Tim Wise's Blog, page 28

Getting What We Deserve? Wealth, Race and Entitlement in America

Everywhere you turn, conservatives are bemoaning the so-called "mentality of entitlement."

To hear such folks tell it, the problem with America is that people think they're owed something. Of course, income support programs, nutritional assistance, or housing subsidies have long been pilloried by the right for this reason — because they ostensibly encourage people to expect someone else (in this case, the government, via the American taxpayer) to support them. But now, the criticisms that were once reserved for programs aimed at helping the poor are being applied even to programs upon which much of the middle class has come to rely, like Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance.

Increasingly one hears conservative politicians and commentators arguing for cuts in these efforts as well, and critiquing those who rely on them for health care, retirement, or income in-between jobs. To the right, the elderly and unemployed apparently refuse to do for self. They aren't far-sighted enough, one supposes, to invest their money in a high-growth (and high-risk) private retirement plan; they aren't responsible enough to purchase good health care, and they'd prefer to sit at home collecting a couple hundred dollars a week in unemployment insurance than find a job that might support them and their families. In other words, there's something wrong with these people: they're lazy, have the wrong mindset, and need to get out there and show initiative, presumably the way rich people do. Yes, unemployed workers paid for unemployment insurance, by way of withheld monies from their prior paychecks; and yes, they paid for Social Security and Medicare too; and yes, even the poor who rely on traditional forms of "welfare" have not usually been on those programs for long, and were, previously, paying into the very tax base from which program dollars are drawn. But to the right, none of that matters. All that matters is that, presumably, we have become a nation of overindulged, overpampered people who feel entitled to this, that or the other thing.

Though this critique is not solely aimed at persons of color, there is little doubt but that the history of growing opposition to social safety net efforts — which were wildly popular among most whites from the 1930s through most of the 1960s — mirrors, almost perfectly, the time period during which black and brown folks began to gain access, for the first time, to such programs. While blacks, for instance, were largely excluded from Social Security for the first twenty years of its existence, and while very few people of color could access cash benefits until the 1960s, by the 1970s, the rolls of such programs had been opened up, and the public perception was increasingly that those people were the ones using (and abusing) the programs. So in large part, the critique of "entitlement" has been bound up with a racialized narrative of the deserving and undeserving, which can be seen, in many ways, as a racist meme.

But if we look and listen closely, what we discover is that the mentality of entitlement and expectation is far more embedded among the affluent and among whites than among the poor or people of color.

Exploring the Fallacy of "Earning What You Have": Entitlement Thinking Among the Wealthy

Let's first consider class status, apart from race for a second. When someone with money insists that they "earned everything they have," and therefore, they resent their tax burden, or various government regulations that might affect their business in some way, what is that, if not evidence of an "entitlement mentality?" After all, they didn't really earn what they have all on their own. Our professional status and income owe much to circumstances beyond our own efforts and initiative.

So, for instance, those with money have benefitted directly from substantial public investment in schools (either for themselves or their employees), roads, technology and communication infrastructures that have been publicly subsidized, as well as fiscal and monetary policy aimed at making capital available to businesses. We make choices as a society, through instruments like the Federal Reserve, to either tighten or loosen the reins of credit — either of which decision can have a huge impact on whether or not you can hire new people, build a new plant, or expand your business — as well as what types of things to subsidize via the tax code (investment, home ownership, hiring, advertising, etc.), all of which can be made more or less costly due to the existence and size of various tax credits for each.

In other words, the wealth of individuals is only partly about their own hard work; more so, it is the result of the cumulative decisions made by lots of people. So if I have a successful business that relies on technologies and knowledge generated by others before me, I am not really "self made," in that I am, to a large extent, "free riding" on the labor of others. Likewise, without the labor of my employees (without whom my "good idea" would mean nothing), I would be devoid of wealth or status too. And without public roads, rail lines, and subsidized air transport, there is very little that even the most ingenious entrepreneur could accomplish on their own.

Then of course, there is the little matter of intergenerational inheritance. Although we like to deny it, the fact remains, a large amount of wealth and status held by those at the top, and their high incomes as well, are the result of having started out with advantages relative to others. They are not things they "earned" under any rational definition of the term.

According to the available research, if your father's wages rank in the top fifth of all income earners in the country, you'll have nearly a 60 percent chance of surpassing your dad's status over time. On the other hand, if your father's earnings fall in the bottom fifth, the odds that you'll do better than him one day plummet to less than 5 percent. And not only is mobility itself limited, it appears to be diminishing relative to previous generations. As a recent study for the Boston Federal Reserve Bank discovered, among the nation's poorest families, the percentage that were able to climb simply to the next quintile (still far from well-off), fell from over half in the 1968-78 period, to only 46 percent in the period from 1993-2003. Additionally, the study found that poor families are 10 times more likely to remain poor than to move into the highest income quintile, while those who started out rich are 5 times more likely to remain there, as to fall into either of the lower two quintiles of earners.

Another study found that persons who start out in the bottom fifth of all income-earning families as children are twice as likely to remain there as to jump even into the middle class as adults, while those born to families in the top fifth of earners are more than two-and-half times as likely to remain there as adults, as to fall into merely the middle class.

When it comes to wealth and asset status, the problems with mobility are even greater than for income. Research has determined that at least 45 percent — and perhaps as much as 80 percent — of an individual's wealth is accounted for by intergenerational material transfers, either during the life of one's relative or upon death. This suggests a deeply embedded and structural advantage for those who are born to affluence, which owes nothing to their own hard work.

Additional research that examined families from the 1980s through 2003, discovered that about three-fourths of where an individual ends up in terms of wealth is explained solely by the wealth status of that person's parents. Only about 10 percent of those who start out wealth-poor ever attain high wealth status by adulthood, while most who start out at the top remain there.

Even persons like Bill Gates, who are regularly touted as "self-made" simply because they were not raised by millionaires or billionaires, were born to advantage nonetheless. Gates's father was a successful attorney (who went to college, it should be noted, on the publicly-funded G.I. Bill), and his mother served on the Board of Directors for First Interstate Bank (her own father was a bank president). The Gates family was comfortably upper-middle class, and were able to afford to send their son to the prestigious Lakeside School, in Seattle, where — thanks to proceeds from a "rummage sale" put on by the wealthy parents at the school — the resources existed to purchase, for the students, an early computer system. It was this early introduction to computing (which Gates would not have obtained at any Seattle public school, or even many other private ones), that launched him on his career path. A combination of class advantage, timing, and frankly, luck combined to create the Bill Gates we know today. This is not to dispute his own hard work and ability; it is simply to say that circumstances also play a huge role in where people end up.

Likewise, even in those rare cases when someone rises from poverty to affluence (or upper-middle class status), by the time they pass down any of that advantage to their children, the notion of meritocracy and entitlement has surely been vitiated.

So, for instance, several years ago I was making a presentation to high school students at an affluent prep school in Massachusetts. While most of the young men at the school came from well-off families, there was one young man who wanted to make clear to me that he was not among them. His father had been dirt poor, he said, and had worked in the mills for years, doing backbreaking labor to make a better life for his children. He had worked and worked, and saved and saved, and because of his efforts, now his son (this young man) was able to attend the prep school in question. When he was finished, I told him how much I appreciated his being willing to share his story. In a society as class-conscious as ours, it isn't easy, after all, when surrounded by affluent classmates, to acknowledge that one comes from far more modest means. I then noted that his father sounded like a great guy, a hard-working role model, and like someone who absolutely, positively had earned his way into the prep school where his son now sat. The young man looked at me, puzzled. What did I mean, he wanted to know, by saying that his father deserved admission there? I explained that his father sounded like a paragon of hard work and personal virtue, which was great. But, I asked, what did that have to do with him, the son? He was fifteen and had done nothing but get born to the "right family" in terms of his father's work ethic. Did he, therefore, deserve the education he was receiving, more so than, say, some other kid who was equally capable but whose father (or single mom) hadn't achieved as much?

