The Great Hypocrisy
You are not racist.
Well, if you are reading this, I do not personally believe it is likely you are racist – law enforcement officers included.
Not in anything resembling the common and dictionary meaning that Merriam-Webster defines as one who holds “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.”
Statistically speaking though, it is more likely your parents were racist. It is also much more likely your grandparents were racist, and your great-grandparents, great-great grandparents, etc.
It is a begrudging fact that America was founded by racists and white supremacists, and often these men owned other human beings as slaves. These same men that many individuals worldwide nevertheless admire for their words and actions (self-included). Men like Thomas Jefferson, that in one instance penned “All men are created equal,” and in a few breaths later penned the following passage in his Notes on the State of Virginia:
“Besides those of colour, figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race. They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour. This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than the whites…They seem to require less sleep. A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. ..They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation…Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.”
America was not only founded by racists and white supremacists, it was governed by them for centuries. Honest Abe, the Great Emancipator himself, offered the following thoughts on black people during presidential debates against Stephen Douglas:
“I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races … I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be a position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
It was these racists and white supremacists that not only enacted evil institutions like slavery, but passed legislation like the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to force that evil upon others. A person even in a free-state that aided in the escape of slaves would be arrested, imprisoned and heavily fined (funny how states’ rights stopped the moment some states wanted to help slaves that made it across the border).
It was these racists and white supremacists that dismantled reconstruction, inflicted terror upon African Americans, deprived them of their civil liberties, suppressed their suffrage, and assassinated whites that were interested in helping them – even if they were sitting Congressmen.
It was these racists and white supremacists that did everything in their power to prevent African Americans from receiving representation. Once upon a time under Reconstruction, the 44th Congress (1875-1877) had 8 African American congressmen, but as blacks were systemically deprived of the vote, they would not again reach these heights until nearly 100 years later, during the 91st Congress in (1969-1971). This includes a stretch of 53 years from 1891-1944 when there would be 1 or fewer African Americans in the entire Congress.
It was these racists and white supremacists that founded Jim Crow laws in order to institutionalize their racism in the form of “separate but equal,” but in reality was every bit unequal as it was separate. The education and future wages of African Americans suffered immensely as a result, unless they could manage the good fortune of passing as white.
It was these racists and white supremacists that deliberately enacted policies such as redlining to segregate blacks into their own neighborhoods with reduced access to credit, where they would accrue higher borrowing costs. This resulted in ever greater disinvestment in poor urban American neighborhoods that were disproportionately black and with long-run repercussions to this day and beyond.
It was these racists and white supremacists that would be sued by the US Department of Justice for violating the Fair Housing Act, a policy designed to help turn back the tide against redlining. One specifically would be sued for refusing to rent to black tenants and repeatedly lying to black applicants about a lack of vacancies, so signed an agreement in 1975 to no longer discriminate against renters of color. He would then become President of the United States in 2016.
So again, I do sincerely believe that if you are reading this, you are probably not racist. However, I also believe in bureaucratic inertia and the difficulty of changing laws and systems, even if the outcomes they produce are clearly unjust or unequal.
It is obvious that many of America’s institutions reek of racist rot. That rot was put in place deliberately by racists and white supremacists for generations to be resilient – even if the individual agents within those same institutions are not racists themselves.
If you don’t believe me, please allow me to explain (or at the very least, read the meme that sandwiches this post).
The Racial Disparities
There are countless studies showing massive disparities between blacks and whites in the Criminal Justice system. Many of these I am pulling from journalist Radley Balko’s excellent compilation here.
The National Academy of Science found in a 2019 study that black men were killed by police at 2.5 times the rate of whites. Roughly 96 per 100,000 black men and boys will be killed by police over their lifetime, while for white men and boys it is about 39 out of 100,000. Black women were killed at 1.4 times the rate of whites.
A 2013 Department of Justice study found that black and Latino drivers were pulled over at about 3 times the rate of whites.
This 2015 study used county-level data from 2011-2014 and found that being black and unarmed made you 3.5 times more likely to be shot by police than if you were white and unarmed, with some individual counties having disparities as high as 20:1.
An in-depth Washington Post investigation examined 52,000 homicides in a dozen different major American cities. It found that homicides that had a white victim ended in arrest 63% of the time, while if the victim was black or Hispanic, it was 46% and 48% respectively.
A 2018 study in Boston University Law Review looked at decades of misdemeanor arrest data and found persistent, large disparities for most crimes that stretches back decades.
A 2020 ACLU report found that from 2010-2018, blacks are about 3 1/2 times more likely to be arrested than whites for marijuana offenses, including in states where marijuana has been legalized. A 2013 ACLU report had a fairly identical finding. This is despite loads of research showing that, although blacks are more likely to consume or have substance abuse disorders with marijuana than whites, the difference is nowhere near that rate.
A national 2014 ACLU survey of SWAT teams indicated that black individuals faced SWAT deployments at twice the rate of whites. The majority of the raids were for individuals suspected of low-level drug offenses.
