Which Black Lives Matter?
Recently, in one of my classes, I presented students with two texts, each of which argued a position on the problem of race, crime, and incarceration, neither of which was compatible with the other. I am the author of both texts, and I’ve held both positions at different points in my life. I asked my students to come to the next class prepared to say which “me” they think is more correct.
As you might guess, the second text more or less reflects how I currently think about high crime and incarcerations rates in low-income black communities. At the end of the first piece, I write, “Black Lives Matter, all of them, even the so-called thugs!” I still believe this, as a matter of principle. We cannot write off the value of a human life, even a human who has done something horrific to another. Conditions in our prisons can be despicable—there is no virtue in forcing another to live in squalor, no matter what they’ve done.
But the fact is, placing moral emphasis primarily on the incarcerated does a disservice to those whom they victimize. A very small number of African Americans are responsible for the most damaging crimes in their communities, and the rest simply have to deal with the danger they pose. Those law-abiding members of the community, who are too often victims, “matter,” too, and we ought to prioritize them when deciding where our resources and attention go. Almost all black men in our prisons are there because they committed a crime. That is the first order of business to be dealt with when we consider how black communities can alleviate their problems.
That’s how I see it, anyway. Check out the texts below, and let me know which Glenn you side with (if any).
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Black Incarceration and the Violence of Ideas
These remarks offer one scholar’s reaction to historically unprecedented rates of incarceration that emerged in the United States after 1980. (That rate quadrupled in 20 years!) What, I ask, are an intellectual’s responsibilities in the face of that situation? This is difficult territory, especially for an economist. Treacherous territory. The stakes are high! Because there are limits to our purportedly objective cost-benefit analyses that inform public decision-making about investing in prison (For, just how ought we to value a “thug’s” wellbeing?). And there are incentives to conformity that stifle reflexive and critical thinking for many academics. Their career concerns often lead investigators to frame studies so as to remain viable within the prevailing structures of authority and funding. (After all only “radicals” like Angela Davis dare call for prison abolition!)
Historical narratives are under-determined by empirical research (i.e., the facts don’t pin down the story). Hence, substantive political commitments often masquerade under the cover of supposedly neutral investigation. So, what is someone like me to do? What’s my story? A responsible intellectual must tread carefully—especially if he is black. There are snares, traps and pitfalls. There are two sides to this dilemma, it seems to me. So, mine is a Janus-faced tale.
On the one hand, by the turn of the twenty-first century, America’s prison system had grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history. Anyone professing to love liberty should have been deeply troubled by this. Incarceration on a massive scale has become a central component of social policy in this country. This is a preeminent moral challenge to be faced, not merely a technical problem to be solved. We are not dealing here with mere policy analysis. The very nature of the country is at stake. America—with great armies deployed under a figurative banner that reads FREEDOM—harbors the largest custodial infrastructure for the mass deprivation of liberty on the planet. For poorly educated black men, coercion is now the most salient feature of their encounters with the American state. More than mere law enforcement—more than locking up “bad guys” in the name of public safety—incarceration became a modality of governance. It is social policy writ large. And no other nation on earth does it quite the way we do.
As a “second line of defense,” if you will, American punishment policy deals with individuals whose human development has not been adequately fostered by other societal institutions. It interacts powerfully with social welfare, education, employment and job training, mental health and other social initiatives. It is a site for the (re)production of social stratification, for the (re)enforcement of various social stigmas, and for the (re)enactment of powerful and uniquely American social dramas.
And yet, the ubiquity of imprisonment in poor urban neighborhoods has left families in these places less effective at inculcating in their children the delinquency-resistant self-control and pro-social attitudes that insulate youths against law-breaking. Ironically, mass incarceration is criminogenic! As criminologist Todd Clear concludes from a review of evidence in his book, Imprisoning Communities: “[D]eficits in informal social controls that result from high levels of incarceration are, in fact, crime-promoting. The high incarceration rates in poor communities destabilize the social relationships in these places and help cause crime rather than prevent it.” Put differently, the relationship between prison and public safety is complicated since “what happens in San Quentin does not stay in San Quentin.”