Unearned Advantage and its Opposite: Race and the Structuring of Inequality

The role of inheritance and the transmission of pre-existing advantage is especially important in explaining racial disparities in well-being. To begin, white families are two and a half times more likely than black families to be able to bequeath assets or wealth to their children, and the value of those bequeathments is far smaller for blacks and other people of color than for whites. In large measure, this is why even young, college-educated black couples with incomes comparable to those of their white counterparts, typically start out with $20,000 less net worth than young white couples: simply put, they are not able to get a head start from their families (in the form of down payment assistance on a home, or assistance paying off college loans), nearly so often as whites can.

And when people of color start out behind, they typically remain there. Three-fourths of black families that start out poor remain poor, compared to only 44 percent of white poor families, according to the above-mentioned study done for the Boston Federal Reserve. Even more disturbing, the ability to retain one's relatively high status differs markedly by race. For instance, according to research that followed persons over a 15 to 20-year period, 60 percent of whites who were in the top wealth quartile at the beginning of that period remained there by the end, compared with only 22 percent of African Americans. Overall, 55 percent of white children who grow up in wealthy homes remain there as adults, while only 37 percent of African American children raised in wealthy homes are able to retain that status into adulthood.

My own story proves instructive in terms of how racial inequity can be intergenerationally transmitted. I grew up in a modest 850-square foot apartment for the entirety of my youth, before leaving for college shortly before turning 18. I had no immediate class advantage in the sense of actual money or other material items given to me by my parents: no car, for instance, no spending money, no personal credit card which they were able to pay off for me — nothing of the sort. I worked for what little spending money I ever had in high school, at a job that, it should be noted, was procured for me because my grandmother knew the owner of the business and put in a good word.

In any event, although my family had very little money, my mother was able to procure a loan for $10,000 with which to help finance my first year of college, after I had turned in my financial aid forms too late to obtain sufficient assistance to cover the cost. She had no collateral herself, but was able to get her mother to co-sign the loan, using her house as collateral at the bank. My grandmother lived in that house because of two things: first, because my grandfather (who had been dead for six years by that point) had had a steady if not lucrative career, first in the military and then in civil service; and secondly, because being white, she and my grandfather had been able to move into the nice, suburban community in which they settled, in ways that no people of color had been able to do. Even my grandfather's middle-class career had been bolstered by whiteness: at the time he had entered Officer's Candidacy School, people of color were ineligible for such opportunities; and the civil service jobs he obtained were also largely off limits to anyone who wasn't white.

So in a very real sense, I could not likely have attended the expensive, elite college from which I ultimately graduated, had it not been for pre-existing racial advantage, and this, even in a family that was far from wealthy. My grandmother died two years ago, and I received no inheritance after that fact; but then again, I had already benefitted from her "estate" more than two decades previously. That had had nothing to do with me or my hard work. And had I not attended that particular school, I wouldn't likely be doing what I am doing right now. After all, it was there that I met the two men who would give me my first job out of college, doing antiracism work in the campaigns against neo-Nazi political candidate, David Duke, who was running for Senate and then Governor in the early 90s. So if I don't go to Tulane, I don't meet those men, get that job, and then develop the talents obtained therein into a career as an antiracist educator and writer. But I don't go to Tulane at all if it isn't for the pre-existing advantage held by my family, which itself was connected directly to being white.

In short, to suggest that where people end up is earned — either high status because of hard work and ability, or low status because of its opposite — is to ignore the truth about the structural advantages and/or disadvantages to which persons are subjected in this society, due either to class status, racial identity, or a combination of the two.

Though conservatives would no doubt reply by claiming that the intergenerational transfer of advantage and disadvantage largely reflects the differences between the haves and have-nots in terms of certain talents, efforts or ambitions — in other words, this transferring of advantage is not unjust, but due to the children of the haves simply possessing better work habits than those of the have-nots, by and large — such an explanation is wholly unsatisfying. If such differences in values or effort really could explain persistent wealth gaps over time, why would there be such differences in the ability of affluent blacks to pass on upper class status to their children, relative to whites and our children? Why, after all, would black youth who grew up in successful, affluent homes, be any less likely to work hard and set high standards for their own achievement, than whites from such homes?

More to the point, even if it were true that affluence and poverty both correlate with certain mindsets or norms that can be passed along to the next generation — either to their benefit or their detriment — what would that fact, if true, have to do with "merit" or entitlement? If I happen to be lucky enough to be born into an affluent home, where high achievement is expected, and am therefore imbued with a set of values and expectations that correlate with success, while someone else is born into a poor home, where, perhaps the expectations are lower (because the opportunity horizon seems far smaller), how are either of us to blame or credit for that outcome? In other words, the "values" that we may, in turn, be manifesting, are still largely ascriptive characteristics. It would hardly be due to my own internal development of certain values that I was likely to work hard and achieve; so too for the poor kid whose sights might have been set lower, through no fault of their own.

But I "Earned" That College Slot (or Job): Entitlement Backlash Against Affirmative Action

This is among the reasons I find it so aggravating when other white folks complain about things like affirmative action, and argue that such efforts seriously put us or our children at a disadvantage, relative to people of color. The only way anyone can say that and not literally die from embarassment at the absurdity of the claim, is because we have ignored the way in which our entire existence has been bolstered by an embedded, systematized form of affirmative action, which however invisible it may be to us, continues to skew the larger opportunity structure.

To become angered by affirmative action in college admissions, for instance, is to ignore the ways in which we as whites have been favored throughout the K-12 educational process. As I note (and fully document) in my books, Colorblind, and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White, we are one-tenth as likely as our black or Latino counterparts to have attended a concentrated poverty school; we are twice as likely to have been taught by the most experienced and qualified instructors, and half as likely as kids of color to have been taught by the least qualified and experienced; we are 2-3 times more likely to have had access to a full range of honors and advanced placement classes; and the schools we attended receive, on average, about $1000 more per pupil, per year than the schools that serve mostly black and brown kids. Yet despite our longstanding advantages, over and again we hear the same arguments about how people of color are taking things away from whites — and specifically things to which we are presumably entitled.

But why do we feel entitled to these things, be they college slots or certain jobs? It's a question no one typically asks, perhaps in part because the hallmark of an entitlement mentality is that you rarely explore the underlying reasons for it, and whether or not those reasons, in the end, can really hold up to scrutiny.

So, on the one hand, I know the answer that the critics of affirmative action offer for their position. They feel that "more qualified" whites are entitled to those college slots, because they had better test scores, or better grades. In other words, they are entitled because of their accomplishments. This, they believe, is a legitimate kind of entitlement, as opposed to one that simply stems from one's racial identity, as is the case (in their minds) with affirmative action. So far so good, but are those "accomplishments," which they believe entitle them to slots in the nation's most selective schools, truly valid reasons for them to obtain those slots?

First, consider the rather obvious (but usually unacknowledged truth) that all accomplishments take place within a larger social context. No one achieves anything in a vacuum, as mentioned before. This is true not just for the obtaining of large fortunes, but even on a smaller level, as in the case of academic performance in school. So, if I obtain a high standardized test score, good for me; but let us remember the overwhelming amount of research suggesting that such scores are directly correlated with family income, the quality of one's prior schooling (over which students have little if any control), and even racial identity, thanks to something called stereotype threat, which refers to the way in which even highly qualified and capable students of color, for instance, often underperform on high stakes tests, due to the anxiety generated as they take the test, trying valiantly not to confirm common racial stereotypes about their ability.

