Deracialize the Police

with John McWhorter and Randall Kennedy

We’re often told by a certain kind of left-leaning intellectual that the police are behind many of the problems black communities are experiencing today. True, the cops are more involved in the daily life of many urban black communities than is ideal. And also true, encounters occasionally go badly, with young black men ending up on the wrong end of a cop’s gun (though this happens less often than you might think). This has become a serious problem.

Still, the solution to this problem is not, as many would have it, to “defund the police.” Poor urban communities with high crime rates need the police more than any of us. While no one initiative will solve the problem of poor relations between black folks and the police, I believe there is a step we can take to improve matters: We can “deracialize the police” rather than defund them.

Here's what I mean: We need to stop thinking of every interaction that goes badly between a white cop and a black person as being “about” race.

It is the job of the police to stop crimes when they can and to arrest suspected criminals when they find them. Unfortunately, a disproportionate number of violent crimes are committed by black people, in black communities (mostly against other black people, by the way). So, it shouldn’t surprise us to see the police showing up in some poor black communities on a regular basis.

Now, why is there so much crime in some poor black communities? Especially when not all poor communities are crime-ridden? That is a complex, difficult question. But the answer can’t be simply, “Because the police are racist.” Policing isn’t, by itself, a solution. But neither is it, by itself, a cause. 

When black criminals harm people, they should be dealt with accordingly. But, and obviously, they don't represent others of their race when acting badly. Likewise, misbehaving white cops should be held accountable. But, when they misbehave they're not representing their race, either. Accordingly, white victims of crimes committed by blacks ought not to interpret their victimization mainly in racial terms, and neither should black victims of police misconduct by whites. 

As I see it, a "deracialized" discourse about crime, policing and punishment would be less volatile and more constructive. The sooner we take race out of the conversation, the sooner we’ll be able to see this fraught matter of police-citizen interactions more clearly.

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GLENN LOURY: You need to deracialize the discussion about policing and crime and criminal victimization and police violence. These are officers of the state acting on behalf of the preservation of public order who have awesome authority vis-a-vis citizens, sometimes some of whom are criminals who are breaking the law.

This becomes a very deep problem of social management and order maintenance. It's not an easy problem. It's a problem in human civilization, wherever you've looked at any point in time, certainly in the modern urbanized societies. It's going to be a problem in Northern Europe. It's going to be a problem in Latin America. It's going to be a problem, et cetera.

We don't have to racialize that discussion. And the reason we shouldn't do it is because the first two points that you made, police need to be regulated because sometimes they act in anti-black ways and there's a real crime problem, could be related to each other. Because the crime problem has a racial coloration, sorry to report. If you're a police officer in one of these cities, you have to consider the possibility that you're going to get killed. I mean, it may be that you exaggerate the likelihood of it, but certainly you're not imagining it, that there are gangbangers out there killing people. There are! There are contractors out there who are doing what they're doing and you have to operate in that environment. That's racialized.

Now, we could say, in the comfort of our Ivy league offices, that they shouldn't see race, they should disattend, they should not notice, they should have no prejudice, they should have no implicit bias, they should be perfect, they should be colorblind. But come on, that's unrealistic. And not only is it unrealistic to think they're not afraid of that young black kid when they smell reefer coming out of the front of the car, and they don't know whether there's a pistol under the seat, and they may be a little trigger happy, and it may lead them to make a mistake.

Not only that, but their communities of police officers on Staten Island and suburban Cleveland and suburban Chicago and St. Louis and whatnot who have their own sense of identity. You gonna write them out? They might vote for Donald Trump. They might be part of this racist army of retrograde people who are taking us toward fascism that you're talking about. They live on Staten Island. They are ethnic Irish or Italian or sometimes Jewish. They're working class whites, and they resent the George Floyd riots. They resent Ben Crump going around talking about open season on black people. They resent the buffoon Al Sharpton going around talking about America needs to get its knee off of the neck, as George Floyd is buried in a gold casket pulled by a caisson in a state funeral in Houston. They resent it. Now, are we going to write them out of the conversation simply as racist? Or are we going to realize that deracializing this whole fucking conversation and talking about Americans, American law-abiding citizens, American criminals, and American police officers is really the only way out?