What are the responsibilities of honest policy intellectuals in such a situation? This is a difficult question, because punishing criminals is not just instrumental state action. It is also expressive. Americans have wanted to “send a message,” and have done so with a vengeance. Along the way we have constructed a national narrative to assuage our fears. We have answered the question: Who is to blame for the maladies which beset our troubled civilization? We intellectuals played a key role in this process. As mentioned, any cost-benefit analysis of our historic prison build-up needs to specify, at least implicitly, how one reckons the pain imposed on imprisoned people and those with whom they share social affiliation. Failure to consider such “collateral damage” in the development of policy implicitly discounts the humanity of the thieves, drug sellers, prostitutes, rapists and, yes, of those whom we would unceremoniously put to death. It is clear that choosing the weight—if any—to place on a “thug's” wellbeing, or on that of his wife or his children, is not a scientific question. Neither does the data tell us how to weigh any additional cost borne by the offending classes against the purported benefit of increased security and peace of mind for the rest of us. That is, data analysis can only take us so far in our quest to identify ideal institutions. Ignoring costs imposed on offenders by institutions of punishment is a political not a scientific decision. We intellectuals—too many of us, wittingly or not—allowed ourselves to become the handmaidens to a massive internal mobilization that our work helped to justify and to implement.
Punishment is rooted in violence. Prison institutionalizes the necessary though problematic violence routinely undertaken by the state on behalf of its citizenry in the interest of order maintenance. Social control and the management of the unruly are the primary function served by such institutions. But, social affirmation—the construction of the virtuous “we”—is a less celebrated though no less central function. And this violence is not only physical. There is also a violence of thought and conception—a “violence of ideas,” if you will. Key to this violence of ideas is the mystifying process by means of which the exercise of might on this scale and with this degree of inequality comes to seem natural, inevitable, necessary, and just. Rather than becoming cheerleaders in this process, my view is that responsible policy intellectuals must strive to de-mystify—that is, to lay bare the underlying ideological terrain.
The social formation of “race” plays a central part in all of this. Although slavery is a distant memory, the racial subordination accompanying African slavery cast a very long shadow. Urban districts like North Philadelphia, the West Side of Chicago, the East Side of Detroit, or South Central Los Angeles are man-made structures that were created over the generations, and have persisted due to a complex of forces and interests ranging far beyond those communities’ borders. Antisocial behavior by people embedded in such social structures may reflect personal moral deviance, but it also reflects shortcomings of the society as a whole. As a result, the rise of the mass imprisonment state has opened-up a new front in the historic struggle for racial justice. That struggle most decidedly is not over. I’m afraid I must insist on this point: racial disparity in punishment reflects explicit and tacit racism. These policies have garnered support at times because of and at other times despite their having a disproportionate impact on blacks.
In The Condemnation of Blackness, a study of entanglement of race with crime in turn-of-the-twentieth-century American political culture, the historian Khalil Muhammad contrasts reactions of American political and intellectual elites to two related, though differently experienced, phenomena: crime perpetrated by new European immigrants and crime by recently emancipated black Americans. Citing emergent statistical social science literatures of that time, Muhammad shows how the prevailing ideological climate influenced analysts to construe the problems of urbanizing and industrializing America in such a way that, while the poor, white city-dwelling migrants were seen to be committing crimes, the poor African Americans migrating to those same cities were seen to be inherently criminal. As a matter of historical causation, the structure of our cities, with their massive racial ghettos, is implicated in the production of deviancy among their residents. As a matter of ethical evaluation, the decency of our institutions depends on the extent to which they comport with a narrative of national purpose that acknowledges and seeks to limit and to reverse the consequences of history’s wrongs.
It is not implausible to suggest that managing social dysfunction via imprisonment is a primary means by which racial stigma is reproduced in the United States. But, racial disparity in the realm of punishment is not merely an accretion of neutral state action applied to a diverse social flux, the chips having fallen as they may, so to speak.
Instead, I see it as a salient feature of contemporary American social life best understood as the residual effect of a history of enslavement, violent domination, disenfranchisement and racial discrimination. (I realize that talking in this way may imperil my viability within the system, but I am old enough now not to care.) For massive inequality by race in the incidence of punishment in this country is one of two things: either a necessary evil given the need to maintain order, or an abhorrent expression of who we Americans have become as a people at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Nothing in the data—nothing within empirical social science—can tell us which of these alternative narratives is the “correct” one. So, I am free to take the latter view. On the whole, we have concluded that those languishing at the margins of society are simply reaping what they have sown. Their deviance is seen to have nothing to do with us—it is not a systemic failure, entailing social responsibilities, correctable via public action.
