The Human Condition, Not the Race Condition

with John McWhorter

This clip from my conversation with John McWhorter is a difficult one. We respond to Jakon Joi, a reader whose father, was murdered by a young black man, and it’s possible there was a racial motivation for the crime. He’s searching for answers. He wants to know what everyone in his position wants to know: how could this have happened, how should he feel, and what can he do about it?

On the one hand, however heinous the crime—and the crime Jakon describes is that—a single incident cannot show us much about the larger social, economic, political, and cultural dynamics that led one young black man to gun down one older white man for no apparent reason. We can point, as Jakon does, to the post-2020 racialization of politics and to conditions like COVID restrictions and policies, but we can't possibly know from the details Jakon provides whether any of these elements was the determining factor in the crime.

At the same time, we cannot ignore those factors, just as we cannot ignore the deep pain that Jakon and many others in similar circumstances are suffering. In any event, we should resist the temptation to adopt simplistic racial narratives—the very narratives that, Jakon suspects, might have led to the crime in the first place. We should want to avoid a situation where whites place undue emphasis on the race of black criminal offenders (who are a small number among all blacks). Likewise, blacks should avoid placing undue emphasis on the race of the small number of white police officers who violate the rights of blacks. Otherwise we’ll doom ourselves to replay the nightmare of 2020 again and again. We must break out of that cycle.

Of course, rewriting our narratives about race, criminality, and policing will not address all of our problems. But it is necessary. And it must happen, first and foremost, at the level of the individual. I find it moving and, in a way, heartening that, even after suffering this awful tragedy, Jakon seeks to preserve his own humanity, to resist bitterness and vengefulness, and to do what he can to heal and move forward. I would say to everyone what I say to him: there are others going through what you’re going through, who feel what you feel, even if they don’t look like you. Find them. Talk with them. Look them in the eye. That’s not easy, but the alternative is that we find ourselves, as individuals and a society, right back where we started.

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GLENN LOURY: It's going to take me a little bit of time to read the question because it goes into some background, but it's quite moving, and I think it behooves us to consider it. So with your forbearance, I'm going to read the question.

My (white) dad bought a house in a working-class neighborhood in the south 40 years ago. Though we only lived there for a short period, choosing as many did in the face of skyrocketing crime rates to move to a “white flight” suburb, my dad kept it as a rental property for the rest of his life. Over the years, the composition of the neighborhood evolved from white working class to black working class to a blighted area. Nevertheless, Dad stuck around. Although he always treated his renters fairly, they did not always afford him the same courtesy. As the neighborhood deteriorated, the renters became more delinquent, paying later and leaving the house in worse disrepair when they departed. When the house was vacant, all manner of mischief ensued. One neighbor ran water hoses from the tap on the back of the property to use water on my dad’s dime. There were break-ins and vandalism.

Still Dad persisted, visiting frequently to repair damage and ready the house for the next tenants. Oftentimes when making repairs, he would try to mentor the young boys roaming the streets, offering them some spending money to help him rake leaves or carry supplies in from the truck. He was not a slumlord—the house was by far the best maintained on the street. The sensible members of that community loved and valued my dad, and he loved them in return. He seemed at times to be fighting a losing battle to rehabilitate the neighborhood we had abandoned.

Things reached a nadir during COVID, with the double-whammy of government policies that allowed his renters to quit paying rent altogether while depriving him of any legal recourse coupled with a new crime wave ushered in by the retreat of the police amid the BLM social movement. The homicide rate in that city, which had been steady for a decade, doubled from 2020 to 2022. At its height in 2022, my dad was senselessly murdered—shot in the chest and then the head—in the driveway of that house by an 18-year-old kid from the neighborhood.

The assailant was black, and as there was no identifiable motive, I have been tempted to conclude that my dad was targeted because of his race. My question for you is this—what would justice mean to you in my shoes? I sincerely loved my father and am devastated by what has happened here. But I also cannot seem to shake the feeling that this kid was driven mad by the American zeitgeist of 2022. The media environment in the United States has become so polluted that it is not hard to imagine how a young black kid at that moment in history may have seen my dad as his mortal enemy. I know that sending a poor kid to prison for 40 years will not bring my dad back or make me feel any better about the situation, but is it what is right for society?

If I am allowed a bonus question, as I struggle to make sense of what this situation means for me, do you have any advice on how I could help contribute to some sort of reconciliation in communities such as the one I described? I am desperate to make some lemonade out of these lemons but wary of following in my dad’s footsteps by embarking on my own quixotic quest.

Should you choose to address my question, I sincerely thank you in advance for your time (and for all that you both do—your podcast has been an invaluable resource to me as I have tried to educate myself over the past two years).

That from Jakon Joi. And I think I speak for John in saying that we deeply regret your loss and offer our condolences. Poignant, provocative, disturbing, moving kinds of issues that he brings up. Hard to know how to respond to that, John, but I offer you this opportunity.

JOHN MCWHORTER: That is a senseless tragedy. I'm really ... my condolences are sincere. Of course, would that have happened in 2018 as opposed to 2022? I'm not sure we can say. But certainly a certain kind of sentiment was whipped up in that spring of 2020.

And to the extent that we are beyond that era now—that was much less the case in 2022—what can you do about that kind of sentiment? That's really hard. You're talking about people who are living under relatively isolated circumstances, who are being whipped up by that sentiment, by social media, [from] which it's impossible to take any human view.

