the
same attitudes and behaviors and habits that other groups had to
develop to rise in America. And to the extent that a social policy,
however well-intentioned, interferes with this self-development, it
does more harm than good.
This concept of self-help and self-development is something that
black leaders once understood quite well, and at a time when blacks
faced infinitely more obstacles than they face today. Asked by
whites in 1865 what to do for freed blacks, Frederick Douglass
responded: “I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing
with us! . . . If the apples will not remain on the tree of their
own strength . . . let them fall! . . . And if the Negro cannot
stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a
chance to stand on his own legs!” Douglass was essentially saying,
give blacks equal opportunity and then leave them alone.
Booker T. Washington, another late 19th century black leader who
had been born a slave, once said that it is important and right that
all privileges of the law be granted to blacks, but it is vastly
more important that they be prepared for the exercise of these
privileges.
Douglass and Washington didn’t play down the need for the
government to secure equal rights for blacks, and both were
optimistic that blacks would get equal rights eventually, although
neither man lived to see that day. But both men also understood the
limits of government benevolence. Blacks would have to ready
themselves to meet the challenge of being in a position to take
advantage of opportunities once equal rights had been secured. The
history of 1960s liberal social policies is largely a history of
ignoring this wisdom.
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