Inconvenient Statistics Regarding Urban Homicides and Race, Including Comparison of 2019 and 2020

Soon after George Floyd's death, thousands of people peacefully marched in American streets protesting police violence. As the sun went down in those cities, however, multitudes of people rioted and looted, causing more than $1 billion in damage.

The damage from riots and looting across the U.S. following the death of George Floyd is estimated to be the costliest in insurance history – between $1 billion and $2 billion. Insurance Information Institute (or Triple-I) compiles information from a company called Property Claim Services (PCS), which has tracked insurance claims related to civil disorder since 1950, and other databases.
Yet we have millions of people in the U.S. and major newspapers who will not call $1 billion in damages "rioting" or "looting." That is a repeated phenomenon these days on both the political right and political left: people making strong arguments by ignoring contradictory evidence.  This article focuses on denialism on the political left.  My topic is police violence and race. It's important that we gather the facts, whether it be the existence of riots and of police violence, especially violence toward African American people. Many people would rather not look at actual crime statistics, however, and this has led to an untethered and dysfunctional conversation regarding police violence. Sam Harris experienced harsh pushback (and also praise) when he released a podcast titled, "Can We Pull Back From the Brink?" His "sin" is that his podcast contained actual crime statistics:

Again, cops kill around 1000 people every year in the United States. About 25 percent are black. About 50 percent are white. The data on police homicide are all over the place. The federal government does not have a single repository for data of this kind. But they have been pretty carefully tracked by outside sources, like the Washington Post, for the last 5 years. These ratios appear stable over time. Again, many of these killings are justifiable, we’re talking about career criminals who are often armed and, in many cases, trying to kill the cops. Those aren’t the cases we’re worried about. We’re worried about the unjustifiable homicides.

Now, some people will think that these numbers still represent an outrageous injustice. After all, African Americans are only 13 percent of the population. So, at most, they should be 13 percent of the victims of police violence, not 25 percent. Any departure from the baseline population must be due to racism.

Ok. Well, that sounds plausible, but consider a few more facts:

Blacks are 13 percent of the population, but they commit at least 50 percent of the murders and other violent crimes. If you have 13 percent of the population responsible for 50 percent of the murders—and in some cities committing 2/3rds of all violent crime—what percent of police attention should it attract? I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure it’s not just 13 percent. Given that the overwhelming majority of their victims are black, I’m pretty sure that most black people wouldn’t set the dial at 13 percent either.

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Chloé Valdary’s Kind, Gentle and Honest Diversity Program

Are you tired of hearing about the bullying, divisiveness and unvarnished bigotry pushed by many players in the diversity, equity, and inclusion industry? Players like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi, who freely misrepresent the facts and statistics and hide behind abstruse terminology?

Are you frustrated that many so-called programs in the booming diversity industry completely fill the time of their sessions with preaching and refuse to leave any time for questions and criticisms from the audience? That is what I've noticed about two recent mandated continuing education diversity programs I attended (now required for all lawyers in Missouri).

I'm not claiming that all diversity programs are deficient. I don't know enough about all diversity programs. Based on many programs about which I am familiar, however (including programs like this), this is an industry that needs to be vigorously investigated for its numerous lapses in integrity. No doubt we live in a country that includes racists, but the extent to which these increasingly popular "diversity" programs solve the problem (rather than making things worse) is a troubling question.

Are you dismayed that today's social justice warriors and critical race theorists have abandoned and ridiculed Martin Luther King's dream for a color blind society? So am I, and many "diversity" programs also ridicule MLK's dream. I've learned of several programs that explicitly segregate the participants by skin color. Here is a recent instance, the Brentwood School in Los Angeles:

And especially if you have had your fill of the types of "diversity" programs exposed by Christopher Rufo, you'll find this article in The Atlantic to be a breath of fresh air: "Can Chloé Valdary Sell Skeptics on DEI? Valdary’s Theory of Enchantment elicits unusual openness, trust, and engagement from ideologically diverse observers." Here is an excerpt:

Chloé Valdary is the founder of Theory of Enchantment, a diversity and resilience training company that the 27-year-old African American entrepreneur runs from Downtown Brooklyn. Its website lists clients including TikTok, WeWork, the Federal Aviation Administration, and Greenwich High School, and asks potential customers a loaded question: “Looking for an antiracism program that actually fights bigotry instead of spreading it?” . . .

Three principles guide all of the coursework [Chloé Valdary's] company offers:

    • Treat people like human beings, not political abstractions.
    • Criticize to uplift and empower, never to tear down, never to destroy.
    • Root everything you do in love and compassion.

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Coleman Hughes Speaks in Favor of Color Blindness

Excellent discussion by Coleman Hughes.  The introduction ends at Minute 2:25.  Here's the key take-away (4:25):

"The point isn't to avoid noticing race, which is impossible. The point is to notice race and then disregard it as a reason to treat people differently and as a category on which to base public policy."

I'll conclude with a few more excerpts from the video:

Another source of confusion that I try to avoid and will avoid in this talk is the misleading word post-racial. The “post” in post-racial suggests that there are two separate eras: a racial era characterized by the presence of racism and a post-racial era characterized by its absence, and the only question is which era we are currently living in, because colorblindness in this framework would only make sense during the second racism-free era.