To presume that one's test scores or superior academic performance should automatically entitle one to admission at a particular elite school, is to ignore all of this; it is to ignore the way in which those credentials were obtained, too often times, within a context of unequal opportunity. If I've had advantages, I'm supposed to look better on paper. But why should that entitle me to still more advantages? That would be like having a race where some runners had a five-lap head start, and then when they crossed the finish line first (surprise, surprise), calling them the fastest runners. In fact, the folks who started five laps back but finished perhaps 4 laps back, or 3, are by definition faster runners. They are trying harder. They are better in a real and measurable sense. But in a winner-take-all society, the critics of affirmative action would punish them for having started behind, or having "run the race" so to speak, while dealing with various class or race-based obstacles.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly however — and this is a point that is almost never made despite how obvious it should be — colleges and universities do not exist to serve as reward centers for one's high school achievement. How incredibly narcissistic one must be to think that Harvard, for instance, or for that matter the public college across town, exists for you; to believe that its purpose and mission is to simply dole out goodies (known as admissions slots) to people because they were the valedictorian of their graduating class

Colleges exist to create communities of learners. They are not trophies to be accumulated — however much our society has commodified them and caused us to perceive them as such, as mere gateways to power and money — but rather, they seek to create a community of scholars who have diverse backgrounds, abilities, interests, and yes, racial and ethnic identities, along with economic status, geographic background, and a host of other things.

Once upon a time elite schools existed to perpetuate the existing class domination of a certain claque of rich, white, Eastern families, and they were the worse for it intellectually. Thus, the "gentleman's C" became a standard to which many a Yale man (like George W. Bush) could aspire without compunction or shame. But as these institutions became more national in scope (and mostly to the benefit of other whites, rather than people of color, since the former still make up about three-fourths of those admitted to such schools), they became both more diverse and better schools. Under any measure of academic talent, creativity, scholarly production or anything else you can think to assess, colleges are far more intellectually rigorous places now than they were thirty, fifty or a hundred years ago. This is not solely because of racial diversity, to be sure; but it is because those schools broadened their conception of merit and ability to encompass a much larger range of talents than what once mattered to them. And they have both the right and responsibility to do this, as they attempt to fashion a community of learners.

When someone is rejected for admission to such a school, they have no right to claim they were deprived of something to which they were entitled, unless we accept the fundamentally preposterous notion that schools exist only to engage in test-score bean counting and should have no leeway to construct a class using broader criteria. In which case we should just replace all admissions officers with a computer, into which test score information would be fed, and then we could hand out admissions slots from 1-to-whatever on that basis. Of course, even if we did that most whites who didn't get into a given elite school still wouldn't get in, since most such colleges receive far more applications from qualified whites alone than what they can admit. Harvard, for instance, receives enough applications from valedictorians and students with perfect or near-perfect SATs to fill out their freshman class several times over. So, one can only wonder what these white folks would find to complain about then.

That such a score-based scheme would create an entirely hierarchial educational system, in which there were a few elite schools, followed by lots of mediocre ones, followed still by a bunch of schools for the academic so-called "bottom feeders," should be obvious, as should be the harm of such a scheme. Anyone who thinks those schools, or the country would be better off with such a system clearly lacks the acumen to even enter this debate.

Much the same is true for the world of work. To say that people are "entitled" to certain jobs because they are the most qualified begs the question as to how we measure qualifications, and what credentials we consider important? Are quantitative factors, like seniority and raw experience what matter, or are qualitative factors like accomplishments what matter most? And even if we say the latter, which qualitative factors should matter most, and how do we compare them?

For instance, several years ago, while I was facilitating a workshop on equity and race for a company in Bermuda, an executive there shared with me an experience that highlighted the inherent subjectivity of the notion of merit and qualifications. He discussed a recent hiring decision they had had to make, for the position of insurance underwriter. The final two individuals vying for the job were women, one white and one black. As part of the ultimate evaluation, each was required to take a timed, 20-question exam. At the end of the testing period, the white applicant had answered all 20 questions, while the black applicant had only gotten through 14 questions. Now, if what matters is speed and efficiency, then clearly the white applicant is the "most qualified." But, as it turns out, the black woman, though not finishing all items, got all but one of the 14 she answered correct. Meanwhile, the white woman had answered all the questions but she had missed four or five. So what matters more: speed or accuracy? One could, I suppose, make the case for either. But the point is, merit, and thus, the entitlement to a job that we think flows from it, is not nearly so cut-and-dried as it seems.

And once again, employees who have had more opportunity (and race, gender and class status certainly contribute to that greater opportunity), should be expected to look better on paper. The question is whether looking better on paper should entitle one to a certain job, when there might be others, who didn't have the same opportunity — and thus might not have as impressive a resume — but who can perform at an equal or greater level. Employers have to be free to consider the ways that race, gender, identity and other factors could have artificially served to limit the apparent "qualifications" of certain job applicants, not merely so as to be fair to all aspirants, but even so as to serve their own interests in finding the best people for certain positions. If all they are encouraged or allowed to do is to look at outward indicators of merit, they will end up overlooking some of the best possible employees, to the detriment of equity and their own institutional needs.

Conclusion: Redefining Merit and Entitlement for Both Equity and Excellence

Rather than continuing to go round-and-round about who's qualified for certain things, or who earned certain things, or who is entitled to certain things, be they jobs or college slots, perhaps we would do best to engage a broader conversation about what it is we're trying to measure? What are the standards that we think are important indicators of ability and talent in the modern era? Surely most people wouldn't want to limit those to test scores, grades, or seniority, but would want to include certain other characteristics, like perseverance in the face of substantial obstacles (among these race and class barriers), as well as leadership traits, a proven ability to work collaboratively with others, an openness to new ideas and differing perspectives, and (in a society that will be half people of color within 30 years), the proven ability to work well across racial and ethnic lines.

In other words, while multicultural competence might not have mattered much in American higher education or the business world of the 1950s, it certainly does now. White folks who score well on traditional indicia but lack in these other categories can hardly complain about being overlooked for slots in colleges or certain jobs, when those colleges and jobs will increasingly be serving a diverse society. If we have, by our own insularity and provincialism, turned ourselves into anachronisms, that is hardly the fault of people of color. The fault is ours. If we have run to white communities, and sent our kids to white schools because we thought this would be "better for them," what we may now have to face is that we harmed ourselves and our children, by ill-preparing them for the world as it is, and depriving them of the tools needed to succeed and fit in within a society that no longer reflects their racial background alone.

Likewise, for class status, we should engage a broader conversation about entitlement, about who has what and why? We should discuss, all of us, the way that working class peoples continue to fall farther behind, regardless of constantly expanding labor productivity and hard work. We should be asking ourselves, our children, and our politicians why the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans now owns roughly half of the financial wealth of the nation, whereas in the 1970s they owned "only" 26 percent of it. Did the wealthiest 3 million or so people double their work effort? Do they not sleep any more, so busy are they creating jobs and the other wonders of the modern society? Or is it because of tax policy, fiscal policy, monetary policies, and trade policy that favored these few at the expense of the others? And if the answer is the latter (and it is), then what are we going to do about it? Not so as to "punish" high achievers, but so as to create a society in which high achievement is more broadly spread throughout the society, where people can live up to their true potential, and where reward will follow actual effort, not ascriptive characteristics like who your family was, what connections you have, and whether or not you lived in the "right" neighborhood.

Until we engage these matters, we will be in for many a year of rich, white whining and hand-wringing on the part of people who think they are the victims of injustice, just because now they are having to share some of the spoils of the society's wealth with those working class and darker skinned folks who helped create the vast majority of it, but who up to now have received little of the reward. We are not entitled to the advantages we are losing (however slowly), and people of color and the poor are not obligated to listen to it, for one more minute.

Tim Wise on CNN, 9/24/11, Discussing Affirmative Action and its Opponents at UC-Berkeley

Here's video from my interview on CNN, from 9/24/11, regarding the anti-affirmative action "bake sale" at UC-Berkeley. It was edited down a ton, but still, the thrust of my argument in opposition to this silliness comes across…

"Why Can't They Just Say Stop It?" Reflections on Terror and the Cycle of Indifference

I knew it was a conversation that at some point I would have to indulge; and last night, amid commemorative news coverage of the events of September 11, 2001, it became apparent that the time had come.