RANDALL KENNEDY: Glenn, I agree with much of what you said. But it seems to me there's a contradiction in your statement. There was a lot of race talk in what you just said. And it seems to me that we're going to have to, in a sense, accept it all. On the one hand, we have to realize, it seems to me, that there is a race issue going on in the administration of justice. At the same time, we have to realize that race isn't everything. At the same time, we have to realize that crime is a problem. At the same time, we have to realize this point that you were making about communities of police. It seems to me that it's all there. And I think the intellectuals, the commentators have to embrace it all and try to speak in a way to get our public to understand the complexity of the situation we're in. Going down one avenue exclusively won't do.

JOHN MCWHORTER: So here's some complexity. And I'm asking this not as rhetoric, but as a question to you, Randy. You are reading the paper, probably Monday, and you hear about a carjacking, the usual story. You hear about the three-year-old girl who got killed in gunfire. And I'm sure all three of us have had this experience. You don't even need to wonder. The newspaper is trying to make it seem like it could just be anybody, but we know the people who did that are almost certainly black. When you hear about that carjacking, the person who did it was not named Ethan. Sometimes girls do it. They are not named Kaylee. And, you know, if you look a few days later, you find out that they published the names and you can see by their names, even though they're still trying not to let you know.

Now that's simply a fact. And you're talking about all the facts that need to be taken into consideration holistically, and that's definitely true, but it's a fact what I just said. What is the reason that the people who are doing that are not white, even on Staten Island? And that's not to say that some grimy things don't happen on Staten Island. However, not nearly as frequently. Those boys killing themselves over sneakers, none of them are named Tony. So why? Now, many people would say it's because of racism and frankly, they're kind of sloppy when they say it. You are never sloppy. What is the answer to that question?

RANDALL KENNEDY: I don't know. I'm not trying to be evasive. I do know that the social reality that you describe is, alas, reality. What is going on there? You know, I hope that there are other people who are engaged in study that can shed light on this, but I can't. It's outside of my ken. I study certain things. I can answer certain questions. This was one I can't.

I'm a social scientist, and I guess I don't have the luxury of ducking the question here. Let me just note what it’s not. It's not poverty. Because there are are poor communities where you don't see this behavior. It's not racism in any direct sense, because we're talking about the actions of individuals who have to be assumed to have the exercise of free will over their actions. I mean, they are responsible for their actions. If you're talking about the three-year-old getting shot on the porch sitting on his mother's lap because somebody was carelessly firing a pistol out of a window. I mean, to say that that was caused by racism requires a PhD in sociology. Most people are not going to get that.

RANDALL KENNEDY: Glenn, you said it's not poverty. It's not only poverty.

Okay. I will accept that amendment. I certainly don't mean to say that poverty is unrelated to the phenomena that we talk about. I just mean to say that the disparity by race, which was the burden of John's question. Why do you know that the name is not Kaylee or Tony? And how do we know that? And I'm saying that that disparity, if you will, of the incidence of the pathological behavior that we're calling into a question can't be accounted for in any direct or simplistic way by reference to poverty. Because as I say, there are a lot of poor communities where you don't see it happening.

It's hard to avoid the word culture here. I mean, it's hard not to think about how children are raised and what the values are that are instilled in them. It's hard also not to see sociological networks at work, where there are effects that come about because of the way people are interacting with each other that can't be reduced down to any individual character or whatever, but that are systemic effects. I mean, I think, for example, the fact that you may have a hard time getting witnesses to come forward to testify against assailants when they see something happen, making it very difficult to convict violent felons of the crimes that they've committed, making the threat of retaliation against the witness powerfully credible because the witness has to know that violent acts don't get punished, making the witness fearful to cooperate, which leads to the non-punishment of the violent acts. That's a systemic effect. You can't put the finger on any person when you're talking about that. That's a macro phenomenon.

So I think there are a lot of things that are like that. But I think that the narrative that we have, that these justice DAs that I was talking about all embrace, that the intellectuals who are in the Afro-American studies departments and who are winning the MacArthur Genius Awards and whatnot will put in their book, is that there's somehow a “Get Out of Moral Responsibility Free” card implicit in the evocation of racism. And I think that that's a terrible thing. It's a terrible thing not only for the public policy outcome, but it's a moral surrender.

And I'm just going to say this: The vicious murderers who are taking black lives in the thousands on the streets of American cities are despicable. Their behavior is absolutely contemptible. It should be possible to run a political campaign against them. The fact that they are vastly disproportionately black severely limits the willingness of responsible black leaders to condemn this pathology within our own community. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for how that sounded. I know how terrible it sounds, but that's precisely the point that I'm trying to underscore here.