It can be argued that race relations in the United States are at their lowest ebb in decades. Police shootings, riots, and now football players refusing to stand for the National Anthem, they all polarize to a degree not seen since the acquittal of Rodney King’s attackers. Whatever you make of Colin Kaepernick’s actions, he speaks for many when he says that “black people and people of color” are subjected to “oppression.” He continues: “there are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”(sic) Many commentators have lauded his actions, saying that at the very least, they will engender conversation and discussion about the current state of race relations in this country. So in the spirit of such conversation and discussion, let’s see if Mr. Kaepernick is justified in his allegations about systematic oppression in the U.S. legal system.
Most complaints about our legal system start by pointing out that blacks are incarcerated at a rate several times higher than that of whites. This is true. In 2010, whites constituted 63.7% of the population, while blacks constituted 12.2%. Prison populations in 2016 were 58.7% white, and 37.8% black. This shows that blacks are overrepresented in prison population by a factor of 336%. Taken by itself, this would suggest that the legal system is biased against blacks. The only problem with this conclusion, however, is that the prison population must be understood not in terms of racial percentages in the overall population, but rather in terms of the number of crimes being committed. To fail to control for the number of encounters members of different races have with the police, you violate a fundamental principles of statistical analysis. It is estimated that black males have police encounters at a rate 5 to 10 times higher than white males. If this is true, then conviction and incarceration rates for black males are actually lower than for whites based on how many confrontations they have with police.
Do police practice racial profiling that results in an increased likelihood of arrest for blacks? When statistics for serious crimes are examined, where police are responding to calls and not initiating contact, it appears that profiling is not an issue. In urban settings, understood as America’s 75 largest counties, blacks constitute 62% of all robbery defendants, 57% of all murder defendants, and 45% of all assault defendants, while constituting just 15% of the population. Between 1980 and 2008, 52% of homicides in the US were blacks killing blacks. In 2013, blacks committed 38% of all murders, while whites committed 31%; a startling imbalance in view of the respective population percentages by race overall. Black males are 6.6% of the population, yet in 2012 they committed 5,531 murders. There appears to be a disproportionate level of violence among blacks that cannot be accounted for by police bias.
Now, what about police/black shootings per se? As of July 9 of 2016, of the 440 people police shot, 54% were white and blacks were 28%. For 2015, of the 987 police shootings, whites constituted 50% and blacks 26%. When one controls for the higher incidence of black/police encounters, it is clear that police are less likely to shoot a black man than a white man. In a Houston study, blacks were 24% less likely to be shot by a police officer than whites. Controlled threat scenarios provide further evidence of police restraint when dealing with black suspects. This is in spite of the fact that encounters between police and black males constitute a greater threat to the officer than encounters with white suspects. When a police officer is killed by a person of known race, 44% of the time the killer is black, while 51% of the time it’s a white person. Again, totally out of line with overall population. A policeman is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than a black male is to be killed by a police officer. 12% of whites and Hispanics who die by homicide are killed by police, while only 4% of black homicide victims are killed by police.
What about police shooting unarmed victims? In 2015 police fatally shot 36 unarmed black males and 31 unarmed white males. When you study the individual cases, you find that in many of them, extenuating circumstances render “unarmed” a rather dubious distinction. At least five of the black victims had fought the officer for his gun or were beating him with his own equipment. Some were shot from accidental discharges of the police weapon, one officer was beaten unconscious, and another victim was a bystander who was struck by a police bullet in an exchange of gunfire with an armed offender. Mr. Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, was classified as an unarmed black male shot by a white police officer. Prior to his death, Mr. Brown had struggled for the officer’s gun, turned away, then turned once again and advanced toward the officer who fired non-lethal shots in vain attempts to get Mr. Brown to stop. The police officer was eventually cleared of wrongdoing. There are instances of police shooting black suspects without genuine provocation, but the number of cases is infinitesimal when compared to the number of arrests in cases of violent felonies, almost 500,000 last year alone. The real tragedy in all the publicity about police shootings is that police are starting to patrol less and cut back on interaction with black citizens, leaving the playing field more open to criminals and citizens unprotected
So, what we see is that when we practice legitimate statistical analysis, we can come to only one conclusion: there is no evidence for a pervasive bias against blacks in the U.S. legal system, starting with the reporting of crimes to the police, and extending to police response and arrest, court conviction, sentencing, and finally, to incarceration and probation practices. The appearance of such a bias is simply the result of there being a higher incidence of criminal behavior among black citizens, notably black males. So why is this? Is it lack of educational and economic opportunities that compel blacks to resort to crime?
Studies show that while blacks typically do less well in school, they nevertheless have the opportunity to go to college and acquire skills that will allow them to compete in society. Black children start out elementary education with lower verbal and numerical skills than white children, as do Hispanics. As they progress through elementary education, however, the gap between whites and blacks grows, while the gap between whites and Hispanics, for many of whom English is a second language, narrows. By the time they get to high school, only 56% of black students graduate, while 78% of white students do. Overall dropout rates by race are 7.3% for whites, and 20.9% for blacks. When it comes to standardized tests for college entrance, black students score a full standard deviation lower than whites, meaning lower on the scale by 1/3 of the overall population. In spite of this, black students do have access to higher education. Historically, 70% of white kids continue on to college, while 65% of black students do. In 2014, those figures were reversed, 71% for blacks, 67.3 for whites. The rumor that there are as many black men in prison as college is not true. Of the 3.26 million black males of college age in the United States, 1.4 million are in college against a total black prison population of 821,511. The argument that black students do not have access to educational opportunities is not true, at least at the collegiate level.
