"Without Passion or Prejudice" is a relatively short piece that captures what I've been trying to say to all of America -- and it includes my idea for how to turn the tide.
Thanks John. An interesting study. I’m trying to imagine what a control group for this study looks like. Is it constituted of Non White cops talking to White members of the public? White people engaging with Non Whites in some other public service context?
A difficult study to design and interpret, to be sure. I like your ‘edginess’ argument, but can’t help but think that suspected White drug offenders will have an edginess of their own which might be revealed in a comparison between Cops’ interactions with members of White drug infested Neighbourhoods and their interactions with similar Black drug infested ones. Im sure there are gender effects as well……and so it goes. It seems that talk of racism is a minor distraction in the context of the waste of effort that is the War on Drugs.
Okay, so in general, I agree with your thesis, and there are definitely problems caused by the more aggressive versus more "genteel" communication patterns of different sub-cultures.
You can observe the same thing clearly as between working class whites and affluent whites. I am pretty sure it has always been the case in virtually all cultures that the more affluent one's class, the more polite, careful, and gracious one's speech tends to be (from a generous perspective), or if you want to look at it from another angle, the more fake, passive aggressive, and pretentious -- same thing, really. Affluent people have assets and professional networks and reputations to preserve, and therefore tend to be very careful about causing offense -- they are much more likely to be obsequiously polite to your face and tear you down behind your back. Lower class people don't have many assets to lose by causing offense, but have more incentive to preserve "face" and a reputation as tough and someone not to be messed with. So I think this pattern probably goes back to antiquity.
But here's what I don't get. Are black people actually afraid of the police or not? Because on the one hand, you constantly hear about how they view police as a literal threat to their life, and that they all have to give "the talk" to their sons, and fear for their lives in every police interaction. But then on the other, you see them sassing back and giving attitude to police, which doesn't line up with supposedly fearing them. So which is it? If all the mommas are giving their sons "the talk", how come the talk isn't taking?
I think most white people understand that when you're interacting with police, you IMMEDIATELY go into ultra-subservient, ultra-polite mode. You speak to them like you're addressing the emperor as a mere servant. You smile, you address them politely, you make no sudden moves, you immediately respond, etc. I have seen white people who get pulled over act so boot-lickingly obsequious that I actually feared the cop would take offense because it seemed like a parody and that he was being mocked (I was wrong -- it worked really well). And if a (most likely male, young, working class) white person does NOT follow these conventions, he can expect to have a very unpleasant interaction.
So how does this make sense? If white people aren't afraid of the cops, why are they the ones treating them so carefully and subserviently? And if black people ARE afraid of the cops, what's with giving them attitude? If you're actually afraid of bears, you don't poke them with a stick. Presumably despite any ingrained cultural patterns of speech, all people know how to modulate their tone and present as more deferential when necessary in the face of threat or authority.
As an aside, I once dated a black man who was 6'4", extremely well built, and very physically imposing. And I witnessed him get pulled over on no less than FOUR separate occasions and he got out of the ticket every single time! Which is astonishing, given that of the 20 or so times I've been in the car with a white driver being pulled over, I only ever saw ONE of them get out of the ticket. So what was his secret? He had an English accent and an extremely polite manner of speech. There was something about the juxtaposition between this enormous man who could clearly kick the ass of 99% of all people around him, with the extremely upper-class sounding, ultra polite English accent, that just caused everyone around him to fall all over themselves in deference to him. It was like nothing I've ever seen. I have literally never spent time in the company of any other human who so often had people bending over backwards to be nice and deferential. It was like a magical super power. Of course, English accents tend to strike Americans as sounding very charming, polite, and educated, whether or not they would sound that way in England.
So my advice to black people dealing with police: put on a British accent. And smile and say things like "Evening officer, I suppose I was driving a bit fast there, wasn't I?" with that devious little trick the Brits do where they turn declarative sentences into questions, that make them seem humble and polite at the same time, even when saying something wrong.
Haha. If only you could hear my English accent! I’m reminded of my 10 years in South Africa during the 70’s, when car speed traps were manned by police (all police were men) who would step into the road when speeding motorists drove over the twin speed detection cables stretched across the road.
Obsequious females were let off all too often. This is an anecdote- my friends and I would often accompany the police, hidden behind vegetation at the side of the road. I’ve escaped speeding fines using the technique that you described - it’s tantamount to a preemptive confession of sin, fawning before a minor public servant.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I can see that acting fawning and obsequious would take on more offensive connotations if you're black and you think it's basically kow towing to racism. Maybe that would make it harder to do, whereas when I've been pulled over and used that technique, I just felt like it was an obvious thing to do when dealing with a man with a gun and the force of law on his side, who probably at least somewhat gets off on the power trip and who is used to dealing with bad people and criminals who lie to him all day long. So I didn't feel like I was deferring to "the man" in some kind of unprincipled and unfair way, but just doing the obvious thing in the context.
I guess maybe if I thought that all cops are raging sexists who are out to screw over women any chance they get and treat them unfairly, then it might be a lot harder to swallow my pride and put on a show of deference.
If that's the case, then it is doing black drivers a major disservice to teach them that all cops are racists out to get them. If only for the reason that it is actually causing worse interactions and outcomes to occur (whether a cop is racist or not). Bottom line is that *everyone* should know that cops absolutely LOVE being treated like big powerful men, and it'll help YOU to play to that rather than fighting it. They're the only one in the situation with a gun, tater, handcuffs and the legal right to use them, so better to just treat them how they want to be treated and get yourself out of the interaction as quickly as possible.
Great comment. You said of blacks "But then on the other, you see them sassing back and giving attitude to police, which doesn't line up with supposedly fearing them." This is an important and revealing contradiction. There are other contradictions like it. For example, why don't poor kids stay in school or stay out of trouble "Because that's the only way out of the 'hood?" You expect a poor kid to be tougher than his upper-middle class peers. You do not expect him/her to be more studious or law-abiding. You can certainly imagine a poor teenager saying "I can't afford to get into trouble like some rich kid. I gotta play it straight to get ahead." But this is not what happens. The exception to this might be poor immigrant children (e.g. think of high-achieving refugees from Vietnam). I'm white and Ivy-league educated but I have two black nieces (their father was from West Africa). Both women dropped out of college to have babies by random guys. One of them lost a full 4-year scholarship. It is a deep mystery to all of us how this happened.
All that may be right, John, and I am all for ending our war on drugs. The data out of Portugal's experiment are very encouraging so far as I can see. But I still don't see why we can't teach cops about the "confrontational cadence" so that when black folks use it on them they don't react too fast or too negatively. Sandra Bland should never have had to go to jail for being a little disrespectful on the side of the road in Texas.
my proposal is that we folks need to join the police force. more blacks also need to join the police force, run for city council, state senate, +get involved in general. the biggest way to reform the police force is to change the applicants +that means we sign tf up. ppl w uni education in the liberal arts need to become police officers. plain +simple. we need to care that much +stop pretending to care by yipping. protesting means being uncomfortable +dancing in the streets isnt. being a cop is. do something.
this comment was part of a 2 paragraph response to a comment below; however i'm terribly commited to this position (+closing down all colleges of education [they're not] +ending education as a degree in favor of an academic degree) that i want to say it out loud again up here by itself coz it was buried in a thread.
I find my fellow readers' comments more insightful than John's. I am convinced that cultural differences in communication are worthy of study, by law enforcement officers and others. Look at the Sandra Bland tragedy. The police officer who pulled her over for driving in the right lane likely did so because he was annoyed and she was black. As a Texan I can assure you that this. behavior is common and technically illegal. Bland showed "attitude" after being pulled over, refused to put out her cigarette, and was hostile from the get-go. I think that there are important lessons from both sides on the initial interaction which led to imprisonment which was a huge over-response. Her family members would not pick up the phone, a common practice among the lower SES to avoid bill collectors.
I must say that I could not disagree more that "all of us use trash talking". I work in a children's hospital where all employees of all races tend towards more gentleness and kindness in language.
