Part 11 – The Path of Least Resistance to Racism

A Critique of Kendi, DiAngelo, Hannah Jones, and Critical Race Theory

In this essay, I’ll explore how the false assumption that all disparities among people grouped by race are caused by racism has come to affect both private business and public policing.

In 2021, the Nasdaq technology-centered stock exchange asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to let it require companies listed on the exchange to declare either that it has, or to explain why it doesn’t have, at least one director “who self-identifies as Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx, Asian, Native American or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, two or more races or ethnicities, or as LGBTQ+.”  This requirement, now approved by the SEC, would pressure businesses to practice racial identity politics as a condition for engaging in commerce.  It’s worth noting how such a requirement would be directly contrary to the identity-neutral values the great Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire praised in his famous description of the Royal Exchange in London.

When Voltaire visited that bustling commercial exchange in the early eighteenth century, he was struck by the traders’ ability to forget their ideological differences so they could peaceably exchange goods with each other to their mutual benefit.  As Voltaire wrote:

there you will find deputies from every nation assembled simply to serve mankind.  There, the Jew, the Mohammedan, and the Christian negotiate with one another as if they were all of the same religion, and the only heretics are those who declare bankruptcy.

Voltaire celebrated businesspeople’s willingness to set aside their religious ideologies for everyone’s mutual gain.  If differing views on the fundamental meaning of the universe could be overcome in the early 1700’s -- after centuries of religiously-motivated wars – one would have hoped today’s businesses could overcome the preoccupation with differing skin colors that is so dominant in academia and other elite circles today.  Yet modern corporations have increasingly abandoned their Enlightenment roots and engaged openly in the most divisive forms of identity politics.  The Coca-Cola Company, for example, admitted its official diversity training materials included instructions for white people to “try to be less white.”

Why do some corporations seem to fall so easily into the identity politics of the pre-Enlightenment past?  In a recent interview, Andrew Sullivan was asked why some American corporations are adopting the “woke” rhetoric of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo.  He responded:

Because the elites kind of have a Martin Luther King, Jr. envy.  Every generation wants to have that moral quality, that sense that they are shifting the arc of history in a better way, even though we’ve generally done about as much as we possibly can to do that, in terms of within the possibilities of a liberal system.  So there’s that: the need to feel worthy and the need to feel that you’re doing things.

If liberals protest more than conservatives, and companies want to avoid protests and petition campaigns, they will simply tend to accede to the demands of those protesters, whether or not they represent anything near a majority view on any given issue.

The tendency of institutions to accede to the demands of the most vocal protesters, rather than the views of most people, doesn’t just lead to woke rhetoric on the part of corporations.  It results in even more violence and death in the black community.  Ibram X. Kendi has joined others in promoting the false narrative that police forces are systemically racists and should be defunded.  Kendi has stated “When it comes to defunding the police, many Americans have historically supported inflated police budgets on the premise that it’s police who are able to bring down crime levels.  But there’s no data that supports that.”  The breathtakingly absolutist claim that “no data supports” the proposition that police bring down crime levels seems to be another instance in which false moral clarity (the trick coin that always comes up racism) trumps empirical observations.  The following are quotes from just some of the studies that show that when more police officers are on the beat, less crime follows (including crimes in which blacks are disproportionate victims):

“As of 2010, the [implied Wald] estimate is that one additional sworn officer reduces victimization costs by $310,000.”

“Combining these estimates with the social welfare approach we outline suggests that increases in police in medium to large U.S. cities in recent years would have substantially improved social welfare. We estimate that as of 2010 in our study cities, a dollar invested in policing yields a social return of $1.63.”

“I find that an increase in police presence significantly reduces crime on the margin, with elasticities of −1.28 for violent crime and −0.73 for property crime. … [T]his study demonstrates that police hiring substantially reduces serious crime.” (In economics, elasticity is the measurement of the percentage change of one economic variable in response to a change in another.)

“This paper estimates the impact of police presence on crime using a unique database that tracks the exact location of Dallas Police Department patrol cars throughout 2009 … I find that a 10 percent decrease in police presence at that location results in a 7 percent increase in crime. This result sheds light on the black box of policing and crime and suggests that routine changes in police patrol can significantly impact criminal behavior.”

As summarized at Vox:

Solid data suggests that even if you take a realistic view of the police, spending money to hire more police officers — an idea espoused by both Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — is a sound approach to the multifaceted problem of criminal justice. More police officers, in particular, doesn’t need to mean more arrests and more incarceration.  More beat cops walking the streets seems to deter crime and reduce the need to arrest anyone.