Although I had previously discussed the events of that day and the aftermath of those events with our ten-year old (who was only 10 weeks of age when the attacks took place), Rachel, who is 8, had previously been far more oblivious, paying little attention to my prior conversations with Ashton about the subject, or showing little interest if she had been.

But last night, as she watched footage of United Airlines flight 175 violently piercing the South Tower of the World Trade Center (something I, like so many others, had watched live at the time), her interest, and of course fear, was piqued. Though she was trying hard to concentrate on some cute little game on her iTouch, involving a puppy dog of some sort, I would catch her looking up at the television screen from time to time, obviously disturbed by the images she was seeing.

Then came the inevitable questions, and I realized that this would be our youngest daughter's first real lesson in the global geopolitics of violence.

"Why did someone want to knock down those buildings? Were they important?" Rachel asked.

I tried to explain that the World Trade Center was (and the Pentagon still is) a symbol representing American power. In the first instance, the power of American money, and in the second case, the power of our military: a military with more guns, bombs and the capacity to kill than that of pretty much all other militaries on the face of the Earth combined. So, I noted, for people who are angry with the United States, these particular buildings were targets that made sense to them: to hit them would serve to scare people, which is why that kind of thing is typically referred to as "terrorism."

"Why were they angry with the United States?" would be her next question.

I took a deep breath, knowing that these are the kinds of things that can be hard to explain to children, and also knowing how important it is to provide an answer that is honest, as opposed to the silly, simplistic and narcissistic lies to which we have grown so accustomed; to wit, that they hate us "because of our freedoms," or "because their religion compels them to kill infidels," or whatever it is that any number of ignorant Islamaphobes would have them believe.

"Well," I began, trying to choose my words carefully, "about ten years before they flew those planes into the buildings, our country had started a war with another country called Iraq, and a lot of people were killed as a result of what we did. After the fighting was pretty much over, we kept some of our troops in another country nearby called Saudi Arabia, and it made a lot of people angry because they felt like we were trying to control that part of the world."

"Oh," she answered, short and sweet. "So we started it?" she inquired.

Another deep breath. "Well, it depends on who you ask, I suppose. Some people would say that they started it, and that they just did it because they're bad people, but the United States definitely has done things in that part of the world that have hurt people and made them mad. So in some ways, you could definitely say that we started the fight," I tried to explain. "Of course," I continued, "no matter who started it, it's never O.K. to go kill a bunch of people just because you're mad at their leaders."

"So what happened after they attacked us with the planes," she wanted to know.

And now began the more important part of the lesson, since, after all, my previous mention of the unacceptability of mass violence as a way to resolve disputes with leaders you detest holds as much in one direction as the other.

"Well, we attacked a country called Afghanistan, because they had been helping the group that attacked us, and then we attacked Iraq again because…well, we never did give much of a reason for why we did that," I said. "Iraq had nothing to do with the planes that hit the buildings, but President Bush decided to attack them anyway."

I explained that ten years later, we were still at war in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and that people were still dying because of it. "Like I said, killing a bunch of people just because you're mad at their leaders doesn't make much sense, whether it's them doing it to us, or us doing it to them. It just never really solves the problem."

"What if someone attacks our house?" she inquired, clearly nervous about the prospects of terrorist-inspired violence touching her world, and in a more direct way than merely on a news broadcast, as part of a ten-year commemoration event. As I explained to her why she had no reason to fear such a thing — after all, our house is not really as attractive a target for terrorists as a government building, or national landmark like the Trade Center — my heart broke, mostly because it struck me that such a fear as this is precisely that which Iraqi and Afghan children must feel and have felt daily for years; only fathers in those places could not assure their children, as I can mine, that such a dread is misplaced. For them, the fear is all too understandable and the risk all too real. Indeed, according to classified U.S. military documents released by Wikileaks, there were over 66,000 civilian deaths in Iraq between 2004-2009 alone (other estimates place the number of civilian deaths at well more than 100,000), and mid-range estimates suggest the numbers of civilian dead in Afghanistan at another 22,000 or so.

"Why can't they just say 'stop it'?" Rachel wanted to know, the question striking me at once as both the most simplistic and yet, most utterly valid and important question which, at the end of the day, one can ask about war. It follows, after all, from the kind of advice most of us give to our children about how to resolve conflicts in their own lives: don't hit, be kind, use your words, and try to make peace. But unfortunately, the lessons we teach to children, not just because they sound nice but because they actually work best, are all but forgotten by the time those who teach them find themselves playing the role of a national leader, or the head of a retail terrorist operation, for that matter.

While children mostly understand the futility of violence and counter-violence, of retaliation and escalation, of tit for tat and "sending messages" by way of hijacked planes on the one hand, or precision-guided munitions on the other, adults seem to think we know better. We pretend, against the weight of historical evidence to the contrary, that with just a little more violence, a few more (or a lot more) dead, we will successfully usher in an era of calm, of freedom, of democracy, and of peace. We believe that violence does pay, and I suppose for some it does. It pays for the defense contractors, the weapons-makers, and the politicians who wield it to gain votes from a scared public, whom they warn about how a failure to deploy it, and on a massive scale, will surely mean danger in the future for them and their loved ones.

Sadly, the reason no one is willing to just say "stop it," is because in the world of power politics, to do such a thing is to risk being viewed as weak; because peace is for wimps, because real men hit back, and because one is always sure that one is right, and that the other guy is to blame for the conflict. In the end of course, victory at the barrel of a gun is never final, no matter how much Chairman Mao may have thought otherwise back in the day, or however much George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Ayman al-Zawahiri do now. In al-Zawahiri's case, even if he is able to pull off one, two, or many more significant terrorist attacks against the United States, before we ultimately find and kill him like his predecessor, he and those he represents cannot count on such events as true victories. We have the weapons and quite clearly the ability to kill more of them than they can kill of us, for what that's worth, and for whatever it may say about the nation's greatness, which apparently is measured as of late by this, and very few other metrics.

And as for us, such victory as might obtain in the short run from our efforts — be it in our case the killing of Osama bin Laden, or the routing of the Taliban in Kabul — also says little about the prospects for lasting peace and security down the line: new thugs replace old ones, and the Taliban is already largely regrouped and in charge of significant swaths of Afghanistan again. Even if al-Qaeda were to disappear tomorrow, the threat of terrorism launched against the United States would always be extant so long as we remain committed to a politics of Western dominance around the globe; so long as we stand in the way of self-determination for the Palestinian people; so long as we act as though we are entitled to other people's oil just because our automobile-obsessed culture demands it; so long as hateful bigots continue to demonize Muslims and treat them as the enemy. If we make it "us against them," and project the idea worldwide that we see ourselves locked in a crusader's holy war against Islam, we can hardly act surprised if and when those on whom we've declared that war take us at our word and decide they have nothing to lose by taking as many of us down as they can in the process. Violence begets more of the same, as does hatred.

And yes, I realize these are cliches about both violence and hatred, but what of it? Are they any less valid for that reason? After all, as we remember 9/11, cliches are virtually all we've been offered: cliches about how on that day "everything changed," or how "America lost its innocence." And in those two cases, the cliches however ubiquitous are, of course, utterly and completely false, unlike the ones I've offered regarding violence and hatred, which are virtually inarguable. 9/11 did not change "everything," except for that relatively privileged class that had, because of their privilege, been protected from the realities that almost all other human beings have lived with forever, and with which millions of their own countrymen and women had as well. Terrorism and being targeted because of who you are was not new for everyone. People of color knew about it, but there will be no memorials to the millions of indigenous persons who lost their lives because of it; no memorials for the millions enslaved and subjected to racial terror for two-and-a-half centuries in this land. No indeed, in cases such as that, the very persons who insist most loudly that we must "never forget" 9/11 — and who will no doubt be saying that two hundred years hence — are the very same who insist the suffering of others is to be forgotten precisely because it occurred in the past and that, at some point, the victims need to "get over it."