To end the war on drugs to reduce interaction between blacks and police is really a very silly idea. Drugs have been highly destructive in the black community. There needs to be a change in criminal behaviors as well as a more educated response by law enforcement to the community. Right now, the George Floyd backlash has led to less visibility, less law enforcement and a dramatic increase in black-on-black violence. How would a sudden end in the criminality of selling and taking drugs enhance quality education, peace and family bonds in any community?
I guess that the drug gangs that control the neighbourhood will lose their power over their community that comes from illegal businesses who have to be mean to protect their reputations. The lure of the easy money that drug deals provide must distract many young men from law abiding vocations.
Agree on decriminalization— the idea is a bad one for anything beyond pot, which should be decriminalized. Driving in the left lane without passing will get you a ticket around here whether you are black or white although agree it is hard to enforce. I know of a white guy stopped for not wearing seat belt, then got mouthy about his right to kill himself if he wants to, and then being hauled to jail for outstanding warrants. Dumb.
"The police officer who pulled her over for driving in the right lane likely did so because he was annoyed and she was black. As a Texan I can assure you that this. behavior is common and technically illegal"
Just wondering how on earth you could possibly know this.
I meant that many Texas drivers, regardless of race, drive consistently in the left lane, not that her race played a role in this officer's actions. She gave him lip and he over-reacted by escalating to resisting arrest and then a tragic series of events followed.
the video. observing behavior, attitude. like watching brett kavanaugh +knowing who he was at uni: a sexually inexperienced/inept black-out drunk who women avoided. his social incompetence left him still pulling pigtails.
ppl have patterns of behavior. in : distinction: a social critique on the judgement of taste, bourdieu points out very clearly that various groups/ classes of ppl have the same tastes, behaviours. these are visible to the discerning. sexual ineptitude is often visible without having sex w the subject: we know not to. +the charges didn't turn out to be false; there were many more. if you mean i don't know the man personally yes, youre right there but i do know him by his actions. many of us do. we saw him attack ppl who werent involved. many many telling things. sorry that you are uncomfortable w me using him as an example but there is very much to be gleaned from his performance.
So rude, aggressive, insulting, "confrontational" speech is just fine? And everybody else better get used to it??? Officers are exposed to this every single day. McWhorter would better serve our country by focusing on the depressing regularity of drive-by's and "confrontational" shootings in our urban zones. 60 people were shot, 10 killed in Chicago this weekend. LEO's are keenly aware of real life.
I think Professor McWhorter was trying to relay that this type of communication is a norm in black culture and that it might help if police training included discussion of this tendency so that cops who are unfamiliar with black culture wouldn't take it personally or perceive it as threatening. It's a norm in other cultures as well - Italian comes to mind and sometimes Jewish culture. Sometimes Latin culture. It's not necessarily rude either it depends on the situation and setting. It might just be loud and boisterous, colorful, excited, gregarious.
Norms vary across cultures and contexts. And there is no one right answer. Politesse has its place but sometimes truth is better. It just depends.
I'm quite familiar with "confrontational" speech. It's rude, insulting, and aggressive. Most people are able to modify their interactions according to circumstance. But some choose to intentionally provoke LEO's. And the real life statistics regarding violent crime committed by a very small minority population are known to everyone. A chip on your shoulder is not an asset. It's a detriment.
New subscriber, first comment. My big take-away from this piece is the idea of "confrontational cadence." I've noticed it a lot recently. On TV black characters always seem to be scolding each other, using this tone. I've also known Caribbean immigrants who talk this way. This is the kind of mini-cultural disconnect that can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings. To cite another example-- when sitting on a bus in South Africa I noticed the man next to me had his entire thigh flat up against mine. Turns out personal body space is very different for Africans vs. Europeans. I asked a (black) South African about it. He said: "When we try to talk to white people, they step away." I.e. they aren't comfortable with people standing so close. This of course leads to a conclusion that "White people aren't friendly, they step back."
Social Science is tough to do well. So many bloody variables and the lingering suspicion of readers that the conclusion comes first, fuelled by the self fulfilling prophecy.
Interesting paragraphs on constrained and unconstrained views of human nature to help explain Dr. McWhorter's reasoning on antiracism. I have not run into those terms previously, and honestly, I am a little wary of dividing the world into two halves. On the other hand, I haven't read enough about this take on human nature to have an informed opinion. It is certainly food for thought. As for traffic stops and black men, I can't weigh in -- I am a middle-aged white woman and pretty much switch into very polite, ultra-cooperative mode when I am stopped for a traffic infraction. That seems the most prudent approach. I have some girlfriends who have batted their eye lashes at the police officer and escaped without a ticket. I'm not good at that, and sadly, I almost always get a ticket. I generally deserve it though.
Sorry, can't stop myself: Louisiana Highway Patrol stops a woman for speeding. She says, "I'll bet you want to sell me a ticket to the Louisiana State Troopers' Ball." Cop says: "Louisiana State Troopers don't have balls." Pause. "Have a good day, ma'am."
I just subscribed to this forum, and this is my first post here.
As a long-time reader/listener of John McWhorter, and as one who admires him and his writing, and has a very extensive academic/professional background in social science statistics, I was struck by the headline of this article. I felt compelled to sign up and offer a mild rebuttal. In my view, John's conclusion is correct, but his evaluation of the article is way off the mark.
The article John cites "The Thin Blue Waveform" (hereafter referred to as TTBW21) does not *begin* to show "racism," at least in the classic sense. Do to its methodological shortcomings, it is difficult to say with precision exactly what TTBW21 does show. John's reaction to the article demonstrates the very human tendency to overgeneralize a set of very minor (possibly meaningless) results into something of genuine significance.
Let's take a close look at the methodology. In any such study, the key questions are (a) what is the population, (b) what is the sampling procedure, (c) what measures were taken, (d) what procedures were used to protect against experimenter bias, and (e) how strong were the results. I'll be selective in analyzing these.
Start with the research population. This can be crucial in a study of this type. How was the population selected, and what can we say about it?
Here we have to be doubly careful. There is a tendency to snooze a bit when reading an article's "method section," especially when the topic is one of great substantive interest. It is easy to fall into "benefit of the doubt reading," i.e., the reader assumes without evidence that the experimenter did the correct thing. Classic examples: (a) the reader assumes random sampling when it did not in fact occur, and (b) the reader assumes that the selection of experimental subjects ("participants") was done by people who were unaware of the purpose of the experiment.
Quite often, when something is not stated in a social psychology article, it is because the experimenters did *not* do the right thing, often because the right thing takes more work. True random sampling by workers who are unaware of the purpose of the experiment takes more work.
On page 3 of TTBW21, we are given virtually no information about the research population. They say they grabbed conversations "in a medium-sized U.S. city." Note, we have no idea what the racial mixture of this unnamed city is. That turns out to be important.
The authors started with a pool of conversations from "routine" traffic stops not resulting in an arrest." There were 180 White males and 433 Black males stopped. 70.6% of the stops were Black males. What do those numbers tell us? Without knowing more about the city and its population, we're completely at sea. Suppose, for example, this is a city that is 70% Black, 30% White. Then there is a kind of proportionality. On the other hand, suppose this city is 70% White and only 30% Black. Then Black drivers are heavily overrepresented. We are told the racial composition of the police officers. Less than half are White, and less than 1 in 5 is Black.
Suppose Black drivers are overrepresented. Is it because they were, on average, driving faster than White male drivers? (Some previous studies have found this.) If a White driver is doing 69 in a 55 mph zone, and the Black driver is doing 90, perhaps the greater tension in the officer's voice has nothing to do with race.
All we know is that 70% of the drivers stopped were Black. We are then told that a subset of the 180 White and 433 Black conversations were selected to be in the study. 100 Black and 100 White. WE ARE NOT TOLD HOW THEY WERE SELECTED. The temptation is to believe the sampling was random. Suppose it wasn't? Anyone with experience in the social sciences can tell you myriad ways that the person doing the selecting might have biased the study, unless certain precautions
were taken.
