Part 10 – Public Policy Through Black and White Colored Glasses
A Critique of Kendi, DiAngelo, Hannah Jones, and Critical Race Theory
In early America, many pointed out the dangers of a critical mass of people coming to believe witch conspiracies. As Adam Jortner relates in his Great Courses series American Monsters:
While the Constitutional Convention argued and debated America’s future government, a mob lynched a woman for witchcraft on the streets … In November, 1787, a writer known only as Old Whig remembered the lynching [and] he wondered, How far could the people be trusted to run a government if the people were out on the streets lynching women for witchcraft? An attack against a suspected witch was “an example to warn us how little we ought to trust the unrestrained discretion of human nature,” he wrote. It was a good reason, Old Whig warned, to demand a Bill of Rights be attached to the Constitution. Old Whig didn’t believe in the power of witchcraft one bit, but he did believe that people believed in witchcraft and he had seen a demagogue whip up a crowd to a killing fury over witchcraft. And, in a democracy, the crowd ruled. What kind of country would it be if beliefs in witchcraft, or ghosts, or monsters , ruled the public mind and the public elected people to root out imagined witches? Thomas Jefferson feared the spirit of 1776 would be lulled to sleep by artificial panics of “rawhead and bloody bones,’ an 18th Century nickname for the Boogeyman … Some people still have the notion that as time goes on, belief in the supernatural declines, [but] it’s not backed up by any real historical data.
Today, elected officials are being spurred to enact policies by many voters who have come to believe social media memes and popular books recounting false narratives of “systemic racism” and who are looking for witches that don’t exist. A 2017 analysis of survey data found that instances of discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and age, are very rare. The researchers concluded:
Using a representative sample of American respondents who reflect a variety of racial and ethnic groups, the current study examined perceived experiences of discrimination. Our results indicate that the majority of the sample reported either no experience with discrimination or that it had happened only rarely. Moreover, of those reporting having experienced discrimination, the majority suggested that unique and perhaps situationally specific factors other than race, gender, sexual orientation, and age were the cause(s) of discrimination.
Racism is not generally the cause of disparities between people grouped by race. Racism is a rare event, and risk should be assessed based not just on the harm feared, but on a reasonable understanding of the incidence of the harm. Kendi’s and DiAngelo’s false assumption that all disparities are caused by racism infinitely exaggerates the risk that anyone will be exposed to racism at any given moment. And as the mathematician A.F.M. Smith has written, “Any approach to scientific inference which seeks to legitimise an answer in response to complex uncertainty is, for me, a totalitarian parody of a would-be rational learning process.”
Another totalitarian parody of a fair investigative process, as discussed in previous essays, was the Malleus Maleficarum (usually translated as the Hammer of Witches), a treatise on witchcraft prosecution that also had a “heads I win, tails you lose” method about it, so determined were witch hunters to find witches even where they didn’t exist. The Malleus was widely published until around 1600. Jean Bodin, a law professor in Toulouse, France, and a student of the Malleus, wrote in 1580 that witches posed such a grave threat to society that the normal standards of proof had to be abandoned in order to guarantee their conviction. He wrote in his book On the Demon-Mania of Witches:
This is why one who is charged and accused of being a witch must never be simply let off and acquitted, unless the calumny of the accuser or informer is clearer than the sun. Since the proof of such wickedness is so hidden and so difficult, no one would ever be accused or punished out of a million witches if parties were governed, as in an ordinary trial, by a lack of proof.
Bodin’s fear of witches was so great, he abandoned proof to convict them.
Then in 1662, a seminal book was published called La logique, ou l’art de penser (“Logic, or the Art of Thinking”), which for the first time showed why fear of harm should be conditioned not just on the magnitude of the harm, but also on its probability. As Peter Bernstein describes in his book Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk:
Although its authorship was not revealed, the primary—but not the sole—author [of “Logic, or the Art of Thinking”] is believed to have been Antoine Arnauld … The book was immediately translated into other languages throughout Europe and was still in use as a textbook in the nineteenth century. The last part of the book contains four chapters on probability that cover the process of developing a hypothesis from a limited set of facts; today, this process is called statistical inference … [Arnauld writes that] the probability of being struck by lightning is tiny but “many people ... are excessively terrified when they hear thunder.” Then he makes a critically important statement: “Fear of harm ought to be proportional not merely to the gravity of the harm, but also to the probability of the event.” Here is another major innovation: the idea that both gravity and probability should influence a decision.