According to a 2017 report by the National Registry of Exonerations, although African Americans were about 1/8 of the American population and 1/3 the prison population, they constituted nearly half of those that were exonerated for crimes they did not commit. It also noted that although only 15% of African Americans that were imprisoned for having white victims, 31% of the exonerated African Americans were convicted of killing whites. Additionally, there have been 1,800 “group” exonerations in 15 cities that have occurred since 1989 after the exposition of mass institutional corruption form various Police Departments. The “great majority” of those exonerated in these incidents were black.
The NAACP estimates that African Americans are about 12.5% of all illicit drug users; however, they constitute 29% of those arrested and 33% of those incarcerated for drug offenses.
A 2011 Bureau of Justice Assistance meta-analysis noted that blacks are less likely to receive reduced charges in plea bargains than whites.
A 2013 Yale Law study found that after controlling for arrest offense, criminal history, and other prior characteristics, blacks still received sentences that were about 10% longer in duration.
A 2017 study from the US Sentencing Commission found that after controlling for similar characteristics such as age, priors, etc., black male offenders received sentences that were about 20% longer in duration than their white counterparts for the same crimes.
A 2018 Harvard Law study examined 500,000 federal defendants and found that Republican-appointed judges sentenced black defendants approximately 3 months longer than non-black defendants when compared to Democratic-appointed judges, thus constituting about 65% of the baseline racial sentencing gap.
A 2018 Pew Study found that although blacks constitute about 13% of the US population, they constitute about 30% of those on parole or probation. Only 1 in 81 of all whites were on probation or parole, while blacks were about 3.5 times as likely to be supervised, roughly 1 in 23.
And OMG, these are exhaustingly endless. Please enjoy a kitty.
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The Rebuttal
When I use all of these studies as evidence of what I’d describe as clear evidence of systemic racism, many people are going to look at them, and say something to the effect of, “Correlation is not causation, once you control for blacks having higher rates of crime and higher police interactions as a consequence, what happens then?” And fair enough, I think “How do you know?” is the most underrated sentence in the English language (other than an unironic “The Detroit Lions have won the Super Bowl!” but when will anybody realistically ever say that?).
The truth is I primarily cited these studies because I think they are fairly weak, but I wanted to demonstrate a point with them anyway.
All of those studies share the fact they are national in nature, which is problematic because the median police department, judicial system, etc. in the United States may not be racist or produce racist outcomes, but there could still be a minority of institutionally racist hot spots that drive disparities. More importantly, they all are basically just naively highlighting the racial disparities that exist (though some try to control for circumstances more than others, I do not find the majority of them particularly impressive, nor are they necessarily meant to be).
I share concerns with critics that any disparity that exists may not necessarily be a direct consequence of racism or discrimination.
For example, the 2016 median household income of Americans with Scandinavian ancestry was approximately $73,797, while for French Americans it was $63,471, and for Scottish Americans, it was $51,925. The disparity in income between Scandinavian Americans and Scottish Americans is roughly the size of the gap between white and black American households, and while many would suggest the latter is a consequence of racism, I suspect virtually nobody would argue this for the former.
Therefore, it is true that correlation is not causation, and that in a perfectly non-racist version of America that Civil Rights advocates can only imagine, it is highly probable there would be some sort of disparity between white and black households. Given this, what’s the best way to isolate and test a variable like racism to determine that the relationship is causal? Do any such empirical studies exist?
(For the sake of argument, let’s also pretend that the ability of black and white Americans to acquire human capital has also been on equal footing for centuries – i.e., if we actually did have a separate or integrated fully equal system for schooling, working, etc.)
The first thing that I want to highlight, is that conditional on interaction with police and crime rates, it is true that much of these racial disparities disappear.
For example, there is a pair of papers making the rounds of late disproportionately in right-leaning circles that suggest once you control for conditions of interacting with police, the disparity between whites and blacks disappears.
One study finds that among the individuals that are fatally shot by police, minorities are no more likely to be shot than whites, and if anything, there may be an anti-white bias. But (AND THIS IS A VERY BIG BUT), that’s not really the question of interest. We’re interested in whether or not people of certain races are shot at disproportionate rates – assuming that police encounter minorities and whites in equal numbers is problematic for such analysis. They are not measuring what they imply they are measuring in the paper. The authors basically give away the entire game in their recent correction:
“We want to correct a sentence in our significance statement that has been quoted by others stating ‘White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers.’ This sentence refers to estimating Pr(shot|race, X). As we estimated Pr(race|shot, X), this sentence should read: ‘As the proportion of White officers in a fatal officer-involved shooting increased, a person fatally shot was not more likely to be of a racial minority.’ This is consistent with our framing of the results in the abstract and main text.”
To put in other words, because they do not have a denominator in their analysis, they are effectively just showing that white people are killed more by police than black people because there are a lot more white people in the US!