Blacks are the disproportionate victims of crimes, including homicides, and when a police presence recedes following politicized, racially-charged criticism, blacks suffer.  Harvard social scientist Roland Fryer has recently found that when police departments are investigated by the federal government following incidents of the excessive use of force by a police officer that happen to go “viral” on the internet, those police departments reduce their interaction with their communities, such that homicides are allowed to go up in those communities, costing nearly 1,000 (mostly black) lives over a 24 month period in the studied cities alone.  And as Heather MacDonald reports, after the 2020 riots protesting the death of George Floyd, “The year 2020 likely saw the largest percentage increase in homicides in American history. Murder was up nearly 37% in a sample of 57 large and medium-size cities. Based on preliminary estimates, at least 2,000 more Americans, most of them black, were killed in 2020 than in 2019.”

The pullback on policing in areas that were the site of Black Lives Matter protests (which often promote the methods of medieval witch hunts), and the Justice Department investigations that follow them, are leading to medieval-era murder rates.  As reported in the Washington Post in 2016:

Historians have managed to piece together surprisingly detailed estimates of murder rates in European countries going as far back as the Middle Ages. They’re able to do this by looking at things like court records and coroners reports, which some European cities have maintained for centuries … The murder rate in Los Angeles in 2015 is similar to England’s murder rate in the time of Shakespeare. Living in Chicago today is similar to living in Italy in 1700, murder-wise.  Washington's murder rate last year was higher than the murder rate in England in the time of Chaucer.  Baltimore had the highest murder rate of any major U.S. city last year, at 55 homicides per 100,000. That’s about the same as the murder rate in Dante’s Italy.

In just the last few years, the murder rates in American urban areas subject to protests in the name of “racial equity” have gotten even worse.  As Vox reports:

From 2014 to 2019, [researcher Travis] Campbell tracked more than 1,600 Black Lives Matter protests across the country, largely in bigger cities, with nearly 350,000 protesters. His main finding is a 15 to 20 percent reduction in lethal use of force by police officers — roughly 300 fewer police homicides — in census places that saw BLM [Black Lives Matter] protests.    Campbell’s research also indicates that these protests are associated with a 10 percent increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests.  That means from 2014 to 2019, there were somewhere between 1,000 and 6,000 more homicides than would have been expected if places with protests were on the same trend as places that did not have protests. Campbell’s research does not include the effects of last summer’s historic wave of protests because researchers do not yet have the relevant data.

And the New York Times reports on September, 2021 that “The United States in 2020 experienced the biggest rise in murder since the start of national record-keeping in 1960, according to data gathered by the F.B.I. for its annual report on crime.”

This increase in murder rates disproportionately harms blacks, as the black-on-black crime rate is especially high.  As Eugene Volokh writes:

As best we can tell, blacks appear to commit violent crimes at a substantially higher rate per capita than do whites; there seems to be little aggregate disparity between the rate at which blacks commit violent crimes (especially when one focuses on crimes where the victims say they reported the crimes to the police) and the rate at which blacks are arrested for crimes; and the black-on-black crime rate is especially high … [T]he most reliable data, to my knowledge, is generally the National Crime Victimization Survey, and the U.S. Justice Department Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that are based on that survey … Blacks, which here means non-Hispanic blacks, were 12.5% of the U.S. population, and non-Hispanic whites were 60.4%. It thus appears from this data that the black per capita violent crime rate is roughly 2.3 to 2.8 times the rate for the country as a whole, while the white per capita violent crime rate is roughly 0.7 to 0.9 times the rate for the country as a whole.  It also appears that the arrest rates for violent crime are roughly comparable to the rates of offending, especially if one takes into account those offenses reported to the police (which is a choice of the victims, not of police departments).  And the great bulk of such violent crime is intraracial … When the race of the offender was known, 55.9 percent were Black or African American, 41.1 percent were White, and 3.0 percent were of other races … [B]lacks are disproportionately likely to be murder victims …

Homicide is the leading cause of death for black males under the age of 44.  And many of the perpetrators of those homicides continue to roam free for lack of policing.  As Conor Friedersdorf writes, “The absence of policing yields not a safe space where marginalized people thrive, but a nasty, brutish place where violent actors either push people around with impunity or are met with violence by someone who forces them to stop.”

Kendi’s false assumptions are now shared by many others, and protests based on those false assumptions yield tragic real-world results.

In the next and final essay in this series, I’ll explore how Kendi and DiAngelo’s false assumptions -- and their dismissal of individualism and other Enlightenment values to promote tribal instincts based on race – parallel themes of the eugenics movement during the Progressive Era.

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