What about the measures? There were a couple of items using a 6 point Likert scale, ranging from 1 to 6. (very cold to very warm). So a mean score of 3.5 would be right in the middle, i.e., lukewarm.
What about the results? From a practical standpoint, the results are miniscule! The average response to a Black driver is judged as lukewarm (about 3.5) and the average response to a White driver is judges slightly warmer than lukewarm (about 3.7). This is judged statistically significant. If the study had been done properly, we would still conclude that this is not microaggression, it is nanoaggression.
Unfortunately, this study eliminates all information about what took place prior to the interactions between police and drivers. What were the drivers stopped for? How did they respond when first approached? Without this information, here is what we can conclude:
A truly trivial difference in "prosody" was found in a study that did not control for severity of offense or race of officer. On average, police respond with "lukewarm" prosody to both White and Black drivers, slightly warmer toward Whites. Without the proper controls, we have no idea what this means.
..."a study that did not control for severity of offense or race of officer. " ...
True? If so, I then wonder if researchers who did not bother with such a control bothered to control for the class/income/social status of those stopped.
"Interaction effects" (for example, between race of officer, race of driver, and prosody) are both inconvenient (to simplistic interpretations) and generally are assessed with much lower statistical power than main effects (race of driver compiled across all police officers).
So it might be that officers of one race are primarily responsible for the tiny difference in prosody observed here, but we have no way of knowing that. Class, income, social status, and *age* of driver might all have an impact, and in some cases the impact might be counterintuitive.
Out of curiosity, have you done a close reading of Roland Fryer's work on police shootings? Several friends of mine have remarked that it is easily debunked -- but never bothered to elaborate. And in John's recent interview with Scott Barry Kaufman, the latter made a similar claim, again without specifics.
I would be grateful for someone with your credentials to weigh in.
I started reading two of Fryer's articles this morning. I haven't gotten to the meat of the technical work, but I'm immediately struck by what appear to be very questionable statements in the introduction sections of the articles.
For example, in his article "Reconciling Results on Racial Differences in Police Shootings," Fryer states that "One in every sixty-five --- or 1.5 percent --- deaths of a
black man in the US is a killing by police." This is off by an order of magnitude!! For example, the Guardian's database at
states that 307 black males were killed by police in 2015. This is roughly 0.15 percent of the black male population, NOT 1.5%. So it isn't one in every sixty-five, it is one out of every 650. And that is a very substantial difference. The LA Times ran an article saying the number was 1 in 1000.
Let me emphasize that all productive academicians have errors in print, and some are truly embarrassing. I'll probably email Fryer and let him know about this one.
I was more disturbed by the Fryer's errors of omission in his description of some well-known deaths at the hands of police in his article titled "An Empirical Analysis of Racial Difference in Police Use of Force." Fryer wrote
--------
Michael Brown, unarmed, was shot twelve times by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, after Brown fit the description of a robbery suspect of a nearby store. Eric Garner, unarmed, was approached because officers believed he was selling single cigarettes from packs without tax stamps and in the process of arresting him an officer choked him and he died.
----------
Consider the Brown case. Anyone familiar with the case knows that Fryer left out numerous facts that led to the inescapable conclusion that the shooting was justified.
Specifically, Brown attacked the police officer, attempting to grab his gun, got shot in the process, and when the office pursued him, he charged the officer. A 6'5", 290 pound man acting violently and completely irrationally was charging the officer. Initial accounts of this incident portrayed Brown as a "gentle giant." Then video of Brown bullying a store clerk half his size emerged.
These kinds of misleading accounts abound. A particularly egregious one is in Jill Lepore's popular history of America "These Truths," in which she presents a brief account of the Trayvon Martin tragedy. Her one paragraph account of the incident contains 3 obvious errors of fact, 4 errors of omission, and 3 questionable characterizations. If anyone's interested, I'll post a detailed analysis.
Comment on Jill Lepore's treatment of the Trayvon Martin tragedy in her book, "These Truths"
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The most fundamental obligation of an historian is to get the facts right. So much the better if the historian can do this with style, verve, and wisdom. Although Lepore partially succeeds on the latter goals, she sometimes stumbles badly on the former. The errors are egregious and, for a Pulitzer Prize winning historian, difficult to forgive.
Consider a particularly vexing example. The shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman was a major event with dramatic consequences. Here is Lepore's 5-sentence account of the fatal encounter.
====== (p. 763)
On February 26, 2012, in a national atmosphere of racial incitement, a twenty-eight-year-old man named George Zimmerman, prowling around the neighborhood outside Orlando, Florida, called 911 to report seeing “a real suspicious guy." He’d seen seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was walking to a nearby store. Zimmerman got out of his car and shot Martin, who was unarmed, with a 9mm handgun. Zimmerman told the police that Martin attacked him. Zimmerman weighed 250 pounds; Martin weighed 140. Martin’s family said that the boy, heard over a cellphone, had begged for his life.
======
Readers unfamiliar with the facts of the case would naturally conjure up an image of a slight (140 pound, age 17) youth, begging for his life, summarily executed ("got out of his car and shot Martin") by a hulkingly brutish (250 pound, age 28) Zimmerman who was just "prowling around" looking for someone to shoot. This was, indeed, the kind of view promoted by activists like Al Sharpton and media outlets like CNN and MSNBC.
Yet this view is indisputably wrong. Within the short paragraph we find:
Errors of fact:
1. Martin was not "walking to a nearby store" when Zimmerman spotted him. He had left the store after purchasing Skittles and iced tea there. He was on the way home, but despite the weather, did not seem to be walking home purposefully.
2. Zimmerman did not weigh 250, or even close to it. Police documents state his weight at 200 the night of the incident, 185 the night of his arrest. These may be estimates. While incarcerated prior to trial, Zimmerman gained a very substantial amount of weight.
3. Martin did not weigh anywhere near 140. At autopsy, Martin was 5'11 and 158 without clothing and hours postmortem. Rather than painting an accurate picture of an athletic 5'11" 160-165 pound Martin facing off with a 5'7" 185-200 adult, Lepore presents erroneous facts designed to create a rather different picture.
Errors of omission:
1. Martin was at his father's house serving a 10-day suspension from high school for a drug offense. He was not the 12 year old shown in the only picture disseminated for days after the event.
2. Zimmerman was the coordinator of a Neighborhood Watch administered by the local police. He wasn't just a random guy "prowling around the neighborhood." His neighborhood had been plagued by a variety of crimes. Police had been called from there 402 times in the period from January 2011 to February 2012!
3. Zimmerman, ignoring a suggestion from the police, got out of his car and attempted to pursue Martin. After about 4 minutes, a physical confrontation occurred. Zimmerman claims Martin came out of the shadows, confronted him, then jumped him. During an ensuing struggle, Zimmerman received several head injuries. A gun discharged around 17:16:55 and Martin was killed by one bullet to the chest. The pathway was through a shirt that was hanging down, suggesting (the defense contended) that Martin was on top of Zimmerman. Lepore never mentions the struggle, or that a witness testified to seeing Martin on top of Zimmerman.
4. Despite the Martin family claims, there is no clear evidence that Martin "begged for his life." You can definitely hear someone yelling for help on a recording, but experts and witnesses disagree whether it was Zimmerman or Martin. Lepore fails to mention that detective and lead investigator Chris Serino testified at trial that when Martin's father, Tracy Martin, listened to the screaming on the 9-1-1 call he became "emotional" and said that the voice did not sound like his son's.
Mischaracterization:
1. Lepore states that the Martin-Zimmerman confrontation occurred "in a national atmosphere of racial incitement," a statement apparently designed to cast negative aspersions on Zimmerman's motivation. Yet she provides not a shred of evidence to support her characterizaion of the "national atmosphere." What "racial incitement" is she talking about? Didn't America just elect (and shortly thereafter reelect) its first African American President?