And there was no innocence to lose, except in that most ironic and revealing sense of the word: innocence as naivete, as a kind of willed ignorance which most people would find embarrassing to admit, but which in a nation such as ours — where an accurate understanding of history is very nearly prohibited in order to rise to prominence in one party, and where even in the other, it is something to be slickly managed and ignored — is considered something the loss of which is occasion for mourning and regret.

But if by innocence lost we are referring to the loss of our ability to feel so special, so protected by a red-white-and-blue-banner-waving God that nothing such as that which touches everyone else on Earth — namely, mass death — could reach us too, well then, the loss of such delusions is not only not regrettable, but rather, may be an absolute prerequisite to the long-term sustainability of life on the planet. Feelings of invincibility, or the sense that one has the power to put a "boot up someone's ass" (to paraphrase noted philosopher, Toby Keith), and to do so without consequence, and without the inevitability of payback, are dangerous to indulge. Without the knowledge that one can also die, that there are those who despise you every bit as much as you despise them, and who might just be willing to show you their hatred up close and personal — and to die for it — there is little to restrain the hubris and violence of the first party.

This is not to suggest — and make a note of it, because I want there to be no mistake about what I am and am not saying — that the attacks of 9/11 were justified, or a good thing, or morally acceptable. But they happened, and having happened we must then decide what we are willing to learn from them, since, in any event, they can't be erased, and the lives lost as a result cannot be brought back. If all we learn is that "they" are evil, or jealous, or fanatical — or whatever self-indulgent, self-serving and self-righteous piffle our leaders would seek to teach us — then we will be forever endangered, trapped in our own mythology, weakened by our unwillingness to engage in even a moment's introspection.

If what we "learn" is that we must send into war brave men and women to whom we lie about why they're being sent — and so we indulge the trumped up fears about weapons of mass destruction, or the misperception believed by more than 80 percent of soldiers in one poll, that they were in Iraq to "avenge Saddam Hussein's role in the 9/11 attacks" — then we have learned nothing. Nothing except that soldiers are, as always, expendable in the service of an empire run mostly by men who themselves have never seen a battlefield, never held a comrade as their guts lay strewn outside of their bodies, their life slipping away with each remaining and increasingly shallow heartbeat. The men who make these decisions and so glibly prattle on about the importance of supporting the troops are the very men (and occasionally women too) who then abandon those troops when they are no longer killing for America, and who, upon returning home find themselves plagued by physical, mental or emotional trauma, only to encounter an eviscerated safety net and a gutted VA system. They are persons who have always and forever sent others to do their dirty work while using every available outlet to avoid combat themselves.

But there are lessons, which, if we are willing to learn them, are there for the taking. And now, after the passage of a full decade since that awful day, maybe we can think clearly enough to consider them. It's doubtful, but perhaps worth a shot, so here they are.

First, that the best weapon against terrorism is not military force but honesty and the policy directions that might flow from it. We cannot defeat, forever and always, a tactic. Terrorism the likes of which we experienced on 9/11 will always exist, so long as people have valid grievances against others. This doesn't mean that those grievances justify the terror unleashed in response — as I've already said, they do not — but it does portend that the terror that flows from those grievances is entirely predictable nonetheless. If we wish to minimize the likelihood of terrorism being deployed against our nation, we must insist that our nation turn from the policies that have given rise to those grievances — and not merely as a way to sue for peace, but because those polices are unjust. In that regard, and as flawed as their response to those polices obviously is, the terrorists are correct: it is not legitimate to station American troops in Saudi Arabia, or to fund Israel to the tune of billions of dollars as they continue to subjugate the Palestinian people in ways they could not do for one week were they to have to pay for their police state on their own. It is not legitimate to starve the people of Iraq with economic sanctions that kill hundreds of thousands of children, and then claim — as did President Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeline Albright — that those results, as painful as they may have been for the dead children and their families, had been "worth it."

We have not the right to condemn the indifference to human suffering that is the hallmark of the terrorist while remaining utterly indifferent to the suffering we inflict, as if it were not the same thing. It is. Dead is dead, and to the families of the dead, it matters painfully little whether the end of their child's life came as the result of a plane crashed into a building by a terrorist, or a "smart bomb" sent stupidly into a village by the world's most powerful and advanced military. And if we cannot see the equivalence — if we continue to insist that the lives of our children are more precious (which is exactly what we suggest by virtue of our non-chalance at the loss of life sustained by our adversaries) — we will never be safe. You can take that to the bank.

A second lesson is this: that either we are all entitled to life or none of us are. For too long, Americans have preened about as if we were somehow more deserving of life and opportunity than others. Yes, we use a disproportionate share of the world's resources, and yes, we maintain military installations and troops in over 700 locations around the world so as to guarantee our continued dominance, but that's O.K., because we deserve it. We're Amurka, as some like to say. But so long as 11 million children under the age of 5 die every year on this planet from preventable disease — disease that this nation could single-handedly eradicate were we to turn from empire to something commensurate with the sustenance of life — we are all implicated. Our failure to do that, and our insistence that it is better to spend trillions on war than to save tens of millions of lives, says, by definition, that we believe those lives to be worthless, or at least worth less than even a few thousand of ours. That is the calculus of America's superiority complex. Our stance to the families of the dead is simple: yes, we are rich enough to save you, but we will not, because we have people to bomb, and Hummers to drive, and derivatives to trade, and reality shows to watch, and churches to attend, wherein we will pray to a God in whom we barely believe, if at all — for if we did, we wouldn't dare manifest an indifference of this magnitude, so sure would we be that such indifference would vouchsafe for us a most unpleasant afterlife.

A third lesson we should learn, but likely won't is that there is strength in humility; that there is no shame in acknowledging one's mistakes, whether one is a child, a parent, or the president of the world's strongest nation. But we seem far from the learning of this one. Republican or Democrat, there is no humility, and no willingness to admit that sometimes this country is simply wrong, and that our actions are immoral, unethical and unjustifiable. We are not just a "pitiful giant" to quote Richard Nixon, who stumbles into one tragic act after another; rather, we make conscious decisions that destroy people's lives, and these are decisions for which we must be accountable.

And we cannot be accountable while mouthing words such as these:

"I'm interested in going forward, not looking backward."

As author, activist and educator, Paul Street reminds us in his most recent essay, these were the words of Barack Obama in June 2009.

Chilean President, Michele Bachelet was visiting the White House, and Obama was asked whether it might be appropriate for the U.S. to apologize for the role our nation had played in the 1973 overthrow of that nation's democratically-elected government (interestingly, also on September 11). That the overthrow of Salvador Allende and his replacement by the vicious dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet led to the murder of at least 3000 people and the torture of some 30,000 more is indisputable. So too is the extent to which such an outcome could not have obtained but for the involvement of the CIA and the covert machinations of the Nixon Administration, and specifically, Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger.

But for two decades of right-wing brutality unleashed upon the Chilean people, there will be no apology, even from the most nominally liberal president the United States has had since that time, because we must "look forward" and never back. Unless of course the injury is ours, as in the case of our 9/11, in which special instance we will insist on the moral right, and indeed obligation, to look back, forever. We will not only look back, but rather, will look back in anger, and with non-stop news coverage, heart-rending documentaries and memorial commemorations. Our pain matters, while their pain does not. It is that simple, and that evil. Yet most of us say nothing.