Many critics of colorblindness have dismissed it on the grounds that we're not there yet which is to say we have not yet eliminated racial prejudice and they're right about that. Racism still exists. Racial prejudice still exists and probably will always exist, to some extent. But they frame the issue upside down. Colorblindness is not a synonym for the absence of racism. I's an ideology created to fight racism.

--

It would appear that virtually everyone has unanimously rejected color blindness as a backwards value, an old-fashioned out-of-date way of maintaining the white supremacist status quo. Yet even as it has become virtually taboo among elites colorblind policies continue to dominate in the court of public opinion especially on the issues of hiring and college admissions. In 2019, the pew research center asked people whether employers should only take a person's qualifications into account even if it results in less racial diversity and 74 percent of Americans agreed that agreed with that statement. Not only did a majority of Americans as a whole agree with this statement of colorblind hiring even at the expense of diversity, a majority of each individual racial group, whites, Blacks and Hispanics, also agreed with this message. Roughly the same percentage agreed that colleges should not consider race in admissions.

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The extent of the attacks on color blindness is sometimes surprising. For example, the best-selling author Ibram X. Kendi in his latest book, “How to be an Anti-Racist,” says “the most threatening racist movement is not the alt-right's unlikely drive for a white ethnostate but the regular Americans’ drive for a race neutral one.” So yeah, to say that colorblindness is wrong-headed is one thing. To say it is worse than the alt-right is quite another. It's impossible to understand the hatred directed at colorblindness without first understanding critical race theory this was an intellectual movement that originated at Harvard Law School in the 1980s.

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[Min 41]

If you take a Martin Luther King quote and you just say it verbatim you may get cancelled if you're white, even if you're Black, frankly. The strange thing about Dr King is we all venerate him--nobody ever speaks ill of him--but also he's basically ignored. He's in this uncanny valley where he is not exactly canceled but he's also not listened to, which is a strange place to be in. It speaks to the moral authority and credibility that we feel his message has. The awkwardness of acknowledging that, the main thrust of anti-racist activism, is exactly the opposite of what he stood for. That's a very awkward thing for the anti-racist movement to acknowledge, because they would lose some moral credibility if they outright said what is true, which is that we reject Dr King's goal. That's the truth but that can't be said out loud.

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[Min 44]

I've read hundreds of pages of Martin Luther King’s speeches and writings and virtually every three or four pages there is something that if said today you would be cancelled for. That's just the truth. It’'s trivially easy to find 20 Martin Luther King quotes expressing the colorblind ethic in the simplest terms and very difficult to find any quotes of him expressing that race is a crucial aspect of your identity to dwell upon and affirm.

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Bullying Wokesters at UIC John Marshall Law School Pretend that they Don’t Understand the Difference Between Using an Offensive Word and Merely Mentioning it.

Woke bullies have reached ever new levels of intolerance and decency.  John McWhorter explains in this tweet:

You need to read the above tweet carefully. Professor Kilborn was unfairly attacked by the 250 students who signed a petition requiring many dramatic actions, including a demand that "Professor Kilborn should immediately step down as the chair of the academic affairs committee and from all other committee appointments he holds." What was Professor Kilborn's crime? As part of a law school exam, he used only the sanitized version of the offensive word, exactly this: "N*****". This is the reason he was attacked by a mob of hypersensitive students.  The following comment to McWhorter's tweet was thus spot on:

After Professor Kilborn was unfairly attacked by the students, he was left twisting in the wind by the University of Illinois - Chicago (UIC) administration, which issued the following statement:

The Law School recognizes the impact of this issue. Before winter break, Dean Dickerson apologized to the students who expressed hurt and distress over the examination question. The Law School acknowledges that the racial and gender references on the examination were deeply offensive. Faculty should avoid language that could cause hurt and distress to students. Those with tenure and academic freedom should always remember their position of power in our system of legal education.

This pathetic defense of its own professor and other details regarding this incident can be found at Above the Law.  Here's an excerpt:

The petition is a call to action for “Insensitive and Racist Content” on the exam, and when I initially read the petition, my impression was that the professor had used the full slur on the exam. (And I bet a lot of other people that read — and potentially signed — the petition thought that too.) But that petition does not “summarize[]” the exam as it purports to do — it provides a direct quote. By that I mean the exam did not use the full n-word (or the b-word for that matter), opting instead for the euphemism. Which is… the exact sort of adaptation and awareness of potentially traumatic racial issues that folks have historically asked for when professors claim the right to drop the full n-word just because it’s an academic setting.

Will any lessons be learned from this incident?  We shall see . . .

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Alan Sokal Bemoans the Damage Wrought by the Woke Edition of Post-Modernism

Alan Sokal knows a thing or two about bullshit. He single-handedly made a mockery of Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. His 1996 article,

"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," was published in the journal's spring/summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in the magazine Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax.

The reemergence of post-modernism, now in the form of Woke culture concerns Sokal in a big way, as he writes in ARC:

What postmodernist relativism has wrought is, rather, something more insidious: by devaluing the concept of objective truth, it has undermined our own ability to combat objective untruths—to develop herd immunity to a pandemic of viral disinformation, as one writer eloquently put it. Now the genie is out of the bottle, and I honestly don't know how to put it back in.

Continue ReadingAlan Sokal Bemoans the Damage Wrought by the Woke Edition of Post-Modernism