2. Lepore fails to indict the role of the media in deliberately distorting and sensationalizing the facts of the Martin-Zimmerman case.
3. She fails to discuss the massive loss of life and property directly or indirectly attributable to Black Lives Matter and the "Ferguson effect."
Lepore is entitled to her own interpretation of history, but she is not entitled to her own facts. After reading her account of the Martin-Zimmerman affair, I'm forced to wonder whether similar levels of factual inaccuracy and "strategic incompleteness" pervade her entire "history."
Thanks. That was an egregiously false and irresponsible account by Lepore, an author I hadnt heard of till now.
In your Errors of Omission, #3, I'd add that the 911 dispatcher told GZ not to pursue TM, and he then turned back toward his truck. Then it was stated by Rachel that TM was on the phone with her (Was it her, or was he talking to Diamond? I cant recall) and said something to the effect that this creepy guy had followed him and he was going back to confront him. She said, Be careful, some sort of warning. There was very good evidence using the timing of the 911 call by GM and then the time the fight and screams for help were heard, when 911 was called by the neighbors, which showed that too much time had passed to support that Trayvon had just been going toward home, hadnt circled back, when they had the encounter. In fact, by the time it happened, it was determined he should have been home by then or close to home. And the screams, I am confident, were from Zimmerman - You reminded me of what the dad originally said, that it wasnt Trayvon's voice. The neighbors saw the guy on top beating the guy below, heard repeated screams for help. GZ's head and nose wounds support that he was on the bottom getting beaten. TM was shot bc he was beating him, and allegedly, according to GZ, making verbal threats to kill him. This scenario makes sense: GZ was getting beaten badly, feared he'd be killed or at least badly injured, and used his gun in self defense.
Thanks very much for the additional information. The 2-hour YouTube video "The Trayvon Hoax" provided many additional layers to my understanding of this event. I keep asking myself, "How can Benjamin Crump still be practicing law? Why is Ms. Jenteal not charged with fraud?" Then again, we could ask the same kinds of questions about Al Sharpton.
the martin/zimmerman thing. yikes! john +glenn dialogued a couple times on the hoax thing +still i know of no journalist who's bothered to look into this thing. have you studied the hoax bit? so much info. i just recentlys finished the documentary so long after john/glenns podcasts on it +wow. laws of mercy. i cant help but notice that martins mother looks different at every gathering no. she doesnt appear to want to be there +not for the obvious reasons. whats says you? will no one speak on this?
Thanks, yes, there was what appears to be a hoax perpetrated on the court.
In an surprising turn of events, evidence surfaced that Martin's family and legal counsel perpetuated a hoax on the court during Zimmerman's trial. A $100,000,000 lawsuit by Zimmerman charged that Martin was actually on the phone with "Diamond Eugene," not the Rachel Jenteal who testified during the trial. Jenteal was deliberately substituted in a fraud upon the court.
There is a 2-hour movie, "The Trayvon Hoax," on YouTube, produced by Joel Gilbert, who also published a book on the topic.
The Trayvon Martin "experience" blows my mind. It was further blown by the documentary about the hoax, which I saw after learning of it from the 2 Glenn/John talks about the case, the phenomenon. I found the Rachel/Diamond hoax was disturbing too in that it was perpetuated in a court of law, now exposed, but not a peep, not a repercussion. Still, while shocking, it seemed all of a piece with the whole she-bang. The initial and most impactful blowing of my mind came from simply watching the entire trial on Court TV. Without all the media hype, the vilifying of Zimmerman and saint-making of Trayvon, the overblown narratives pushed outside the courtroom, and with the story unfolding in such clear evidentiary detail, it was obvious to me why the jury acquitted Zimmerman.
It was nothing like what you heard in the MSM or from the flood of outraged protesters - each of those groups both feeding the other and feasting on them. Not only that, but if you dug around a bit online you found a lot of info about Trayvon that showed he was not just this sweet hoodie kid buying skittles and iced tea. He was a kid who got in a lot of trouble, was raring to physically fight people and did; was implicated in a theft ring with others at school; was looking to get a gun; was out of school on one of several suspensions, smoking pot a lot more than hitting the books (He was temporarily staying with his dad - his mom had shipped him out due to this last suspension.)
And YET... there it was, several years later: Hillary campaigning for Prez, reverently holding hands in a circle with black mothers of kids killed by cops, and there was Trayvon's mom in the circle, and there was Trayvon's name making all of those lists of black kids names we were exhorted to remember, who were killed by cops.
EXCEPT - Trayvon wasnt killed by a cop. Zimmerman was never a cop. And, well, there were all those pesky myth-busters from the trial. Like how TM circled back to confront Zimmerman when he was already walking back to his truck and not following TM, as clueless commentators authoritatively claimed. We learned how he went up to GZ, threatened him, threw him down on the concrete walkway, sat on top of him and was repeatedly bashing his head into the concrete. Neighbor eyewitnesses (the action being a few yards from their sliding glass doors), could see the beating, hear GZ's multiple screams for HELP! This audio was played in court, captured on a neighbor's 911 call. Fellow tenants testified that GZ was a good and helpful neighbor who cared about the crime that had been hitting their complex. They had had some scary break ins lately, and by young, black men, as I recall. One woman testified how she'd hid upstairs in total fear, holding her infant, as 2 guys broke into her house in broad daylight. GZ helped her a lot afterward, as she told it, w tips and support.
Anyway, it went on like this, truth rolling out and washing away bits of spun fiction day after day. It was SO different, the news stories and the facts. Even after the trial, the media chose to stick to their Crump-ian narratives and endless virtue signaling, not bothering to insert some of the countervailing facts from the trial into their chatter. They like it hot.
Guess I'll end this long rant by saying, those 2 Trayvon talks by Glenn/John were quite something - really worth a trip into archives (good ole bloggingheads, I guess) I mean, it seemed to take them some preliminary baby steps, a sort of cautious warming up, just to eventually wade into those waters... and w good reason! I mean, I watched in dismay as Zimmerman's own top notch lawyer, Mark O'Mara, sheepishly did an awkward mea culpa about his own stellar performance! It seemed he did this to appease the piranhas in the school of mad woke that feed in our public square. I think he is a pretty decent guy and it got to him, the constant vilification. This was a minefield for anyone to tread.
So chapeaux & kudos to John & Glenn for what I see as an intrepid public examination of the Trayvon Martin story, something rarely attempted. It's a tragic funhouse of distortion, which I find to be a prime example of how bone-deep stupid and self-damaging our society can too often be. I sometimes marvel that we havent yet completely sunk ourselves under the weight of our own stupidity.
yes thats what i was referring to w/out typing it all out. i watched the trial bcoz i wanted to know why of course +found my answer in rachel's testimony. lord lord there could be no guilty verdict w the case as presented +her as the star witness. like wha? i wonder who pushed this: the lawyer or the parents. the mother doesnt appear to be all in, you know?
even rachels deposition: the guilt. the guilt i aint no know nuthing abt it. aint know nuthin abt it.
or something like that. seems somebody should have seen that rachel was not very interested in testifying +wouldn't be a strong witness on the stand +shut that down case. i wonder was it public pressure? ye olde social media? jesus i suppose we'll not soon get an interview w diamond. +that letter!! oh lord. too much
To be fair, the facts around Ferguson evolved over time, and I'm not sure of the date of publication of the article you are reading. However, errors aside, Fryer ultimately concludes that while racial bias appears to be at play in non-lethal encounters with the cops, it is *not* a factor in acts of lethal force, which, of course, is contrary to the dominant narrative and indeed was not what he himself expected to find.
While this conclusion makes intuitive sense to me insofar as I understand his basic argument, I'd be interested to hear more of your analysis as you dig into the technical meat of his work.
Thanks. You raised an important issue, which I think can be dismissed on the following grounds: Brown was shot in 2014, the Obama DOJ completed its investigation clearing the shooter in early 2015, and Fryer's article is dated July, 2017. All the facts were widely reported.
