Things Are More Complicated Than You Think (BLM)
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As anyone who has read my blog for any length of time knows I’m a big fan of Scott Alexander and his blog Slate Star Codex. You may have also heard that he recently deleted that blog in its entirety in response to the New York Times insisting that they were going to reveal his real name. (Scott Alexander is just his first and middle name.) You can check out his one remaining post for his argument on why that would be a bad thing. Or any of the dozens of other articles that have been written about the subject (see for example here, here or here). I want to take things in another direction. I want to talk about what I see as an attack on reasonable debate and disagreement. And to start we need to examine why the NYT was (and apparently is) so determined to use Alexander’s real name.
The claim the reporter has made is that it’s the newspaper’s policy to include people’s real names when reporting on them. That was quickly shown to be at best a policy to which they had made frequent exceptions to, and at worst an outright lie. The NYT had previously reported on Chapo Trap House (whose book I reviewed here) and had no problem using only a pseudonym for one of the people involved there. This would appear to be prima facie evidence of bias, though it remains to be seen what sort of bias it is. We are advised by Hanlon’s Razor to avoid attributing to malice what can more easily be explained by stupidity. Despite this people have made the strong case that the planned article about Alexander is designed to be an exposé.
If based on the foregoing we decide that the article was/is going to be an attack on Alexander, then what does that mean? I worry that it means that rational discourse is on the verge of becoming impossible. I understand that sounds like a sweeping and extreme statement, but on those few occasions when Alexander questioned the liberal orthodoxy he did it as mildly, as nicely, as rationally, and in the most limited fashion possible, and if even that makes him subject to being targeted by some place like the NYT then it’s really hard to imagine what sort of questioning is allowed.
Which takes us to the current moment, and the hesitation I have in speaking about it. I am definitely not as mild or as nice or as rational as Alexander, nor do I expect to be as limited in scope. Accordingly, I have mostly avoided getting too deeply into the protests and the Black Lives Matter moment we’re currently having. Certainly over the last few posts I’ve mentioned it here and there in the context of my worries that we might all make the same mistake, but I have, somewhat reluctantly, decided to wade in more fully. Why? Honestly I’m not sure. It would probably be easier to just not say anything, and I fully acknowledge that it might be better for society as a whole as well. But I honestly feel that certain things are being overlooked, and that if I can see them and I don’t mention them that I’m guilty of making the problem worse through inaction. And I am fully aware that the assistance I might give to fixing a situation as intractable as the one we’re currently dealing with is so tiny as to be almost non-existent, which is exactly why it would be so easy to just pass the topic by, but I won’t. Hopefully that isn’t going to end up being a mistake.
To start, if I were to try to sum up my worries, it would go something like, "This is a very complicated problem and if we're going to fix it we need to make sure we don't over simplify it." Also I might add, "Historically things done in haste and anger have often turned out bad."
Before we can discuss why the problem is complicated we might need to identify what the problem is. And here we encounter the first thing I think people are overlooking. There are actually two problems (at least). First there’s the eternal problem of racism. Second, there’s the problem of what to do about abuses committed by police. Since these abuses appear predominantly directed at poor minorities, it certainly follows that if we can just fix the problem of racism the problem with the police will be fixed at the same time. That sounds reasonable, but we’ve been attempting to fix racism since at least the Civil RIghts Act of 1964 (CRA) over 50 years ago and it might be useful to examine why in spite of this effort and all the subsequent efforts racism still persists.
If we confine this question to just the CRA the first possibility is that it didn't go far enough. That it needed more clauses to cover more types of behavior, that the government needed to enforce even greater integration for an even longer period of time. That it failed because the government was uncommitted. It failed because not enough pressure was applied from the top. It's hard to imagine how that would have worked without the government being even more draconian, and isn't that kind of the whole complaint now? One might argue that the government needed to be harsher on whites and less harsh towards minorities. Perhaps such a distinction was possible, but I’m libertarian enough to think that when you give the government more power it’s hard to keep them from using it indiscriminately.