That lesson from 1662 has been lost on too many contemporary legislators, who see racism everywhere, regardless of proof, just as it was lost on the inquisitors of medieval times, who saw witches everywhere, regardless of proof, and repeatedly condemned the innocent. In 1787, Old Whig had seen a demagogue whip up a crowd to a killing fury over witchcraft. And today, we have the following examples of public officials’ condemning innocent people to punishment based on suspicion of their complicity in imagined “systemic racism.”
A jaw-dropping display of Kendi and DiAngelo’s racist ideology in application, premised on “mitigating health inequities,” was revealed during a November, 2020, meeting of the Center for Disease Control’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which initially adopted a distribution plan for the COVID-19 vaccines based not on risk of death, but on race.
A slide presentation made at the meeting states explicitly, on Slides 20-21, that “Initially vaccinating age ≥65 in Phase 1b averts approximately [0.5 to 6.5%, depending on the modeling discussed on each slide] more deaths, compared to targeting high-risk adults or essential workers.” That meant that vaccinating those 65 and older was predicted to save up to 6 percent more lives compared to an alternative plan that prioritized essential workers. Yet the presenter then proceeded to recommend on Slides 31-34 that non-healthcare “essential workers” be given the vaccine first, simply because “[r]acial and ethnic minority groups [are] disproportionately represented in many essential industries,” and “[r]acial and ethnic minority groups [are] under-represented among adults >65.” The person making the slide presentation states at the 17:07 mark of the video that “The workgroup felt early vaccination of adults 65 and older was strongly supported by maximizing benefits and minimizing harms,” but then adds “There were concerns that the racial and ethnic groups that have been disproportionately affected by COVID so far [by infection rate, not mortality rate] are underrepresented in this group.” That fact alone led the Advisory Committee to unanimously approve a vaccine distribution plan that would explicitly cost more lives (including the lives of elderly racial and ethnic minorities) in order to vaccinate a greater percentage of working-age racial and ethnic minorities who don’t incur anywhere near the same high risk of death from COVID-19 as do older people. This policy was applauded, not condemned, by Joe Biden’s COVID-19 Advisory Board. As reported in the Washington Post:
President-elect Joe Biden’s covid-19 advisory board supports the phases set forth by the advisory group, said one of its co-chairs, Marcella Nunez-Smith, an associate professor at the Yale School of Medicine. She … said she was “quite excited by their grounding in inequity,” referring to the importance given to factors such as housing and minority status in decisions about prioritization.
This racist policy pursued at the conscious expense of elderly lives was only reversed after public outcry.
Another example is contained in the American Rescue Plan federal law, enacted in 2021, which established a U.S. Department of Agriculture debt relief program in Section 1005(a)(2), under which Congress appropriated “such sums as may be necessary to pay for the cost of loan modifications and payments to ‘socially disadvantaged’ farmers and ranchers.” Under this federal law, any loans issued by the Department of Agriculture are eligible for forgiveness, plus another 20%, as long as the farmer or rancher who received the loan is “socially disadvantaged,” a term that incorporates the definition in title 7, Section 2279(a) of the United States Code, which defines a socially disadvantaged farmer or rancher as one from a “socially disadvantaged group,” which is defined as “a group whose members have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice because of their identity as members of a group without regard to their individual qualities.” Farmers and ranchers who are white cannot have their debt canceled, regardless of their particular situation and the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on their business. Under the federal program. beneficiaries simply have to sign a letter mailed to them from the Farm Service Agency verifying the amount of their debt and their race or ethnicity, and they don’t have to even allege, let alone prove, that they suffered any previous racial discrimination. (This program was shown to be so flagrantly unconstitutional that, after it was successfully challenged in court, the Biden Administration’s own Justice Department stopped defending it.)