I agree that someone of Fryer's stature effectively promulgating poetic truths like "hands up, don't shoot" is quite troubling (especially when I am citing his work to argue against that very thing!)
Once again, an excellent piece. In my won 2016 book, "Survival: The Economic Foundations of American National Security," I touch on this question of how to reduce negative interactions between the Black community and the police. The suggestion I offered, based on research and my own experience working on similar ideas in Iraq, was to transition to a more cashless economy. The evidence is pretty strong that such a move can reduce the kind of crime that leads to these negative interactions by as much as half.
Excellent piece. I work in an organization that has both professors and serving and former military officers. These groups have very different rules of communication. As a member of both groups, I often trip on this. For example, telling a young new hire assistant professor that her lecture was the worst I ever heard did not go down well with her. Even though I deeply supported hiring her and regard her as having immense promise as a faculty member. All I had wanted to do was to convey to her how far off she was from the required teaching standard, something that had not surprised me in the least given her lack of teaching experience.
I very much appreciate John's thinking and writing. I often daydream about having a cocktail and a cigar with him and Glenn Loury and not speaking a word. I would be interested if these studies John refers to about "confrontation cadence" show a correlation, or maybe even causation, between it and the unusually high rate of black on black violence. Might we be ignoring an elephant in the room? If words are the only thing that stand between us and war, it seems painfully obvious that a "confrontational cadence" between two people who likely don't read nearly enough history might regularly escalate their words into more violent behavior. I think correlating this phenomenon mostly to the war on drugs is probably not accurate, and likely not preserving as many black lives as could otherwise be preserved???
Secondly, I agree that the war on drugs has been a magnificent disaster. I also believe that, on balance, modern medicine has also been a magnificent disaster because, it too, has killed far more people than it has saved. Having said that, both of these magnificent disasters appear to be our best choices because nobody has put forth better alternatives that can be scalable to a level that would outperform either of these two magnificent disasters.
Thank you John. You're doing our world a great service!
"Without Passion or Prejudice" is a relatively short piece that captures what I've been trying to say to all of America -- and it includes my idea for how to turn the tide.
However impossible it may seem -- it can be done.
As Tom Hanks said in Apollo 13 about landing on the moon: "It's not a miracle, we just decided to go": https://onevoicebecametwo.life/2021/08/03/without-passion-or-prejudice/
Thanks John. An interesting study. I’m trying to imagine what a control group for this study looks like. Is it constituted of Non White cops talking to White members of the public? White people engaging with Non Whites in some other public service context?
A difficult study to design and interpret, to be sure. I like your ‘edginess’ argument, but can’t help but think that suspected White drug offenders will have an edginess of their own which might be revealed in a comparison between Cops’ interactions with members of White drug infested Neighbourhoods and their interactions with similar Black drug infested ones. Im sure there are gender effects as well……and so it goes. It seems that talk of racism is a minor distraction in the context of the waste of effort that is the War on Drugs.
Okay, so in general, I agree with your thesis, and there are definitely problems caused by the more aggressive versus more "genteel" communication patterns of different sub-cultures.
You can observe the same thing clearly as between working class whites and affluent whites. I am pretty sure it has always been the case in virtually all cultures that the more affluent one's class, the more polite, careful, and gracious one's speech tends to be (from a generous perspective), or if you want to look at it from another angle, the more fake, passive aggressive, and pretentious -- same thing, really. Affluent people have assets and professional networks and reputations to preserve, and therefore tend to be very careful about causing offense -- they are much more likely to be obsequiously polite to your face and tear you down behind your back. Lower class people don't have many assets to lose by causing offense, but have more incentive to preserve "face" and a reputation as tough and someone not to be messed with. So I think this pattern probably goes back to antiquity.
But here's what I don't get. Are black people actually afraid of the police or not? Because on the one hand, you constantly hear about how they view police as a literal threat to their life, and that they all have to give "the talk" to their sons, and fear for their lives in every police interaction. But then on the other, you see them sassing back and giving attitude to police, which doesn't line up with supposedly fearing them. So which is it? If all the mommas are giving their sons "the talk", how come the talk isn't taking?
I think most white people understand that when you're interacting with police, you IMMEDIATELY go into ultra-subservient, ultra-polite mode. You speak to them like you're addressing the emperor as a mere servant. You smile, you address them politely, you make no sudden moves, you immediately respond, etc. I have seen white people who get pulled over act so boot-lickingly obsequious that I actually feared the cop would take offense because it seemed like a parody and that he was being mocked (I was wrong -- it worked really well). And if a (most likely male, young, working class) white person does NOT follow these conventions, he can expect to have a very unpleasant interaction.
So how does this make sense? If white people aren't afraid of the cops, why are they the ones treating them so carefully and subserviently? And if black people ARE afraid of the cops, what's with giving them attitude? If you're actually afraid of bears, you don't poke them with a stick. Presumably despite any ingrained cultural patterns of speech, all people know how to modulate their tone and present as more deferential when necessary in the face of threat or authority.
As an aside, I once dated a black man who was 6'4", extremely well built, and very physically imposing. And I witnessed him get pulled over on no less than FOUR separate occasions and he got out of the ticket every single time! Which is astonishing, given that of the 20 or so times I've been in the car with a white driver being pulled over, I only ever saw ONE of them get out of the ticket. So what was his secret? He had an English accent and an extremely polite manner of speech. There was something about the juxtaposition between this enormous man who could clearly kick the ass of 99% of all people around him, with the extremely upper-class sounding, ultra polite English accent, that just caused everyone around him to fall all over themselves in deference to him. It was like nothing I've ever seen. I have literally never spent time in the company of any other human who so often had people bending over backwards to be nice and deferential. It was like a magical super power. Of course, English accents tend to strike Americans as sounding very charming, polite, and educated, whether or not they would sound that way in England.
So my advice to black people dealing with police: put on a British accent. And smile and say things like "Evening officer, I suppose I was driving a bit fast there, wasn't I?" with that devious little trick the Brits do where they turn declarative sentences into questions, that make them seem humble and polite at the same time, even when saying something wrong.
Haha. If only you could hear my English accent! I’m reminded of my 10 years in South Africa during the 70’s, when car speed traps were manned by police (all police were men) who would step into the road when speeding motorists drove over the twin speed detection cables stretched across the road.
Obsequious females were let off all too often. This is an anecdote- my friends and I would often accompany the police, hidden behind vegetation at the side of the road. I’ve escaped speeding fines using the technique that you described - it’s tantamount to a preemptive confession of sin, fawning before a minor public servant.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I can see that acting fawning and obsequious would take on more offensive connotations if you're black and you think it's basically kow towing to racism. Maybe that would make it harder to do, whereas when I've been pulled over and used that technique, I just felt like it was an obvious thing to do when dealing with a man with a gun and the force of law on his side, who probably at least somewhat gets off on the power trip and who is used to dealing with bad people and criminals who lie to him all day long. So I didn't feel like I was deferring to "the man" in some kind of unprincipled and unfair way, but just doing the obvious thing in the context.
I guess maybe if I thought that all cops are raging sexists who are out to screw over women any chance they get and treat them unfairly, then it might be a lot harder to swallow my pride and put on a show of deference.
If that's the case, then it is doing black drivers a major disservice to teach them that all cops are racists out to get them. If only for the reason that it is actually causing worse interactions and outcomes to occur (whether a cop is racist or not). Bottom line is that *everyone* should know that cops absolutely LOVE being treated like big powerful men, and it'll help YOU to play to that rather than fighting it. They're the only one in the situation with a gun, tater, handcuffs and the legal right to use them, so better to just treat them how they want to be treated and get yourself out of the interaction as quickly as possible.