Also while I'm no expert on the act or the times in which it was passed, it seems like if you looked at the reality on the ground just enforcing what they did was hard enough. Certainly there is an argument that we needed to strike while the iron was hot, that we gave up before finishing the job, and that because of that we're forced to finish it now. But once again I feel like the measures being taken back then were near the edge of what the country could handle as it was. But perhaps not, in any case nothing can be done about it now.
(The post Civil War era may have been another such missed opportunity. But discussing what should have been done then is even more fraught, so I’ll just acknowledge that’s the case and move on.)
Also, any discussion of not going far enough, immediately leads to the question of how far do we have to go? Is there some graceful and straightforward way of putting this issue to bed forever? (outside of a few extremists remaining on both sides.) Because if there is, sign me up! Let's do that. As long as it was a fixed cost that I could conceivably bear I would happily do it. $10,000? Done. Paying $1000/year for the rest of my life? Done. Tearing down all the statues ever erected? Done. Wearing a collar that prevented me from committing microagressions? I’d certainly consider it. The problem of course is that no such solution exists, certainly not one that requires just my participation, and particularly not one that doesn't have second order effects which might end up being far worse than the problem we're trying to solve. (Even if I was willing to wear a collar, trying that on the nation as a whole would be unlikely to end well.)
To return to the questions I just posed, and the idea that the solution should come from the top down, the one proposal people keep bringing up as both a next step, and something of a final destination is reparations. I don’t know if I’ve heard anyone claim that it would put the issue to bed forever, but it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t be a massive undertaking not only financially but politically, so I think it’s reasonable to expect that in order to be worthwhile reparations would have to significantly improve things. So this is one way forward, and insofar as it costs me less than $10k up front or $1k/year per year, then I’ve already said I’m on board. So I’m more open to the idea, than I once was, but my prediction continues to be that it’s not going to be nearly as effective or as easy to pull off as people think. Though my full reasoning for that prediction is outside the scope of this post.
That covers the difficulties, limitations and hopes for a top down solution, what about a bottom up approach? Or to put it another way, have all previous attempts failed because they failed to change the hearts and minds of the individuals who were being racist. That whatever people say, their innate racism is not going to be altered by the passage of a law. That despite an attempt from the top down to enforce a lack of racism, there was still a lot of racism out there and that's what led to all the things people complain about like white flight, aggressive policing of minorities, and a huge increase in the minority prison population.
This leads to three possibilities, the first would be the arc of history/march of progress possibility. That people are gradually getting less racist, and as a consequence eventually this problem will go away. That the current support we're seeing from academia, corporations, and suburban Mormon moms is evidence of the progress we've made. Additionally, most people I talk to about this mention the lack of racism among younger generations, and the hope it brings them. I talk about this a lot in my blog, but this is essentially Steven Pinker's position in his book Enlightenment Now. That things are currently pretty good and if we’re just patient, and don’t do anything crazy, they’re just going to get better. The question that arises from this is, can we hurry it up? Or do we just have to be patient and mostly work for small incremental gains, for people to die off? It’s obvious that this is what’s happening right now, people are trying to hurry up, but I think the jury is still out on whether the current methodology being employed will ultimately have that effect.
For the moment let's assume that things have been and are progressing but that we can speed it up. How might we go about that? Well as much as it pains true believers to be reminded of this, you have to get some of the people in the middle on your side. Some of the people like me who are appalled by police abuses, and the special privileges that unions have carved out for themselves, but also think that the police are probably not modern day Nazis. And if the rest of the moderates are anything like me then extreme actions are not going to help. I know people want to go faster, but when people tear down statues of abolitionists who died in the Civil War and toss them into the lake or when Hulu removes an episode of Golden Girls that actually aimed to be sympathetic to racial issues, these things don’t make the vast number of mostly apathetic people want to go faster, it makes them think we're going too fast. And I understand arguments about the harm of signal boosting of trivialities, like those I mentioned, but that’s the world we live in, and so we need to work around it.