Education is important, because it has been shown to co-vary with subsequent earning power. While we’ve seen that blacks do have access to college education, it is nevertheless true that income levels in the U.S. are disparate when examined by race. Whites earn an average of $57K annually, while blacks earn $33.3K. The question then is, why? Is there discrimination in terms of jobs offered and wages paid because of race? To answer these questions it’s necessary to look at the structure of black families that are experiencing economic pressures. For one thing, many black households have only one parent, and thus one wage earner. The marriage rate among black families is lower than that of whites, and is declining. Only 32% of blacks are married, blacks have a higher divorce rate, and stay married less long than whites. Further, early pregnancy forces many black females to abandon their education and start working, often at lower paying jobs that require less formal training. Studies have shown that illegitimacy and single parent upbringing both correlate with poor academic performance, and subsequent lack of earning power. It appears that although there is a correlation between black race and lower earning power, this is not a causal factor. To say blacks earn less because they are black is to commit what in statistical analysis is called an ecological fallacy. This means that although two factors co-vary, they do so not because one causes the other, but because both are caused by something else, a third factor. In the case of employment opportunities and earnings, it appears as though the causal factor is lack of education and training.
This brings us to the real point of our inquiry, and that is, what leads to a situation where by the age of 23, black males stand a 41% chance of being arrested? In 1965, Daniel Moynihan, a Democrat, published a study in which he predicted that the “destruction” of the black family would inhibit further progress for blacks to achieve economic and political equality. The relevance of his prediction is that the black nuclear family, with two parents present, was the norm from 1880 until 1960. The most credible hypothesis as to why there was a sudden change in the 1960’s is that the Great Society programs of social welfare relief were targeted at single parent families, a fact that rendered husbands and fathers an economic liability. These programs were championed by Lyndon Johnson, a Democratic President. Here is the sociological legacy of these programs: by 2011, 72% of black births in America were illegitimate, by 1992, only 25% of black families were nuclear, with biological parents and biological children present. By 2005 39% of black children did not live with their biological father, versus of 15% for whites. 31% of black fathers rarely or never visit their biological children. 62% of black women are single parents, versus 33% of white women. The absence of fathers in homes of any race has been proven to correlate positively with poor academic performance and teen pregnancy.
Taken as a whole the sociological evidence suggests that the problems blacks have with the legal system are not the result of a bias or conspiracy on the part of a predominantly white establishment, but of behavioral problems within the black community itself. And if true, why among blacks more than other races? If white America were truly discriminatory, we would expect other racial minorities, especially those of recent arrival, to have similar problems. This is not the case. Asian immigrants consistently outperform white counterparts in education and earning power, and are incarcerated at rates a fraction of their population percentage. They constitute 4.75% of the population, but only 1.5% of the national prison population. Other races and cultures are prospering under the same political and legal umbrella afforded blacks. Could it be that black Americans have developed a culture that condones, if not encourages, a nihilistic attitude towards the prevailing morality of white America? Allan Bloom, in his seminal work, The Closing of the American Mind, argues that black students at American universities are unique among races in their cultural consciousness. He writes, “…it is peculiar in that blacks seem to be the only group that has picked up ‘ethnicity’ … in an instinctive way. At the same time, there has been a progressive abandonment on their part of belief or interest in a distinctive black ‘culture.’ Blacks are not sharing a special positive intellectual or moral experience…” I understand him to be saying that it’s not as if blacks have a separate and distinct culture, as much as they lack a culture at all. If true, this is devastating, as culture is the conveyor of moral values that form and reinforce personal character and decisions. Issues of dropping out of school, using drugs, engaging in premarital sex, gang membership, and engaging in crime are only wrong if somebody or something, a prevailing culture, says they are wrong. In the absence of moral boundaries, anything goes, to the detriment of all people of all races.
This brings us back to our conversation. Although there is plenty of sociology to provide answers in the racial debate, we’ve been slow as a country to consult actual science. This is because if somebody talks about facts and behavior in the context of race, they are labeled racist and debate is curtailed. In order to have genuine dialogue, a dispassionate exchange of facts is required. There must be a distinction between race, which is ordained by Nature and not volitional, and culture, which is generated and sustained by people and is fully volitional. This was the vision of Dr. Martin Luther King, who said “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” He was not condemning judgment per se, rather he invited it, but along justifiable lines, not arbitrary ones. His vision was that skin color would no longer be the basis of either discrimination or exculpation. Defined this way, Dr. King would himself be classified not as a racist, but as a culturalist. Can we not revive his example and introduce a new concept that will defuse the emotion of what is essentially a debate about behavior in America? Until there’s an accurate diagnosis of the problem, there can be no effective and lasting cure.
So Mr. Kaepernick is to be commended for his call to conversation and discussion of the root causes of racial tension in America. There are many, both black and white, who like him are disgusted at the present state of race relations and want them to improve. The best strategy is to drop the whole issue of race; it’s a chimera. Let’s talk instead about culture and resultant behavior. Talk about things we can change, not things we can’t.