Great comment. You said of blacks "But then on the other, you see them sassing back and giving attitude to police, which doesn't line up with supposedly fearing them." This is an important and revealing contradiction. There are other contradictions like it. For example, why don't poor kids stay in school or stay out of trouble "Because that's the only way out of the 'hood?" You expect a poor kid to be tougher than his upper-middle class peers. You do not expect him/her to be more studious or law-abiding. You can certainly imagine a poor teenager saying "I can't afford to get into trouble like some rich kid. I gotta play it straight to get ahead." But this is not what happens. The exception to this might be poor immigrant children (e.g. think of high-achieving refugees from Vietnam). I'm white and Ivy-league educated but I have two black nieces (their father was from West Africa). Both women dropped out of college to have babies by random guys. One of them lost a full 4-year scholarship. It is a deep mystery to all of us how this happened.
All that may be right, John, and I am all for ending our war on drugs. The data out of Portugal's experiment are very encouraging so far as I can see. But I still don't see why we can't teach cops about the "confrontational cadence" so that when black folks use it on them they don't react too fast or too negatively. Sandra Bland should never have had to go to jail for being a little disrespectful on the side of the road in Texas.
my proposal is that we folks need to join the police force. more blacks also need to join the police force, run for city council, state senate, +get involved in general. the biggest way to reform the police force is to change the applicants +that means we sign tf up. ppl w uni education in the liberal arts need to become police officers. plain +simple. we need to care that much +stop pretending to care by yipping. protesting means being uncomfortable +dancing in the streets isnt. being a cop is. do something.
this comment was part of a 2 paragraph response to a comment below; however i'm terribly commited to this position (+closing down all colleges of education [they're not] +ending education as a degree in favor of an academic degree) that i want to say it out loud again up here by itself coz it was buried in a thread.
I meant that she was driving in the left lane.
I find my fellow readers' comments more insightful than John's. I am convinced that cultural differences in communication are worthy of study, by law enforcement officers and others. Look at the Sandra Bland tragedy. The police officer who pulled her over for driving in the right lane likely did so because he was annoyed and she was black. As a Texan I can assure you that this. behavior is common and technically illegal. Bland showed "attitude" after being pulled over, refused to put out her cigarette, and was hostile from the get-go. I think that there are important lessons from both sides on the initial interaction which led to imprisonment which was a huge over-response. Her family members would not pick up the phone, a common practice among the lower SES to avoid bill collectors.
I must say that I could not disagree more that "all of us use trash talking". I work in a children's hospital where all employees of all races tend towards more gentleness and kindness in language.
To end the war on drugs to reduce interaction between blacks and police is really a very silly idea. Drugs have been highly destructive in the black community. There needs to be a change in criminal behaviors as well as a more educated response by law enforcement to the community. Right now, the George Floyd backlash has led to less visibility, less law enforcement and a dramatic increase in black-on-black violence. How would a sudden end in the criminality of selling and taking drugs enhance quality education, peace and family bonds in any community?
Thanks for all the provocation.
I guess that the drug gangs that control the neighbourhood will lose their power over their community that comes from illegal businesses who have to be mean to protect their reputations. The lure of the easy money that drug deals provide must distract many young men from law abiding vocations.
Driving in the left should be a ticketing offense. It contributes significantly to unsafe driving conditions.
I am amazed at your ability to see into other people’s souls. I’m sure NSA could use your services.
Yes a ticketed advice, not jail for indeterminate length of time.
Agree on decriminalization— the idea is a bad one for anything beyond pot, which should be decriminalized. Driving in the left lane without passing will get you a ticket around here whether you are black or white although agree it is hard to enforce. I know of a white guy stopped for not wearing seat belt, then got mouthy about his right to kill himself if he wants to, and then being hauled to jail for outstanding warrants. Dumb.
"The police officer who pulled her over for driving in the right lane likely did so because he was annoyed and she was black. As a Texan I can assure you that this. behavior is common and technically illegal"
Just wondering how on earth you could possibly know this.
I meant that many Texas drivers, regardless of race, drive consistently in the left lane, not that her race played a role in this officer's actions. She gave him lip and he over-reacted by escalating to resisting arrest and then a tragic series of events followed.
the video. observing behavior, attitude. like watching brett kavanaugh +knowing who he was at uni: a sexually inexperienced/inept black-out drunk who women avoided. his social incompetence left him still pulling pigtails.
You know nothing about him. The charges leveled against turned out to be false. But go ahead with your conspiracy bull.
ppl have patterns of behavior. in : distinction: a social critique on the judgement of taste, bourdieu points out very clearly that various groups/ classes of ppl have the same tastes, behaviours. these are visible to the discerning. sexual ineptitude is often visible without having sex w the subject: we know not to. +the charges didn't turn out to be false; there were many more. if you mean i don't know the man personally yes, youre right there but i do know him by his actions. many of us do. we saw him attack ppl who werent involved. many many telling things. sorry that you are uncomfortable w me using him as an example but there is very much to be gleaned from his performance.
Utter baloney. The charges were false. Zero evidence supporting the charges was presented. Typical leftist smear tactics.
And Thomas Sowell was 100% correct
So rude, aggressive, insulting, "confrontational" speech is just fine? And everybody else better get used to it??? Officers are exposed to this every single day. McWhorter would better serve our country by focusing on the depressing regularity of drive-by's and "confrontational" shootings in our urban zones. 60 people were shot, 10 killed in Chicago this weekend. LEO's are keenly aware of real life.
I think Professor McWhorter was trying to relay that this type of communication is a norm in black culture and that it might help if police training included discussion of this tendency so that cops who are unfamiliar with black culture wouldn't take it personally or perceive it as threatening. It's a norm in other cultures as well - Italian comes to mind and sometimes Jewish culture. Sometimes Latin culture. It's not necessarily rude either it depends on the situation and setting. It might just be loud and boisterous, colorful, excited, gregarious.
Norms vary across cultures and contexts. And there is no one right answer. Politesse has its place but sometimes truth is better. It just depends.
I'm quite familiar with "confrontational" speech. It's rude, insulting, and aggressive. Most people are able to modify their interactions according to circumstance. But some choose to intentionally provoke LEO's. And the real life statistics regarding violent crime committed by a very small minority population are known to everyone. A chip on your shoulder is not an asset. It's a detriment.
New subscriber, first comment. My big take-away from this piece is the idea of "confrontational cadence." I've noticed it a lot recently. On TV black characters always seem to be scolding each other, using this tone. I've also known Caribbean immigrants who talk this way. This is the kind of mini-cultural disconnect that can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings. To cite another example-- when sitting on a bus in South Africa I noticed the man next to me had his entire thigh flat up against mine. Turns out personal body space is very different for Africans vs. Europeans. I asked a (black) South African about it. He said: "When we try to talk to white people, they step away." I.e. they aren't comfortable with people standing so close. This of course leads to a conclusion that "White people aren't friendly, they step back."
I hate junk social-science. And we're obliged to get used to more and more of it, not less and less.
Social Science is tough to do well. So many bloody variables and the lingering suspicion of readers that the conclusion comes first, fuelled by the self fulfilling prophecy.
Interesting paragraphs on constrained and unconstrained views of human nature to help explain Dr. McWhorter's reasoning on antiracism. I have not run into those terms previously, and honestly, I am a little wary of dividing the world into two halves. On the other hand, I haven't read enough about this take on human nature to have an informed opinion. It is certainly food for thought. As for traffic stops and black men, I can't weigh in -- I am a middle-aged white woman and pretty much switch into very polite, ultra-cooperative mode when I am stopped for a traffic infraction. That seems the most prudent approach. I have some girlfriends who have batted their eye lashes at the police officer and escaped without a ticket. I'm not good at that, and sadly, I almost always get a ticket. I generally deserve it though.
Sorry, can't stop myself: Louisiana Highway Patrol stops a woman for speeding. She says, "I'll bet you want to sell me a ticket to the Louisiana State Troopers' Ball." Cop says: "Louisiana State Troopers don't have balls." Pause. "Have a good day, ma'am."
I just subscribed to this forum, and this is my first post here.