Which is to say despite the urgency of the issue, I would argue that it is possible to go too fast. Though the late 60's and early 70s are dim in most people’s minds, it should be noted that things got pretty crazy. As an example, people have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States. (That's a direct quote from an FBI agent active at the time.) Furthermore, I think there's a credible argument to be made that millions of people have died in revolutions caused by trying to go too fast. Revolutions where essentially everything the revolutionaries wanted came to pass eventually, just not as quickly as they had hoped.
Another possibility is that progress isn’t inevitable, or hasn’t been happening, but that it can happen if people rise up and make their voices heard. I understand this sentiment, but it seems belied by all the data on generational attitudes, all the progress that has been made, even if racism still exists, no what seems more likely is a third possibility, that there is a small irreducible kernel of racism in everyone. That beyond a certain point people are just selfish and stupid and no matter how bad we make them feel or how much we educate them, or how much they want to be completely free of in-group bias that the great mass of people never will be. Note that this is particularly likely to be true if we keep expanding the definition of racism.
I understand that this is kind of a extreme position so let me offer up a couple of stories:
One of my friends is super liberal, he's not the most liberal person I know, but he's pretty far out there. We had a long talk over the weekend about this issue, and he was pretty strident about it. Years ago he and I were at the same wedding, and he approached a black gentleman to ask where the bathroom was. As you may have guessed this person was not part of the staff he was on the bride's side of things (we were friends of the groom). This friend of mine felt awful for the rest of the evening, he still feels bad if I bring it up today. I see lots of stories of these sorts of small racially biased acts, and it seems that a large part of the racism people point to currently are situations similar to this. But if these sorts of things happen even to people who are firmly committed to not being racists, what kind of policy/spending/training/extreme measures are we going to have to resort to in order to purge the world of them? And do such measures even exist?
Second story, there's a person I know, very politically active, about as liberal as you can get in Utah. Strident facebook posts about the liberal outrage de jure. They frequently go out canvassing for the local liberal candidate and one time this person came to my door and I was talking to them and they wanted me to vote for a particular candidate because this candidate wanted to turn the nearby high school which the district had closed because of falling enrollment into a community center. Otherwise they told me, it will be used to build "low income housing". Now perhaps this person is just prejudiced against the poor, but it is of a sort with all the other examples people give, white flight, sending kids to far away schools, etc.
What's further interesting about both those stories is that I don't think I've ever made the mistake my friend did, nor would I have used the phrase “low income housing” when out canvassing. As someone who leans conservative, or at least away from progressivism, I understand the mistakes I’m likely to make, so I police myself pretty thoroughly.
Which takes us to the book White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo, which I recently finished. I’ll post a review of it in the monthly wrap up, but for now I want to bring in what the book has to say about this subject. To begin with she mentions that people who think they're not racist can be the worst of all, the ones most likely to show fragility and to come up to her after her diversity training and point out all the black friends they have or the fact that they’re Italian and Italians were once also a discriminated class. Basically to strenuously assert that they couldn’t possibly be racist. DiAngelo herself shares many stories of her own unintentional racism. Here stories are similar to the stories I mentioned above, mistakes that I don’t think I’ve ever made.
Now note what’s happening there. People come up to her after the training. And she made these mistakes despite all of her own education and efforts. If we decide to treat this as authoritative, (and I’m not saying we necessarily should, DiAngelo is just one voice among many, though a popular one). And after combining it with the stories I related, eliminating every shred of racism starts to look like a really difficult problem. And furthermore a somewhat paradoxical one as DiAngelo illustrates. Though without apparently recognizing the paradox.
One of the things she claims is that the sorts of behavior just described are nearly ubiquitous among whites, and as such we need to get past a good and evil dichotomy, because people naturally bristle if you tell them that their evil, which is what being accused of racism equates to in this day and age. So she wants to tell them that they're racist, that all white people are racist, but without necessarily further implying that they are also therefore irretrievably evil. But yet isn’t the idea that racism is evil, perhaps the greatest evil, the fundamental message of the protests that are currently taking place? Thus the paradox...