Whoops (Edit July 7, 2020: It has been brought to my attention that as of yesterday, the authors of this study issued a call for a full retraction.)
Meanwhile, in my opinion, the clearly superior paper of these two is Fryer’s 2017, “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force.”
Fryer uses a plethora of detailed data coming from NYC’s Stop and Frisk program, a Police-Public Contact survey (a civilian measure of descriptions of police interactions), a data set he assembled from a sample of some of America’s largest cities and counties measuring all incidents of officer weapon discharges, and a comprehensive random sample of police-civilian interactions from Houston PD.
He finds that ultimately, there doesn’t appear to be a disparity in the use of lethal force between minorities and whites; however, blacks and Hispanics are each more than 50% more likely to experience some form of force during police interactions (and again, this is after for controlling for suspect demographics, officer demographics, civilian behavior in interaction and a host of other factors).
However, the fatal flaw of this paper is it uses data that is conditional on police interaction (and Fryer is very forthright about this). This is problematic, because one cause of police interaction may be racism itself, or in other words, you would expect to see racist police officers and policies to choose to interact with minorities more because of their racism, even if the outcomes of those interactions themselves is not biased. In other words, there may be a bias in who police are choosing to stop in the first place!
I personally think this paper does a marvelous job of rebutting Fryer and papers like it, and 538 does a fantastic job of explaining how police-interaction data could be biased if officers choose to disproportionately stop minorities.
Similarly, just pointing out that blacks commit crimes at a higher rate than whites isn’t good enough, because even if controlling for this completely erases the black/white discrepancy (it generally doesn’t), crime itself can be a significant factor of racism. For example, if police are targeting blacks at higher rates than whites for identical offenses, such as drug possession, this will produce wide discrepancies in arrests despite similar base rates of illicit consumption. In addition, if police are choosing to patrol disproportionately minority neighborhoods less, the lack of police will directly cause more crime (this is an exceptionally robust and important finding that I will explore more in-depth in my next post).
The Smoking Gun of Racism
There are a variety of empirical studies that find massive racial biases in a way that I think does a tremendous job of isolating racism as a causal factor.
For example, there are multiple studies that indicate blacks are much more likely than whites to be traffic stopped by police, but that the disparity significantly closes at night – when it becomes trickier to figure out the race of any passing driver.
The skin tone of African Americans is predictive of criminal justice outcomes. In other words, lighter skin African Americans that may better “pass” are less likely to be arrested, charged, convicted, and sentenced than their darker skin counterparts. A Harvard study of Georgia first-time felons found a similar result with the skin-color gradient of African Americans predicting longer sentencing rates for darker-skinned blacks. Ditto.
Additionally, in an experiment of “mock jurors,” juries were significantly more likely to find race-neutral evidence incriminating against darker-skinned suspects and more likely to find them guilty.
One new study used evidence from 2 million 911 calls and their ensuing dispatches from two anonymized American metros. It includes the priority assigned to the call by the operator, the race of the officer dispatched, a description of the call, and whether or not force was used (and by which officer). It found that in general white officers were 60% more likely to use force on average than black officers and were likely to use gun force twice as often. Meanwhile, it found that although white and minority officers used gun force at similar rates in white and racially mixed neighborhoods, white officers significantly increased their use of any force relative to minority officers when dispatched to minority neighborhoods. Overall, it estimates that black and Hispanic civilians are 30-60% and 75-120% respectively more likely to experience any use of force and five times as likely to experience gun use of force than if white officers increased their use of force at the same rate of minority officers.
A new paper used speeding ticket data from individual officers in Florida and did a bunch of clever things to find that minorities are slightly more likely to speed, but even after accounting for this, face a disproportionate amount of discrimination and lack of leniency from officers, especially white officers. This racial discrimination accounts for more than 80% of the ticketing disparity. Meanwhile, the ticketing behavior of only 40% of the officers essentially drives the entire disparity, while the top 10% most discriminatory officers are more than 40% more likely to give white folks ticketing leniency relative to minorities.
Another similar study of Texas troopers shows how individually biased law enforcement officers can be identified through similar statistical means. This suggests that holding such officers accountable can reduce discrimination.
In the words of my meme-form scholarly summary:
I find all of these to be quite convincing smoking guns of racism in the criminal justice system as a likely consequence of the institutional racist rot wrought on by our forefathers. The vast majority of actors operating within this system are likely not racist (or at least, not outwardly so) themselves. Yet, these racist outcomes nevertheless persist. That is why it is important to not just sit idly by and proclaim “I am not racist,” but to actively be anti-racist and work to purge ourselves of this pestilence.
Even if you remain skeptical of the disparities being a cause of racism, one consequence is that they are so large and systemic, essentially any improvement in the criminal justice system or in policing is still going to disproportionately benefit minorities.
Keeping this in mind, stay tuned for my next post, which will be an evidence-based discussion of what can be done to improve policing in the United States.