As a long-time reader/listener of John McWhorter, and as one who admires him and his writing, and has a very extensive academic/professional background in social science statistics, I was struck by the headline of this article. I felt compelled to sign up and offer a mild rebuttal. In my view, John's conclusion is correct, but his evaluation of the article is way off the mark.
The article John cites "The Thin Blue Waveform" (hereafter referred to as TTBW21) does not *begin* to show "racism," at least in the classic sense. Do to its methodological shortcomings, it is difficult to say with precision exactly what TTBW21 does show. John's reaction to the article demonstrates the very human tendency to overgeneralize a set of very minor (possibly meaningless) results into something of genuine significance.
Let's take a close look at the methodology. In any such study, the key questions are (a) what is the population, (b) what is the sampling procedure, (c) what measures were taken, (d) what procedures were used to protect against experimenter bias, and (e) how strong were the results. I'll be selective in analyzing these.
Start with the research population. This can be crucial in a study of this type. How was the population selected, and what can we say about it?
Here we have to be doubly careful. There is a tendency to snooze a bit when reading an article's "method section," especially when the topic is one of great substantive interest. It is easy to fall into "benefit of the doubt reading," i.e., the reader assumes without evidence that the experimenter did the correct thing. Classic examples: (a) the reader assumes random sampling when it did not in fact occur, and (b) the reader assumes that the selection of experimental subjects ("participants") was done by people who were unaware of the purpose of the experiment.
Quite often, when something is not stated in a social psychology article, it is because the experimenters did *not* do the right thing, often because the right thing takes more work. True random sampling by workers who are unaware of the purpose of the experiment takes more work.
On page 3 of TTBW21, we are given virtually no information about the research population. They say they grabbed conversations "in a medium-sized U.S. city." Note, we have no idea what the racial mixture of this unnamed city is. That turns out to be important.
The authors started with a pool of conversations from "routine" traffic stops not resulting in an arrest." There were 180 White males and 433 Black males stopped. 70.6% of the stops were Black males. What do those numbers tell us? Without knowing more about the city and its population, we're completely at sea. Suppose, for example, this is a city that is 70% Black, 30% White. Then there is a kind of proportionality. On the other hand, suppose this city is 70% White and only 30% Black. Then Black drivers are heavily overrepresented. We are told the racial composition of the police officers. Less than half are White, and less than 1 in 5 is Black.
Suppose Black drivers are overrepresented. Is it because they were, on average, driving faster than White male drivers? (Some previous studies have found this.) If a White driver is doing 69 in a 55 mph zone, and the Black driver is doing 90, perhaps the greater tension in the officer's voice has nothing to do with race.
All we know is that 70% of the drivers stopped were Black. We are then told that a subset of the 180 White and 433 Black conversations were selected to be in the study. 100 Black and 100 White. WE ARE NOT TOLD HOW THEY WERE SELECTED. The temptation is to believe the sampling was random. Suppose it wasn't? Anyone with experience in the social sciences can tell you myriad ways that the person doing the selecting might have biased the study, unless certain precautions
were taken.
What about the measures? There were a couple of items using a 6 point Likert scale, ranging from 1 to 6. (very cold to very warm). So a mean score of 3.5 would be right in the middle, i.e., lukewarm.
What about the results? From a practical standpoint, the results are miniscule! The average response to a Black driver is judged as lukewarm (about 3.5) and the average response to a White driver is judges slightly warmer than lukewarm (about 3.7). This is judged statistically significant. If the study had been done properly, we would still conclude that this is not microaggression, it is nanoaggression.
Unfortunately, this study eliminates all information about what took place prior to the interactions between police and drivers. What were the drivers stopped for? How did they respond when first approached? Without this information, here is what we can conclude:
A truly trivial difference in "prosody" was found in a study that did not control for severity of offense or race of officer. On average, police respond with "lukewarm" prosody to both White and Black drivers, slightly warmer toward Whites. Without the proper controls, we have no idea what this means.
Thanks for introducing me to "prosody." This board always improves my vocab. :-)
LOL, it introduced me to it, too!
..."a study that did not control for severity of offense or race of officer. " ...
True? If so, I then wonder if researchers who did not bother with such a control bothered to control for the class/income/social status of those stopped.
Probably not.
"Interaction effects" (for example, between race of officer, race of driver, and prosody) are both inconvenient (to simplistic interpretations) and generally are assessed with much lower statistical power than main effects (race of driver compiled across all police officers).
So it might be that officers of one race are primarily responsible for the tiny difference in prosody observed here, but we have no way of knowing that. Class, income, social status, and *age* of driver might all have an impact, and in some cases the impact might be counterintuitive.
Out of curiosity, have you done a close reading of Roland Fryer's work on police shootings? Several friends of mine have remarked that it is easily debunked -- but never bothered to elaborate. And in John's recent interview with Scott Barry Kaufman, the latter made a similar claim, again without specifics.
I would be grateful for someone with your credentials to weigh in.
I started reading two of Fryer's articles this morning. I haven't gotten to the meat of the technical work, but I'm immediately struck by what appear to be very questionable statements in the introduction sections of the articles.
For example, in his article "Reconciling Results on Racial Differences in Police Shootings," Fryer states that "One in every sixty-five --- or 1.5 percent --- deaths of a
black man in the US is a killing by police." This is off by an order of magnitude!! For example, the Guardian's database at
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database#
states that 307 black males were killed by police in 2015. This is roughly 0.15 percent of the black male population, NOT 1.5%. So it isn't one in every sixty-five, it is one out of every 650. And that is a very substantial difference. The LA Times ran an article saying the number was 1 in 1000.
Let me emphasize that all productive academicians have errors in print, and some are truly embarrassing. I'll probably email Fryer and let him know about this one.
I was more disturbed by the Fryer's errors of omission in his description of some well-known deaths at the hands of police in his article titled "An Empirical Analysis of Racial Difference in Police Use of Force." Fryer wrote
--------
Michael Brown, unarmed, was shot twelve times by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, after Brown fit the description of a robbery suspect of a nearby store. Eric Garner, unarmed, was approached because officers believed he was selling single cigarettes from packs without tax stamps and in the process of arresting him an officer choked him and he died.
----------
Consider the Brown case. Anyone familiar with the case knows that Fryer left out numerous facts that led to the inescapable conclusion that the shooting was justified.
Specifically, Brown attacked the police officer, attempting to grab his gun, got shot in the process, and when the office pursued him, he charged the officer. A 6'5", 290 pound man acting violently and completely irrationally was charging the officer. Initial accounts of this incident portrayed Brown as a "gentle giant." Then video of Brown bullying a store clerk half his size emerged.
These kinds of misleading accounts abound. A particularly egregious one is in Jill Lepore's popular history of America "These Truths," in which she presents a brief account of the Trayvon Martin tragedy. Her one paragraph account of the incident contains 3 obvious errors of fact, 4 errors of omission, and 3 questionable characterizations. If anyone's interested, I'll post a detailed analysis.
I'd be interested. Please do post it when you can, with some indication of what it's about at top of post. Thx!
Comment on Jill Lepore's treatment of the Trayvon Martin tragedy in her book, "These Truths"
=======================================
The most fundamental obligation of an historian is to get the facts right. So much the better if the historian can do this with style, verve, and wisdom. Although Lepore partially succeeds on the latter goals, she sometimes stumbles badly on the former. The errors are egregious and, for a Pulitzer Prize winning historian, difficult to forgive.
Consider a particularly vexing example. The shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman was a major event with dramatic consequences. Here is Lepore's 5-sentence account of the fatal encounter.
====== (p. 763)
On February 26, 2012, in a national atmosphere of racial incitement, a twenty-eight-year-old man named George Zimmerman, prowling around the neighborhood outside Orlando, Florida, called 911 to report seeing “a real suspicious guy." He’d seen seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was walking to a nearby store. Zimmerman got out of his car and shot Martin, who was unarmed, with a 9mm handgun. Zimmerman told the police that Martin attacked him. Zimmerman weighed 250 pounds; Martin weighed 140. Martin’s family said that the boy, heard over a cellphone, had begged for his life.