Yet another example is the the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, also enacted by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and administered by the Small Business Administration. This program explicitly discriminates based on race by flatly banning white people from consideration for federal relief during the program’s first 21 days (after which all the money in the fund ran out). During that time, the federal law required the Small Business Administration to “take such steps as necessary” to prioritize eligible restaurants that are at least 51% owned and controlled by those who are “socially and economically disadvantaged,” (along with women and veterans) which is defined, under title 15, Section 637(a)(5) of the United States Code and title 13 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Section 124.103(a) and (b)(1), as including only black Americans and other racial minorities. (Ironically, the plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging this law as racially discriminatory, Antonio Vitolo, is married to a Hispanic woman. They both owned 50% of the restaurant. Because his wife owned only 50% of the restaurant, and not 51%, she wasn’t eligible for the racial benefit, and so neither one of this biracial couple was allowed to take advantage of the relief program.)
And keep in mind that these programs are being administered under President Biden’s head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, Kristen Clarke, who, while in college at Harvard, wrote the following in the Harvard newspaper: “use the following theories and observations to assist you in your search for truth regarding the genetic differences between Blacks and whites … Melanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities.”
Perhaps offering as preview of more things to come, the head of personnel of the U.S. Navy recently stated he preferred using photos of candidates for promotion so their skin color could be considered as part of the promotion process:
Earlier this month the Navy’s chief of personnel made a revealing remark that received little public attention. “I think we should consider reinstating photos in selection boards,” Vice Adm. John Nowell Jr. said at a conference. Officers up for promotion used to submit a photo as part of the review. A couple of years ago the services eliminated the photo requirement, aiming to remove any bias. Adm. Nowell suggested the result wasn’t what the Navy hoped for. “We look at, for instance, the one-star board over the last five years, and we can show you where, as you look at diversity, it went down with photos removed.” In case that wasn’t clear, he continued: “We’re very clear with our language to boards that we want them to consider diversity across all areas. . . . I think having a clear picture just makes it easier.”
In 2023, under the Biden Administration, during a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) webinar on how to focus on minority communities in a disaster, an Administration official stated (at the 36:35 minute mark) “The shift we’re seeing right now is a shift in emergency services from utilitarian principles — where everything is designed for the greatest good for the greatest amount of people — to disaster equity.”
And all this follows President Biden’s issuance, on his first day in office, of a facially absurd memorandum to executive branch regulators instructing them to “account” for regulatory benefits that are “impossible to quantify” if done to pursue the goals of “racial justice” and “equity.” How can one “account” for something that’s “impossible to quantify”? Perhaps those who drafted the memorandum took to heart Jean Bodin’s warning (mentioned earlier) that “no one would ever be accused or punished out of a million witches if parties were governed, as in an ordinary trial, by a lack of proof.”
In any case, when the costs and benefits of certain “equity” plans are quantified, they show just how internally contradictory they are, and doomed to fail. For example, the 2020 Democratic Party Platform states that “Unemployment rates for people of color are persistently higher than the national average, which is why Democrats support making racial equity part of the mandate of the Federal Reserve.” But the complexity of how individual decisions translate to aggregate economic outcomes among racial groups makes that Democratic Party Platform goal, racist as it is, impossible to achieve in any case. A staff report from the New York Federal Reserve, titled “Monetary Policy and Racial Inequality,” examined the asset portfolios of black and white Americans and modeled the effect of Federal Reserve interest rate cuts on wealth and labor-market outcomes by race. If one looks only at gaps in the labor market among racial groups, the paper finds that “The black unemployment rate falls by about 0.2 percentage points more than the white unemployment rate.” Yet when one looks at the results among wealth distribution caused by the very same rate cuts, the researchers find that:
Our core finding is that an accommodative monetary policy shock leads to larger employment gains for black households, but also to larger wealth gains for white households. More precisely, the black unemployment rate falls by about 0.2 percentage points more than the white unemployment rate after an unexpected accommodative 100bp [basis point] interest rate shock. This translates into higher earnings for the mean black household relative to the mean white household of $97 annually. But the same shock also pushes up stock prices by about 5 percent, and house prices by 2 percent, while lowering bond yields on corporate and government debt.
