Radicalized With Respect to Race

Writing at City Journal, Steven Malanga lays the blame for any increased racial divisions solidly at the feet of the Obama Administration:

Several Obama administration initiatives have distorted the national conversation on race. In 2010, for instance, the administration’s education and justice departments launched investigations against school districts around the country for disciplining black students more often, proportionately, than students of other races. A Department of Education study observed that black students were three and a half times more likely to be disciplined. The study alleged that, “everyday educational experience for many students of color violates the principle of equity.” In making its charges, the department ignored compelling data showing that black students were more likely to misbehave in and around school—including crime statistics revealing that blacks were 25 times more likely than their white counterparts to be arrested at schools for serious offenses like battery.

Similarly, the administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, through a policy known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, now is essentially charging wealthier suburban communities like those in Westchester County, New York, with housing discrimination if their populations are not diverse enough for the administration’s taste. Under the new rules, the federal government no longer must prove that these communities are actively engaging in racial discrimination in order to compel them to cast aside local zoning rules and build housing that would attract low-income residents. The mere fact that a town’s population is not diverse suffices for the Obama administration to demand that the community make efforts to transform itself. “HUD’s power grab is based on the mistaken belief that zoning and discrimination are the same,” Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino wrote in 2013. What’s particularly ironic about this implication of racism in Westchester’s case is that the county voted by nearly a two-to-one margin for Obama in 2012.

Consider this statement of President Obama’s in reaction to the murders of police in Dallas on Thursday as a case in point:

First of all, I think it’s very hard to untangle the motives of this shooter. As we’ve seen in a whole range of incidents with mass shooters, they’re, by definition, troubled. By definition, if you shoot people who pose no threat to you—strangers—you have a troubled mind. What triggers that, what feeds it, what sets it off—I’ll leave that to psychologists and people who study these kinds of incidents.

A mind less subtle than President Obama’s would be tempted to take the shooter at his word. As a first order approximation I think stated motives are a pretty good indicator, just as they are with the actions of violent radical Islamists.

When someone is radicalized with respect to any particular issue, it means that they see every event through the lens of that issue. When you are radicalized with respect to race, race becomes the only significant factor for you. A crime suspect is killed while resisting arrest? If he’s black, it must be because of his race. With every encounter with police there is some likelihood of that encounter going wrong and leading to violence. The more encounters, the greater the risk.

Is it possible that black men experience encounters with police at a rate disproportionate to their perpetration of crimes and misdemeanors? Is it possible they are killed by police officers in numbers disproportionate to the number of encounters with police? I think the answer to both questions is “Yes” but we can’t have confidence in the answer because the necessary statistics are simply not collected and maintained.

That might seem like something a good, investigative reporter would latch his or her teeth into. Perhaps at some past time. Now they just take to social media proclaiming its unshakeable truth.