Even the anti-woke can end up accepting the woke arguments while denying that they’re doing so. By Richard Hanania.
Point out a disparity, ignore obvious but unpleasant explanations, and jump to the conclusion that discrimination must be the cause. In the area of public policy, this is pretty much all wokeness is!
Police arrest more black people, so police are the problem. Blacks score lower on all written tests, the tests are the problem. Blacks have less money, which means that capitalism….you get the point. …
Of course, it’s possible for two things to be true at once. French blacks might have a higher crime rate, and police might be racist against them. Maybe if you collected the data, you would find blacks are 10 times more likely to commit a serious crime than white Frenchmen in major cities, but cops stop them 20 times as often. …
Everyone accepts that men commit more crimes than women, and young people commit more crimes than the elderly. We therefore implicitly accept the fact that a police officer might naturally treat a situation where he has to approach a car full of young men differently than one where he approaches a car full of old women.
A young man doesn’t get pulled over and say “if I was a little old lady, you would’ve let me go. Sure, statistics say I’m 30x more likely to be carrying a weapon, but you acted in a way consistent with believing that my demographic was 40x more likely to do so. You are therefore a sexist and an ageist.”
Why does this sound so ridiculous to us? Probably because we consider it an impossible standard for a criminal justice system, or any system, to perfectly calibrate its level of disparate treatment or disparate impact between groups that actually do behave differently. …
But in the real world, differences in how groups are treated tend to roughly correspond to how they behave, indicating that the woke (and Thomas Chatterton Williams) are almost always wrong to even see a problem in the first place.
Yep, long-lived stereotypes usually have a strong statistical basis.
A white friend who works for a government agency (I’m being deliberately obscure) in a crime-ridden city told me during the Summer of Floyd that he has observed a significant amount of police brutality — and that the most brutal cops of all were black ones. …
He described situations in which police officers and firefighters had to go into very dangerous places, not knowing what they would be facing, or whether there would be shots fired at them. He talked about the jaw-dropping chaos in the poor black ghettos of his city, and how simply to police that part of town requires being on hair-trigger all the time, because guns are everywhere, and there is so much confusion and instability that it is hard to know what’s what.
He told me a story of watching some black cops beat the hell out of a black man who had beaten his female partner, but by the time the cops got there, he had intimidated her into refusing to press charges. When the cops tried to convince the woman, who was a bloody mess, to file charges against her abuser, the abuser got mouthy and confrontational with the cops. The cops, who were all black men, beat the shit out of him. My friend, who watched it, said the creep deserved it. He speculated that the cops were so rough with the wife-beater because they knew that he would never have to answer in court for what he had done to that woman. …
To talk honestly about police brutality in black neighborhoods requires discussing the broader context of violence and social breakdown there, and what the phenomenon of law enforcement requires under such circumstances. …
A firefighter in my former city, Baton Rouge, whom I met through my brother in law (a firefighter himself) told me once that middle class people have no idea at all how different life is in the poor black parts of the city, where he works. He described things — ways of life that the firefighters of all races observe — that sounded like something from another country. His point was not even to criticize it, as much as to say that the gap between what middle class people think they know, and what actually exists, is vast. …
Public school teachers in Louisiana aren’t paid much, but I heard these white women talking about buying clothes for some of these elementary school black kids, because otherwise they wouldn’t have anything that fit them. There was anger among these women, because they knew that these kids’ mothers were spending all their money on drugs and booze, totally neglecting the kids.
I didn’t write about that because I wasn’t there as a journalist, and if I had asked to write about it, they would have said no, and they ought to have said no. Why? Because even though those poorly paid public schoolteachers were digging money out of their own pockets to provide the basics for other people’s neglected kids, the story would have been racialized as “white saviorism,” and those well-meaning teachers would have been demonized by blacks and white liberals — and anybody who would have stood up for the teachers would have been accused of being an apologist for racism. …
I realized how nobody wants to hear any of this. It doesn’t fit the preferred narrative. It is better for these innocent black children to suffer than that we have an honest discussion about moral and social failures in the black community there, and try to figure out ways to remedy what is broken.
A reader of Dreher:
We allow children/vulnerable people to be abused because society needs a narrative to be organized around, and seeing the abuse (a prerequisite to stopping it) would entail destroying the narrative. …
I taught my daughter early on, if you want to be a proper lady when you grow up, you need to get comfortable with being called a bitch, because when you try to protect people who are weaker than you, those with more power will hate you. With humility, you can learn not to care, to remember all the truth-tellers before you who suffered for their honesty and care for others, and realize that you are no better than they, and can’t possibly deserve better.
You can say to your detractors, “I am indeed a terrible person in many ways, I might not use the term bigot/racist/sexist to describe myself, but perhaps you are right. I am not in a position to defend myself in any event; however, let’s focus on the-girls-being-raped-by-gangs/the-women-prisoners-being-raped-by-transwomen/the-black-children-being-shot-in-their-neighborhoods-by-criminals-because-the-police-are-afraid/unable-to-do-their-jobs/etc.” You don’t allow ego to redirect the conversation.
The woke are causing untold misery by insisting we believe their narrative that all large groups of people are statistically identical (except for superficial features like skin color).
Instead, we should recognize reality and work with it.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