And a final lesson is this: that our biggest enemies — enemies to our national well-being, the Constitution, and the democratic values to which we claim to cleave — are not hostile foreign forces, but ourselves. It has been no Muslim Caliphate that has instituted wiretaps, and domestic spying, and secret military tribunals, and torture of our enemies. It has been no Ayatollah who has vowed to roll back the rights of women, relegating them to involuntary incubators for the state. It has been no Middle Eastern follower of Mohammed who has wrecked the national economy by way of their speculative investment activities or the get-rich-quick trading of derivatives. All of those things have been done by Americans, including many who call themselves Christians. More damage has been done to this nation since 9/11 by supposedly patriotic white men who go to church on Sunday than what all the brown-skinned supporters of bin Laden could have hoped to do in three lifetimes.

It is time we hold them accountable, and demand better of ourselves than this.

Oh and one more thing: we must remember to hug our children tight, and each other. Because life is precious, and fleeting, and not promised us for even one more day. And that is something we should have learned from 9/11: that what we take for granted can be snuffed in an instant, and that all the time we waste in anger, in acrimony, in seething hatred for the dreaded other, is time we are not spending holding, and caring for, and loving those closest to us. It is a lesson that needs to be remembered, by terrorists of all stripes — be they freelancers or government-sponsored — and and by the rest of us as well.

Why can't they just say stop it? Indeed.

Crime, Race and the Perils of Profiling

When it comes to rationalizing the mistreatment of people of color, there are few who manage to do it better, or more consistently, than syndicated columnist Mona Charen.

So, for instance, when officers from the NYPD's Street Crimes Unit were acquitted of any wrongdoing after killing Amadou Diallo — whose wallet they mistook for a gun, leading them to fire 41 rounds his way, 19 of which found their mark — there was Charen ready to leap to their defense. Although she admitted the event had been "sad" and even "tragic" (words she would have no doubt found putridly inadequate had the victim been a nice Jewish boy on his way home from Yeshiva, or a WASP hedge fund manager on his way home from a hard day at the office), to hear Charen tell it, it was almost unavoidable in the case of Diallo, the African immigrant. After all, Diallo was a black man in a dangerous neighborhood, and given generally higher black crime rates, police are understandably afraid of black people. So yes, Charen agreed, Diallo had likely died at least in part because "he looked like so many of the young men in that neighborhood who are seriously dangerous," but that was just the price he would have to pay for the "high crime rate of American blacks."

Then there was her Thanksgiving day essay in 2008, in which she brushed aside any lingering regrets for the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas, noting that it was merely "the usual course in human affairs," and simply a matter of "the more technologically advanced civilization" winning. No big deal.

And when Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested in his own home in July 2009, for daring to become belligerent with the Cambridge cops who presumed he didn't belong there — belligerence that, it should be noted, does not constitute disorderly conduct according to Massachusetts law — Charen was at it again. This time, she lambasted President Obama for his rather tame (and factual) suggestion that there has been a "long history" of blacks and Latinos being stopped disproportionately by police, calling it a "left-wing fable." After all, she noted, "Blacks and Hispanics also commit a disproportionately high percentage of crimes," so even if the president were correct, we ought not worry about it much. The mistreatment is justified. Oh, and according to Charen, the president's statement itself amounted to "reverse racism" — a charge so utterly bizarre as to defy explanation, seeing as how it suggests that merely mentioning the history of racism makes one an anti-white bigot.

Now, true to form, dear Ms. Charen has returned to the well of white denial and rationalization, with her most recent column (September 5, 2011), in which she attacks the New York Times for its supposedly biased coverage of a pending lawsuit against the NYPD. The lawsuit, filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights, alleges a pattern of racial profiling in citywide stop-and-frisk policies, and recently a judge ruled that the suit had sufficient merit to go forward, despite attempts by the city to have it dismissed. Apparently by reporting that fact — even though the Times included statements from police officials responding to the allegations of profiling — the paper is somehow guilty of liberal bias. After all, according to Charen, given the much higher rates of criminal violence among blacks and Latinos in New York City, it only makes sense that police would stop and search a disproportionate number and percentage of them, relative to whites. By failing to provide the data on relative racial crime rates in the city, the Times, in Charen's view, is deliberately misleading their readers, and going on a "racial profiling goose chase." Charen then proceeds to provide the data herself — or rather she produces data provided to her by conservative policy analyst and writer, Heather MacDonald — and suggests that since blacks and Latinos commit such a massively disproportionate share of violent crime, you would have to be a fool to show the least bit of concern about the racial disparity in stops and frisks.

Although I have previously written several essays about the fundamental illogic of the right-wing position on racial profiling — and although law professor David A. Harris has thoroughly eviscerated every attempt to justify the practice in his meticulously researched book on the subject — the regularity with which such pedantic rationalizations for racial bias bubble up requires that I do it again, if for no other reason than to demonstrate the utter anti-logic of conservative thinking on this subject, and their basic inability to interpret data. And, to be perfectly frank, because making Mona Charen look foolish, though painfully easy to do, is fun.

The Facts About Stop-and-Frisk and Crime in New York City

First, let's begin with the facts we know, and which are not in dispute.

Beginning in the 1990s, under the Mayoral Administration of Rudy Giuliani, the NYPD adopted a number of new policing strategies intended to address the problem of crime. Among these were the use of computer-modeling to track crime and then predict where future crime would likely occur, the deployment of additional officers to those "hot spots" identified by the COMPSTAT system, and a "broken windows" philosophy of policing, which holds that if minor infractions and quality-of-life rule violations are enforced aggressively, the result will be a reduction in more serious crimes as well. Although crime certainly dropped in New York City following the adoption of these strategies, it also fell nationwide, including in many large cities that did not deploy such strategies, making it difficult to claim that the new methods per se had been the cause of the crime drops in New York.

Additionally, the NYPD began widespread stop-and-frisk operations at this time, so that whenever officers felt they had reasonable justification to suspect someone of criminal wrongdoing, they would stop and question them. Then, if these interactions led to further suspicion, they would frisk the presumed perp for illegal contraband such as weapons or drugs. In the first few years after the program's inception, roughly 85,000 or so persons in the city were being searched annually. By 2009, even though the crime rate had dropped substantially in the intervening years, the numbers of stops had exploded to over 580,000. Last year, they topped 600,000. And consistently, since the beginning, about 85 percent of persons stopped by police and searched, have been black or Latino.

On the one hand, conservatives are right to chide those on the left who claim naively that this fact alone, in and of itself, proves racism in the the NYPD, since folks of color comprise only about 65 percent of the city's population. Obviously, the population percentages of various racial groups are not the only factor that would logically be relevant to a law enforcement practice, since law enforcement is supposed to aim its efforts at lawbreakers, not random people. As such, the right is correct when they note that the relevant demographic information is not the percentage of whites, blacks or Latinos in a given community, but rather, the percentage of crime in a given area being committed by whites, blacks or Latinos. So let's take a look at that.

As for crime in New York, there is no argument that the rates of violent criminal wrongdoing in the city are much higher among blacks and Latinos than among whites. About that, Charen is correct, and it forms the basis of her defense of the NYPD. According to data from the NYPD for 2010, victims of violent crime who report their victimization to police, overwhelmingly indicate that their attackers were black or Latino. So, for instance, according to victim and witness reports, 91.5 percent of murder suspects in the city are black or Latino, as are 86 percent of rape suspects, 94 percent of robbery suspects, 87.5 percent of aggravated/felonious assault suspects, 85 percent of misdemeanor assault perps, and nearly all shooting suspects. Meanwhile, only about 5 percent or so of violent crime perps, according to that same data, are white (as opposed to about 35 percent of the population of the city).* So perhaps Charen and the conservatives are correct: perhaps the disproportionate rates at which blacks and Latinos are stopped by the NYPD makes sense. Indeed, to the extent such practices might remove dangerous criminals from the streets, it could even be seen as a pro-black and brown folks policy, ultimately helping the very communities hardest hit by crime. Perhaps the NYPD is the new NAACP?