And the question is what you do about that tribal sense of hostility against the white man. How do you fix it? To tell you the truth, Jakon, I think that really there's a gradual kind of conversation that has to be had, a nationwide kind of dialogue. Not a deliberate one, but the kind of thing that Glenn and I try to foster, hoping that there are people who are listening, hoping people can realize that to not have that reflexive anti-white view, whether it's a poor person, like that murderer, or an educated person, that's not the only sensible and moral way to think as a black person. Frankly there's an extent to which all of us are being told to engage in a kind of play-acting which can get out of hand and make it so that somebody feels comfortable shooting a white person for no real reason. But these things are hard because the change only happens slowly.

And there's an extent to which—this isn't a word I usually use—but segregation, whether it's self-willed or imposed by society, ends up creating those sorts of things. People understanding one another better by spending more time together helps.

But no, that was a horrible thing. And you're right, you're not going to be able to fix it by rehabilitating some other house in that neighborhood. It's not the kind of thing that yields to single individuals' actions. It's about cultural mood. And how you change cultural mood is to me, always fascinating. This cultural mood determines so much that the economy does not.

It interests me. I'm not sure I have the answers. What do you think?

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He asked, in the first instance, what is justice for him? He acknowledges that sending a teenager—assuming it was a teenager—to prison for 40 years—assuming a person was caught, convicted, and sentenced for a long time in prison—doesn't bring his father back. And it doesn't. By the way, putting him to death, if the death penalty were applicable and were applied in this case, also wouldn't bring his father back. Punishing the criminal can't be the sum, substance, and totality of justice.

He asks, what can I do that's on a positive note, that's constructive? I don't want to be my dad and go back and try to rehabilitate houses in a neighborhood which is dangerous and falling apart. That seems like a fool's errand. But I want to be a part of the solution and not a part of the problem, to which I almost want to say, you're not the only person who is losing family members to gun violence. Many of the residents of that community are also losing family members to gun violence.

Find them, commiserate, try to bond and be mutually supportive. There's a church basement somewhere in that neighborhood where people are gathering around. And if you're not a Christian then find a mosque, and if you're not a Muslim then find a temple. And if it's not that, then let it be a union hall or a community center where people are trying to support each other and share about their loss and grow and get to know what others are dealing with and try to make some real connections with real people who are grappling with this.

I'm put in mind of the program that Bob Woodson runs at the Woodson Center in Washington, DC. This is a community activist guy who's got grassroots affiliates all around the country. They call it Voices of Black Mothers United, and it's an effort of mothers who have lost children to gun violence in urban centers. to support one another. And they're not just black, although they say Voices of Black Mothers United, and they're not just mothers. They are survivors trying to support one another. That's one thing that I think of.

Another thought that I have is he doesn't know if he was killed because he was white or not. No. Often, you don't know. It's not a crazy speculation that race had something to do with it, but often you don't know. And I almost want to say to Jakon Joi, welcome to the club. This is something that black people deal with a lot. Things happen and you don't know whether it happened because you were black or not, and you're never gonna absolutely know. But yes, the climate of rhetoric, the anti-white aspect of the activism that underlay the Black Lives Matter movement surely did poison the well.

And yeah, the anti-police movement. This has been demonstrated. Guys like Roland Fryer, the statistical studies of the impact of pattern and practice investigations of police departments in cities around the country, which were triggered by public fury when a black kid was killed by a white cop showed that in those cities, the post-investigation trends and violent crime were deleterious: more violent crime than otherwise would have been expected in those cities but for those pattern and practice investigations.

[Fryer] explains this by saying, police, when they come under scrutiny which they think is unfair, will react often by being less engaged in law enforcement activities—not following somebody down a blind alley, not responding to distress calls, gunshots heard, or whatever it might be. The result of the police withdrawing from the intensity of their supervision is to allow for a greater degree of crime than otherwise would have taken place. There's evidence to that effect, and there's reason to think that the increase in crime in the city that you talk about, which you didn't name, had something to do with police reactions to the anti-police attitudes fostered by the Black Lives Matter movement. You could say that. A person could say that, yeah. So I wanted to credit that.

Finally, I just repeat something I've been saying for a long time. We need to deracialize the discussion about crime, policing, and violence in the country, because it's very unhealthy for us to have an overt condemnation of white criminality—police out of line, too abusive and violent in their conduct in interacting with black men. On the one hand, an overt conversation about that racial dimension, but not having an overt conversation about something that everybody else can see, which is that blacks are vastly overrepresented amongst those who are committing violent criminal offenses.

Just look at the homicide statistics. Blacks are one in eight of the population and one in two of the homicide perpetrators. You live in a big city and you know who to be afraid of. You pick up the newspaper, turn on the television, you can see it. Now, is the blackness of these relatively few offenders—they're relatively few compared to the black population. They do not characterize the black population in this country. But it's true that they are overrepresented amongst those bad actors, blacks are.

Is that something we want to dwell on? I don't think so. I think the problem is violent criminals, not violent black criminals. The blackness is incidental, isn't it, to the nature of the problem. So how can you, at one and the same time, have a racialized conversation about policing but not have a racialized conversation about criminal offending? I don't think you can. I think the difference is between what's covert and what's overt. The conversation about policing is overt. That other conversation goes on around kitchen tables and in bars and in people's living rooms, Jakon Joi's living room, all the time.

I don't think that's healthy. I think the best response to that situation is to see the human condition, not the racial conditions, of both those who perpetrate and those who are victimized by this kind of behavior.

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