But this is wrong-headed. When the socially marginal are not seen as being part of the public body along with the rest of us, it becomes possible to do just about anything with them. What does this state of affairs say about our purportedly open and democratic society? What manner of people do our punishment policies, with their racially disparate incidence, reveal us Americans to be? As I see it, we are acting as though some of us are different from the rest and because of their culture, their bad values, their self-destructive behavior, their malfeasance, their criminality, their lack of responsibility—they deserve their fate. I wish to suggest that this posture is inconsistent with the attainment of any distribution of benefits and burdens in our society that could rightly be called “just.” Because Black Lives Matter, all of them, even the so-called thugs!
That’s one side of the story I want to tell here, the progressive’s account. Now, here’s the other side.
“Systemic Racism” Is a “Just So” Story
Consider this report from my hometown newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times, that ran some years ago [May 31, 2016]. Things have only gotten worse since. I ask you to bear with me here because these details matter. Those of us who insist that “black lives matter” must face them squarely.
Six people were killed including a 15-year-old girl and at least 63 others were wounded in shootings across Chicago over Memorial Day weekend.
That’s one city. That’s one weekend.
The total number of people shot during the weekend this year surpassed (last year’s) holiday when 55 people were shot, 12 fatally.
The most recent homicide happened late Monday in the Washington Park neighborhood on the south side.
Officers responding to a call of shots fired at 11:00 pm found James Taylor …
He had a name. Can we say his name?
James Taylor lying on the ground near his vehicle on the 5100 block of South Calumet Avenue, according to the Chicago police and the Cook County medical examiner’s office. Taylor lived about a mile and a half away at the 6500 block of South Ellis. He had been shot in the chest and was pronounced dead at the scene, authorities said.
Witnesses at the scene were not cooperating with detectives.
About the same time a man was shot to death In the West Rogers Park neighborhood on the North Side.
Officers responding to a call of shots fired at about 11:00 pm found 39-year-old Johan Jean lying in a gangway in the 6400 block of North Rockwell, authorities said.
Jean, who lived in the 100 block of North Ashland in Evanston, was shot in the neck and taken to the Presence St. Francis Hospital in Evanston where he was later pronounced dead, authorities said. Police said he was 25 years old.
A source said the shooting stemmed from a dispute between two women. One of them has a child with the man and the other was his girlfriend. The women were armed and the man was eventually shot during the argument. No weapons were recovered from the scene.
And finally:
About 5:20 pm on Saturday, a man was shot to death in the Fuller Park neighborhood on the south side.
Gavin Whitmore, 27, was sitting in the driver’s seat of a vehicle with a passenger, 26-year-old Ashley Harrison, in the 200 block of West Root Street when someone walked up to the vehicle and shot him in the head, according to the police and the medical examiner’s office.
Whitmore, of the 5800 block of West 63rd Place, was pronounced dead at the scene at 5:29 pm, authorities said.
All the victims were blacks. Sixty-three shot, 6 dead, one weekend, one city. Here’s the thing: reports such as this could be multiplied dozens of times, effortlessly. If a black intellectual truly believes that “Black Lives Matter,” then what is he supposed to say in response to such nauseating reports? That “there is nothing to see here?” But how can he effectively respond without demonizing the “thugs”?
Violence on such a scale involving blacks as both perpetrators and victims poses a dilemma to someone like me. On the one hand, as the Harvard legal scholar Randall Kennedy has observed in his book, Race, Crime, and the Law, we elites need to represent the decent law-abiding majority of African Americans cowering fearfully inside their homes in the face of such violence. We must do so not just to enhance our group’s reputation, as in the “politics of respectability,” but mainly as precondition for our own dignity and self-respect.
On the other hand, we elites must also counter the demonization of young black men which the larger American culture has for some time now been feverishly engaged in. Even as we condemn murderers, we cannot help but view with sympathy the plight of many youngsters who, though not incorrigible, have nonetheless committed crimes. We must wrestle with complex historical and contemporary causes internal and external to the black experience that help to account for this pathology.
(There’s no way around it. This is pathology. The behavior in question here is not okay. It is a sign of profound social dysfunction in these communities. That one can adduce social-psychological-economic-political explanations does not resolve all moral questions.)
Where is the self-respecting black intellectual to take his stand? Must he simply act as a mouthpiece for movement propaganda aiming to counteract “white supremacy”? Has he nothing to say to his own people about how some of us are living? Is there no space within American public discourses for nuanced, subtle and sophisticated moral engagement with these questions? Or are they mere fodder for what amount to tendentious, cynical and overtly politically partisan arguments on behalf of something called “racial equity”? Must we limit ourselves to the incantation of anti-racist slogans and expressions of “solidarity” with activists?