But no. Despite the seeming logic of such a claim, given the raw data, there are a number of problems with the quick jump to this conclusion so readily and happily made by Charen, MacDonald, and other defenders of the NYPD. These flaws have been meticulously demonstrated by scholarly research on the subject, going back over a decade, and most recently by Jeffrey Fagan, a Professor of Law and Public Health at Columbia University, in his expert report, prepared for the court in the current and pending case.

Deceptive Data: How the Right Misuses Crime Statistics to Justify Racist Policing

The claim that the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policies are a key element of effective crime control seems laughable once you actually look at the numbers produced by the policy. From 2004-2009, out of 2.8 million stops made by the police, fewer than 6 percent resulted in an arrest of any kind — a rate that is actually lower than that which has been produced in other jurisdictions using random checkpoints. When it comes to finding guns, drugs or stolen property — among the principal goals that defenders of the practice cite as justification for it — the stops are even more inadequate, with guns being found in only 0.15 percent of all cases, and drugs or stolen property recovered in only 1.75 percent of all stops. In the heavily-policed Brownsville community of Brooklyn, arrests occur in fewer than 1 percent of all stops made, and out of 50,000 stops in the community just since 2006, only 25 guns have been recovered: that's a hit rate of about one-twentieth of a percent.

Among the reasons for such pathetic "hit rates," Fagan notes that a disproportionate share of all stops are justified on police incident forms on the basis of vague and subjective reasons, such as an individual making "furtive movements," being in a "high crime area," or for other unspecified reasons. In those cases, which represent roughly half of all stops made, the hit rates are even worse than in the larger sample. In other words, as a crime-control tactic, stop-and-frisk is inefficient at best, downright irrational at worst. Officers are apparently suspecting people of criminal activity on the basis of clues and signals that are proving to be ill-informed. Yet rather than rethink their assumptions, they continue to use the same reasons for their racially-disparate stops year after year.

Interestingly, the racial disparities are even harder to explain when you consider what Fagan and a colleague discovered even as far back as the 1990s; namely, that as bad as the hit rates were overall for stops-and-frisks, they were actually far lower for persons of color. When searched, blacks and Latinos historically have been about a third less likely than their white counterparts to actually be found with illegal contraband or other evidence of criminal activity. Although the disparities in hit rates have been reduced since the 1990s, blacks stopped and searched are still nearly 10 percent less likely than their white counterparts to receive some kind of sanction (either arrest or a court summons) after being stopped by the NYPD. Far from suggesting that the cops are bending over backwards to be kind to African Americans, this fact suggests that still today, the police are quicker to suspect blacks for less legitimate reasons than they are whites, and thus, after searching them, less likely to actually find evidence of actual wrongdoing.

Furthermore, and as Fagan amply demonstrates, in what may well be the most rigorous statistical analysis ever performed on the subject of racial profiling, the correlation between police stops in a given precinct and reports of crimes in those precincts is generally pathetic. For violent crime, there is no significant correlation between reports of crime and the number or racial distribution of stops made, and the racial composition of a precinct alone actually predicts stops three times better than reported crimes. In other words, the fact that people of color commit the lion's share of violent crime in New York cannot possibly justify the level of racial disproportionality in stops-and-frisks.

Of course, this makes sense when you consider that stops of this nature are a pretty inefficient tool for catching violent criminals. In those kinds of cases, police have more precise information to go on, and utilize more sophisticated methods of investigation than simply stopping people on the streets because of "furtive movements," in the hopes of, let's say, turning up last night's liquor store holdup man. This is likely why only about 15 percent of stops by police since 2004 have been for the purpose of investigating violent crime, according to the NYPD's own records: yet another reason why the Charen/MacDonald evidence on people of color and violent crime is irrelevant when it comes to understanding the disproportionality of police stops.

Rather than violent crime, large numbers of stops are written up as being related to a search for weapons or drugs (about 800,000 of the 2.8 million incidents), trespassing (another 325,000 or so stops), or for "unknown or unclassified" offenses (another half-million of the stops from 2004-2009). That blacks and Latinos commit violent crime at much higher rates than whites in New York, cannot possibly explain such wildly disparate rates of racial stops by police, as those stops (and indeed 85 percent of all stops) had nothing to do with the person stopped being suspected of a violent offense.

As for trespassing, the correlation between stops and reports of this offense, is only one-tenth as strong as the correlation between stops and the racial composition of the community alone. And as for drugs and weapons, stop rates are significantly but negatively correlated with reported drug or gun possession offenses in a given precinct. In other words, the rationale being offered by Charen and MacDonald for the stops (that people of color are committing more crimes and thus, racial disparity should naturally result in the stop rates) is exactly the opposite of reality when it comes to drug and gun possession offenses.

Although there is no clear data on drug possession or weapons possession rates for New Yorkers as a whole, there is data on Borough-level drug use and weapons possession for high school students in New York. So we can at least examine data on youth to get an idea of whether the disproportionate stopping and frisking of people of color by the NYPD is justifiable, based on the relative rates of offending in those categories. And once you take a look at that data, it becomes clear: drug and weapons possession rates are far too similar for young whites and young people of color to justify such racially disparate rates of stops.

According to 2009 data from the Centers for Disease Control, in Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island — the three New York City boroughs that consistently have a sufficient number of white public school students so as to allow for statistical comparisons — there are no significant differences between the rates at which white and black youth carry weapons in general, or guns, specifically; likewise, rates of drug use between the two groups either indicate no significant differences, or differences that suggest higher rates of use by whites.

Although the 2009 data from Brooklyn indicates higher rates of weapons possession and drug use for blacks than for whites, in almost every category of comparison, the sample sizes for white youth are simply too low for statistically valid comparisons or estimates. And even if we overlook the sample size problem, and accept the data at face value, the fact would remain that less than 4 percent of black youth in the borough are carrying a gun in a given month, hardly sufficient to warrant widespread assumptions about their possession of a firearm. Interestingly, the data from 2007, which had larger samples of white students — and thus allowed for more accurate side-by-side comparisons — showed no statistically significant differences between whites and blacks when it came to weapons or gun possession, and generally higher rates of drug use by whites; likewise, the data from 2003 (which also included a sufficient size white sample to allow for comparison), shows that while black youth were slightly more likely to carry a weapon than white youth, whites were equally or more likely than black youth to use, and thus possess, drugs.

In other words, the data on New York City's youth provides very little statistical rationale for racially-disparate assumptions when it comes to such categories as weapons or drug possession: two key categories for which stops and frisks could at least theoretically be justified. Unless there is some reason to believe that the data for older New Yorkers differs dramatically from the data for youth — so for instance, unless whites in their twenties and thirties just suddenly stop doing drugs or carrying weapons, while black and brown adults continue to do so — it is hard to then justify the disparities in stop and frisk rates between whites and blacks at any age group. This is all the more true when you consider the data on drug use for adults nationally (which is likely mirrored in New York), all of which points to roughly equivalent rates of drug use (and thus, possession) between whites and blacks. Finally, given the hit rates for uncovering drugs or stolen property (defined in the Fagan research as "contraband"), it is clear that racial disparity cannot be justified in these areas: from 2004-2009, blacks searched were actually 15 percent less likely than their white counterparts to be found with contraband on them, and Latinos were 23 percent less likely than whites to possess such items when searched.

Overall, even when you control for the various non-racial variables that could explain the disproportionate stopping of blacks and Latinos by the NYPD (such as local crime levels, the demographics of the community, or the level of police saturation due to higher crime, all of which could logically explain some portion of the higher levels of contact and stops, even if there were no racial bias operating), Fagan's analysis shows that police are still far more likely to stop people of color than would be expected. For some categories of suspected crime, simply being black or Latino will make one more than twice as likely as whites to be stopped and frisked, even after these other factors have been taken into consideration. Indeed, even in mostly white neighborhoods, people of color are disproportionately stopped and searched, especially for suspected weapons possession or "trespassing."