What I’m trying to illustrate by all of this is just how complicated the situation is, and all of the complicated ways people recommend for merely identifying it, let alone solving it. That we have somehow lumped the behavior of my very progressive friend assuming that if someone is black he has to be an employee as belonging to exactly the same category of behavior as minorities being unjustly killed by police.
Which takes us back to the beginning when I said that there are really two problems (at least). There’s the problem illustrated by the killing of George Floyd, and the problem of causal and widespread racism described by White Fragility (among other places). And I’m going to assert that trying to simplify both of these into a single problem is probably a mistake, or at least something that makes this effort less likely to succeed. That ideally we should focus on one problem, police brutality, rather than attempting to cure the entire country of racism at a stroke. And of course even with this focus we still are faced with a pretty complicated problem, but at least it allows us to rigorously define what we’re trying to do and track whether our efforts are working or not. Indeed I am suggesting that if we want to succeed we need to exercise as much dispassionate objectivity as possible, and I fear this is the attribute most lacking in the current climate. As an example, rather than focusing all of our efforts on a somewhat ephemeral push to defund the police, we should be able to look at various police funding levels and the various strategies implemented by different municipalities in the wake of these protests and compare them, ideally using some fairly robust measurement.
It needs to be something where the measurement is tangible (i.e. not based on someone’s perception of harm) and ideally we should zero in on the greatest harms. It should also be a measurement where we have a lot of data and it’s easy to collect more of it. Putting all this together I suggest that we should use the murder rate as a measurement we're trying to optimize around. It fits all three of the criteria and I would think that all sides should agree that we want it to be as low as possible. Then the question becomes how do the various policy proposals affect this measurement? Particularly the massive push to defund or eliminate police?
I am not suggesting that I can solve this question in the limited space I have remaining, but at a first glance it appears that the recent unrest has, on this measure, been a bad idea. For example:
104 shot, 15 fatally, over Father’s Day weekend in Chicago (Key quote, "The weekend saw more shooting victims but less fatalities than the last weekend of May, when 85 people were shot, 24 of them fatally — Chicago’s most deadly weekend in years." The other deadly weekend was also post George Floyd.)
Gun Violence Spikes in N.Y.C., Intensifying Debate Over Policing (Opening paragraph: "It has been nearly a quarter century since New York City experienced as much gun violence in the month of June as it has seen this year.")
CMPD: 180+ shots fired from multiple weapons during deadly Charlotte block party ("Police say at least 181 shots were fired into a crowd of around 400 people during a block party Monday. The shooting and chaos that followed left four people dead and 10 others injured.")
Note I am not saying this proves anything one way or the other, I am suggesting that it’s enough evidence to create caution in how we proceed and what we encourage. It also does appear to point towards what some people have called the Ferguson Effect, the idea that when cops are placed under increased scrutiny following a major incident of misconduct they back off from policing, and that this has the effect of encouraging more crime. In support of this I offer not only the above stories, but this study that came out in June that found when a police department is investigated in the normal course of events, that police department improves. Unless the investigation comes after a "viral" incident in which case:
In stark contrast, all investigations that were preceded by "viral" incidents of deadly force have led to a large and statistically significant increase in homicides and total crime. We estimate that these investigations caused almost 900 excess homicides and almost 34,000 excess felonies.
To reiterate, in putting this out there I am not claiming to have proved anything, except perhaps the idea of a link between police and the murder rate, and the idea that caution should be exercised. I am definitely not claiming that we should roll over and let the police get away with whatever they want. I'm saying that it's a complex system, with significant costs if we get it wrong. And that what we really need to do is split things up into tractable problems, and then apply as much rational examination of the data as possible, the kind of stuff where Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex was a viking, before he felt forced to take his blog down.
I certainly hold out hope that policing can be done better. And in fact I would be very surprised if there aren’t all sorts of improvements what can be made, but when it comes to the more radical proposals, I’m inclined to adapt a phrase from Churchill:
Many forms of policing have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that current policing is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that it is the worst form of crime prevention except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…
If you actually like Churchill, and some of the other people whose statues are being threatened (Lord Baden Powell anyone?) then consider donating. I promise that I will never use that money in the removal of any statues.