I don’t know all of the answers here, but I know that those victims had names. I know they had families. I know they did not deserve their fate. I know that black intellectuals must bear witness to what actually is taking place in our midst; must wrestle with complex historical and contemporary causes both within and outside the black community that bear on these tragedies; must tell truths about what is happening and must not hide from the truth with platitudes, euphemisms, and lies.
I know, despite whatever causal factors may be at play, that black intellectuals must insist each youngster is capable of choosing a moral way of life. I know that, for the sake of the dignity and self-respect of my people and for the future of my country, we American intellectuals of all colors must never lose sight of what a moral way of life consists in. And yet, I fear that we are in imminent danger of doing precisely that.
Here’s one big reason why: Progressives are not honest in the ways they talk about this problem.
Socially mediated behavioral issues lie at the root of today’s racial inequality problem. They are real and must be faced squarely if we are to grasp why racial disparities persist. Activists on the left of American politics claim that “white supremacy,” “implicit bias,” and old-fashioned “anti-black racism” are sufficient to account for black disadvantage. But this is a bluff that relies on “cancel culture” to be sustained. Those making such arguments are, in effect, daring you to disagree with them. They are threatening to “cancel” you if you do not accept their account: You must be a “racist”; you must believe something is intrinsically wrong with black people if you do not attribute pathological behavior among them to systemic injustice. You must think blacks are inferior, for how else could one explain the disparities? “Blaming the victim” is the offense they will convict you of, if you’re lucky.
I claim this is a dare; a debater’s trick. Because, at the end of the day, what are those folks saying when they declare that “mass incarceration” is “racism”—that the high number of blacks in jails is, self-evidently, a sign of racial antipathy? To respond, “No. It’s mainly a sign of anti-social behavior by criminals who happen to be black,” one risks being dismissed as a moral reprobate.
But we should all want to stay in touch with reality! Common sense, and much evidence, suggest that on the whole people are not arrested, convicted, and sentenced because of their race. Those in prison are, in the main, those who have hurt other people or stolen something. They have violated the behavioral norms which make civil society possible. Seeing prisons as a racist conspiracy to confine black people is an absurd proposition. No serious person could believe it. Not really. It is self-evident that those taking lives on the street of St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Chicago, to a man, are behaving despicably. Those bearing the cost of such pathology, almost exclusively, are other blacks. An ideology ascribing this violent behavior to racism is not serious.
The invocation in political argument about incarceration of the “structural racism” trope is unconvincing—at least to this observer. It offers an “explanation” that is not an explanation at all and, in effect, dares the listener to come back.
So, for example, if someone says, “There are too many blacks in prison in the U.S., due to structural racism,” you’re being dared to respond, “No. Blacks are so many among criminals and that’s why so many are in prison.” (This retort has the inconvenient virtue of being true!) More than this I think “structural racism” talk is mainly a rhetorical device. Its users do not even pretend to offer evidence-based arguments beyond citing the fact of the racial disparity itself. The “structural racism” argument does not go into cause and effect. Rather, it asserts shadowy causes which are never fully specified, let alone demonstrated. We are all just supposed to know that racial disparities are the fault of something called “structural racism,” abetted by an environment of “white privilege,” furthered by an ideology of “white supremacy” that characterizes our society. Any account that explains everything, at the end of the day, really explains nothing at all!
History, I would argue, is rather more complicated than such “just so” stories would suggest. These racial disparities have multiple, interwoven and interacting causes— from culture to politics to economics to historical accident to environmental influence and, yes, also to the nefarious doings of particular actors who may or may not be “racists,” as well as systems of law and policy that disadvantage to some groups without having so been intended. I want to know what they are talking about when they say “structural racism.” In effect, use of the term expresses a disposition. It calls me to solidarity. It asks for my fealty, for my affirmation of a system of belief.
It’s a hard thing , I imagine it’s made worse by the family and communal overlap of victims and perpetrators . It’s going to take a lot of time to get this right .
I so appreciate this post, because it focuses on an issue that I care deeply about, and because it presents credible and incredible arguments from multiple perspectives. I would love to see more posts on this subject, especially some that focus on what the "cultural" and socioeconomic forces are that lead young black men to associate violence with manliness, success or other attractive images.