The Cost of Racist Ignorance: How Profiling Hurts Us All

It should be understood, however, that the problems with the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policies are not merely academic, legal, or even ethical concerns. There is a practical concern as well; namely, the utilization of racially-disparate stops by the police can actually make effective crime control more difficult and detract from more promising methods for addressing the very real problem of criminal victimization.

One thing about which all persons — whether on the right or left — should be able to agree is this: even though crime rates have dropped substantially over the past 20 years, the prospects of criminal victimization are still terrifying, and understandably so. As such, we all have an interest in addressing the problem of crime, none more so than lower-income persons of color who bear the brunt of such disproportionate rates of victimization. And no doubt, such folks would, in most cases, support increased police presence in their communities. However (and it's a big however), that police presence cannot operate in an adversarial and combative way, stopping hundreds of thousands of people of color for ill-defined reasons simply because they happen to be in a "high crime area," as is so often the justification offered for stops by the NYPD. Such practices can only erode support for law enforcement and make cooperation with police in solving crimes less likely.

Currently, for instance, when people are stopped by the NYPD, even if there is no evidence of criminal wrongdoing uncovered (which is the case in roughly 94 of 100 stops), the names of the persons stopped are entered into a database, ostensibly for use in solving future crimes. As such, it is no exaggeration to say that in some New York City neighborhoods, virtually every black male is in the police database as a potential perp, even if they have never been found to have committed any crime. Such practices as this, in effect, presume that although the people stopped today may be innocent, eventually they will be guilty of something, so we'd best get their names on file now. That such a practice would never be tolerated in the suburbs (or in any white community) should be obvious. And that such a practice will almost by definition create enmity between the black and brown public and the police should be apparent as well. How such strained relationships can possibly help reduce crime in the long-run remains a mystery about which Charen and her ilk seem unconcerned.

Meanwhile, although the stops-and-frisks produce very few arrests and even fewer guns, other efforts have paid far greater dividends. For instance, the NYPD operates a program that pays cash rewards for information about persons with illegal weapons, and another that utilizes undercover investigation teams, working with confidential informants to make gun buys from traffickers and other street criminals. Unlike the stop-and-frisk efforts, these have paid off substantially. In one 18-month period from 2002-2003, the cash reward program resulted in the seizure of 455 guns and 757 arrests, from a total of 1234 anonymous tips, while the undercover gun buy initiative, and related investigative strategies utilizing CIs, recovered nearly 500 additional guns in 2002. One operation in a Brooklyn public housing project in early 2003 netted 65 guns and 36 arrests — far more successful than the stop-and-frisk initiative. Research in Chicago and Detroit has also found that focused undercover stings — which are quite a bit different than stop-and-frisk efforts — can reduce the flow of new guns to criminals by nearly 50 percent during the time of the sting operations.**

Sadly, these kinds of programs — the kinds that actually work — are likely to suffer, the more the NYPD relies on widespread stops and frisks. By sowing resentment and mistrust among the city's lower-income black and brown communities, potential informants may become reluctant to work with police, for fear that they would become targets themselves. In order to produce good CIs, police need positive relationships with the community; but with largely rookie cops being turned loose on many of the city's highest-crime communities, and treating everyone in them as a potential criminal perp, it's hard to see how those relationships can remain constructive over time.

Sadly, it is utterly predictable that persons like Mona Charen and Heather MacDonald will continue to rationalize the mistreatment of black and brown folks, evidence notwithstanding. MacDonald has made a name for herself trying miserably and amateurishly to debunk racial profiling, and Charen is, well, Charen: someone who has never once managed to decry an act of racism perpetrated against a person of color without — as in the case of the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd in Texas — turning the discussion around to supposed black hatred of white people. But despite their own denials and prevarications, the rest of us should be clear as to just how dishonest and/or fundamentally ignorant they really are.

* It should be noted here that the actual black and Latino shares of these respective crimes in NYC could be somewhat lower than these estimates suggest, and the white shares could be somewhat higher. This is because the data from the NYPD only represents those crimes where the race of the suspected perp is known or reported to them by victims or witnesses. However, research has long found that blacks and Latinos (especially blacks) are more likely than whites to report crime. Since people of color are mostly victimized by other people of color, and whites are mostly victimized by other whites, this difference in reporting would tend to underestimate the share of all crimes committed by whites and overestimate the percentage committed by blacks and Latinos. However, with that said, it is unlikely that the differences represented by those crimes that are not reported to police, or where the race of the perp is unknown would dramatically alter the bigger picture: people of color do indeed have disproportionate crime rates, relative to whites, due to the economic conditions that have long been found to be highly correlated with crime, and which also tend to be experienced disproportionately by people of color in the U.S.: namely, concentrated poverty, crowded housing, high population density, and disorganized/decaying urban landscapes.

** I want to be clear here: I realize that even these efforts, as effective as they may be, can still prove problematic. If stings or other investigative techniques are carried out by overzealous or corrupt law enforcement officers (as has certainly been documented in more than a few instances), the erosion of Constitutional liberties may end up being the cost of such efforts — certainly an unacceptable trade-off. And I also realize that given the racial and class biases in the justice system, from the point of investigation to prosecution to sentencing, even these otherwise valid techniques can contribute to an overall system that is highly flawed and in need of significant reform. That said, when it comes to the stated goals of conservatives — to get guns and drugs off the street and catch criminal perps — it is still worth noting that the methods they endorse for doing that fail in comparison to less heavy-handed (if yet still sometimes troublesome) approaches.

Tim Wise – Boston Public Health Commission Presentation (Racism and Health), 2011 (3 Parts)

Here is a three-part video of my presentation from a few months ago, at a Boston Public Health Commission Event, in which I discuss, mostly, racism and its connection to health.

Part I

Part II

Part III

Short Interview Clip, 2010: On Race/Class Connections and the Value of White Antiracist Allyship

Here's a short interview clip that I did back in 2010 at the Applied Research Center's Facing Race Conference, in Chicago. Short but pretty good discussion of the link between institutional and personal bias, the link between racial oppression and class injustice, and the importance of white allyship, historically and today

Tim Wise 092510 from Robert Gray on Vimeo.

Tim Wise on CNN (from May, 2011), discussing Donald Trump's attack on President Obama

Here is the old clip (which I didn't know had ever been made available, frankly) from CNN, in which I discussed (via telephone) Donald Trump's absurd, and frankly racist allegations about President Obama's lack of academic credentials. Dated now, but still a pretty good one…

Short Presentation on White Privilege/Racism – Austin Peay State University, 2011

Here is a short presentation on white privilege, from earlier this year at Austin Peay State University, in Clarksville, TN. Since my other WP presentation on the web is quite a bit longer, this one might be more user friendly for some folks, either for classroom or personal use. Somewhat basic 101/201 level, but still in depth enough to appeal to people with more background in these matters.

Tim Wise Interview and Speech, Edmonds Community College, May 2011

Here is an interview and full speech video from May at Edmonds Community College, in Lynwood, WA, conducted by Christine Hudyma. This interview was immediately following my lecture at the school, and explores issues ranging from my own upbringing and involvement in antiracist work, to larger matters of institutional racism, white racial resentment in the current political climate and other related issues.

Tim Wise interview with Christine Hudyma from Visual Communications, Learning on Vimeo.

And then here is the speech itself…

"Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity". from Visual Communications, Learning on Vimeo.

I'm in a David Banner Song??!! Yep…Well, at Least the You Tube Video…

New You Tube promotional clip for David Banner's latest, "SWAG," which features an intro of me speaking on the use of the n-word at Boston College in 2004…I'm not on the actual single, which you can get at iTunes, but still, it's cool being on the You Tube version…maybe it'll make the cut when he does a full-out video for the song…

Just to clarify, the last part of my statement, which gets chopped a bit by the beginning of David's lyrics, is, "if you want to fight racism, go march on a police station…"

Thanks to David Banner for putting me on here like this…