The authors continue: “if stock prices rise by 10 percent, capital gains for white households are over 40 percent of annual income. For black households, the corresponding number is less than 10 percent. These results mean that any capital gains from asset price changes accrue disproportionately to white households.” The bottom line from this example is that it’s impossible to achieve “racial equity” outcomes along one dimension without worsening it along another dimension.
Further, it’s worth noting that there are wide earnings gaps within all racial groups, including the black community. In 1970, the 90th percentile of black households earned 9 times as much as the 10th percentile, and it has grown since then. By 2016, the Pew Research Center found that the 90th percentile of Black households now earned nearly 10 times as much as the 10th percentile. If all disparities are based on racism, as Kendi and DiAngelo claim, then how to explain growing earnings differences within the black community itself?
These variations in earnings within the black community create additional contradictions for those who would use race as a criterion for granting benefits. As William Julius Wilson points out in his book The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, Second Edition:
[T]he competitive resources developed by the advantaged minority members—resources that flow directly from the family stability, schooling, income, and peer groups that their parents have been able to provide—result in their benefiting disproportionately from policies that promote the rights of minority individuals by removing artificial barriers to valued positions. Nevertheless, since 1970, government policy has tended to focus on formal programs designed and created both to prevent discrimination and to ensure that minorities are sufficiently represented in certain positions. This has resulted in a shift from the simple formal investigation and adjudication of complaints of racial discrimination to government-mandated affirmative action programs to increase minority representation in public programs, employment, and education. However, if minority members from the most advantaged families profit disproportionately from policies based on the principle of equality of individual opportunity, they also reap disproportionate benefits from policies of affirmative action based solely on their group membership. This is because advantaged minority members are likely to be disproportionately represented among those of their racial group most qualified for valued positions, such as college admissions, higher paying jobs, and promotions. Thus, if policies of preferential treatment for such positions are developed in terms of racial group membership rather than the real disadvantages suffered by individuals, then these policies will further improve the opportunities of the advantaged without necessarily addressing the problems of the truly disadvantaged such as the ghetto underclass. The problems of the truly disadvantaged may require nonracial solutions such as full employment, balanced economic growth, and manpower training and education (tied to—not isolated from—these two economic conditions).
Ibram X. Kendi’s policy of distributing positions to members of different races in proportion to racial population statistics suffers from the very same criticism: under Kendi’s proposed policy, the best-off among a particular racial group (who will be generally distinguished by two-parent families, better education, and greater incomes, among other things) will be the beneficiaries of that policy, and the least well-off among the same racial group will be left out. Much better, it seems, to promote policies that help all of those who are least-well off, regardless of race.
And beyond the “equity” contradictions of Kendi’s program at the policy level, there are contradictions on the personal level. As a wife in an inter-racial marriage wrote in Newsweek:
I am from China and my husband is American … I learned that some activists claim all white people are oppressors, while people of other racial groups are oppressed victims. I learned that they think that a racial power dynamic exists in every interaction between white and nonwhite people, and thus oppression is present in every activity of life. Acknowledging and fighting against white people's oppressive role, I learned, is essential for “anti-racism.” And refusing to acknowledge it is “White Fragility.” As the people around me became more deeply mired in this worldview, I wondered, where does interracial marriage belong in these narratives? Why would oppressed persons want to marry oppressors? And if these activists are right, wouldn’t we have to conclude that no authentic relationship could exist between white and nonwhite people? … As someone who is deeply in love with a white person, I strongly disagree with this “oppressor/victim” narrative. It erases my love for my husband. It erases my humanity. This is why I believe that to be truly anti-racist, we must uphold common humanity first.
In the next essay, I’ll explore some of the ramifications of the adoption of Kendi’s and DiAngelo’s false assumptions by those who govern private businesses and public police forces.
Links to all essays in this series: Part1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9; Part 10; Part 11; Part 12
Collected essays in this series
Short video documentary on problems with popular critical race theory texts
Harvard Law School flashback