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Readers unfamiliar with the facts of the case would naturally conjure up an image of a slight (140 pound, age 17) youth, begging for his life, summarily executed ("got out of his car and shot Martin") by a hulkingly brutish (250 pound, age 28) Zimmerman who was just "prowling around" looking for someone to shoot. This was, indeed, the kind of view promoted by activists like Al Sharpton and media outlets like CNN and MSNBC.
Yet this view is indisputably wrong. Within the short paragraph we find:
Errors of fact:
1. Martin was not "walking to a nearby store" when Zimmerman spotted him. He had left the store after purchasing Skittles and iced tea there. He was on the way home, but despite the weather, did not seem to be walking home purposefully.
2. Zimmerman did not weigh 250, or even close to it. Police documents state his weight at 200 the night of the incident, 185 the night of his arrest. These may be estimates. While incarcerated prior to trial, Zimmerman gained a very substantial amount of weight.
3. Martin did not weigh anywhere near 140. At autopsy, Martin was 5'11 and 158 without clothing and hours postmortem. Rather than painting an accurate picture of an athletic 5'11" 160-165 pound Martin facing off with a 5'7" 185-200 adult, Lepore presents erroneous facts designed to create a rather different picture.
Errors of omission:
1. Martin was at his father's house serving a 10-day suspension from high school for a drug offense. He was not the 12 year old shown in the only picture disseminated for days after the event.
2. Zimmerman was the coordinator of a Neighborhood Watch administered by the local police. He wasn't just a random guy "prowling around the neighborhood." His neighborhood had been plagued by a variety of crimes. Police had been called from there 402 times in the period from January 2011 to February 2012!
3. Zimmerman, ignoring a suggestion from the police, got out of his car and attempted to pursue Martin. After about 4 minutes, a physical confrontation occurred. Zimmerman claims Martin came out of the shadows, confronted him, then jumped him. During an ensuing struggle, Zimmerman received several head injuries. A gun discharged around 17:16:55 and Martin was killed by one bullet to the chest. The pathway was through a shirt that was hanging down, suggesting (the defense contended) that Martin was on top of Zimmerman. Lepore never mentions the struggle, or that a witness testified to seeing Martin on top of Zimmerman.
4. Despite the Martin family claims, there is no clear evidence that Martin "begged for his life." You can definitely hear someone yelling for help on a recording, but experts and witnesses disagree whether it was Zimmerman or Martin. Lepore fails to mention that detective and lead investigator Chris Serino testified at trial that when Martin's father, Tracy Martin, listened to the screaming on the 9-1-1 call he became "emotional" and said that the voice did not sound like his son's.
Mischaracterization:
1. Lepore states that the Martin-Zimmerman confrontation occurred "in a national atmosphere of racial incitement," a statement apparently designed to cast negative aspersions on Zimmerman's motivation. Yet she provides not a shred of evidence to support her characterizaion of the "national atmosphere." What "racial incitement" is she talking about? Didn't America just elect (and shortly thereafter reelect) its first African American President?
2. Lepore fails to indict the role of the media in deliberately distorting and sensationalizing the facts of the Martin-Zimmerman case.
3. She fails to discuss the massive loss of life and property directly or indirectly attributable to Black Lives Matter and the "Ferguson effect."
Lepore is entitled to her own interpretation of history, but she is not entitled to her own facts. After reading her account of the Martin-Zimmerman affair, I'm forced to wonder whether similar levels of factual inaccuracy and "strategic incompleteness" pervade her entire "history."
Thanks. That was an egregiously false and irresponsible account by Lepore, an author I hadnt heard of till now.
In your Errors of Omission, #3, I'd add that the 911 dispatcher told GZ not to pursue TM, and he then turned back toward his truck. Then it was stated by Rachel that TM was on the phone with her (Was it her, or was he talking to Diamond? I cant recall) and said something to the effect that this creepy guy had followed him and he was going back to confront him. She said, Be careful, some sort of warning. There was very good evidence using the timing of the 911 call by GM and then the time the fight and screams for help were heard, when 911 was called by the neighbors, which showed that too much time had passed to support that Trayvon had just been going toward home, hadnt circled back, when they had the encounter. In fact, by the time it happened, it was determined he should have been home by then or close to home. And the screams, I am confident, were from Zimmerman - You reminded me of what the dad originally said, that it wasnt Trayvon's voice. The neighbors saw the guy on top beating the guy below, heard repeated screams for help. GZ's head and nose wounds support that he was on the bottom getting beaten. TM was shot bc he was beating him, and allegedly, according to GZ, making verbal threats to kill him. This scenario makes sense: GZ was getting beaten badly, feared he'd be killed or at least badly injured, and used his gun in self defense.
Thanks very much for the additional information. The 2-hour YouTube video "The Trayvon Hoax" provided many additional layers to my understanding of this event. I keep asking myself, "How can Benjamin Crump still be practicing law? Why is Ms. Jenteal not charged with fraud?" Then again, we could ask the same kinds of questions about Al Sharpton.
the martin/zimmerman thing. yikes! john +glenn dialogued a couple times on the hoax thing +still i know of no journalist who's bothered to look into this thing. have you studied the hoax bit? so much info. i just recentlys finished the documentary so long after john/glenns podcasts on it +wow. laws of mercy. i cant help but notice that martins mother looks different at every gathering no. she doesnt appear to want to be there +not for the obvious reasons. whats says you? will no one speak on this?
Thanks, yes, there was what appears to be a hoax perpetrated on the court.
In an surprising turn of events, evidence surfaced that Martin's family and legal counsel perpetuated a hoax on the court during Zimmerman's trial. A $100,000,000 lawsuit by Zimmerman charged that Martin was actually on the phone with "Diamond Eugene," not the Rachel Jenteal who testified during the trial. Jenteal was deliberately substituted in a fraud upon the court.
There is a 2-hour movie, "The Trayvon Hoax," on YouTube, produced by Joel Gilbert, who also published a book on the topic.
The Trayvon Martin "experience" blows my mind. It was further blown by the documentary about the hoax, which I saw after learning of it from the 2 Glenn/John talks about the case, the phenomenon. I found the Rachel/Diamond hoax was disturbing too in that it was perpetuated in a court of law, now exposed, but not a peep, not a repercussion. Still, while shocking, it seemed all of a piece with the whole she-bang. The initial and most impactful blowing of my mind came from simply watching the entire trial on Court TV. Without all the media hype, the vilifying of Zimmerman and saint-making of Trayvon, the overblown narratives pushed outside the courtroom, and with the story unfolding in such clear evidentiary detail, it was obvious to me why the jury acquitted Zimmerman.
It was nothing like what you heard in the MSM or from the flood of outraged protesters - each of those groups both feeding the other and feasting on them. Not only that, but if you dug around a bit online you found a lot of info about Trayvon that showed he was not just this sweet hoodie kid buying skittles and iced tea. He was a kid who got in a lot of trouble, was raring to physically fight people and did; was implicated in a theft ring with others at school; was looking to get a gun; was out of school on one of several suspensions, smoking pot a lot more than hitting the books (He was temporarily staying with his dad - his mom had shipped him out due to this last suspension.)
And YET... there it was, several years later: Hillary campaigning for Prez, reverently holding hands in a circle with black mothers of kids killed by cops, and there was Trayvon's mom in the circle, and there was Trayvon's name making all of those lists of black kids names we were exhorted to remember, who were killed by cops.
EXCEPT - Trayvon wasnt killed by a cop. Zimmerman was never a cop. And, well, there were all those pesky myth-busters from the trial. Like how TM circled back to confront Zimmerman when he was already walking back to his truck and not following TM, as clueless commentators authoritatively claimed. We learned how he went up to GZ, threatened him, threw him down on the concrete walkway, sat on top of him and was repeatedly bashing his head into the concrete. Neighbor eyewitnesses (the action being a few yards from their sliding glass doors), could see the beating, hear GZ's multiple screams for HELP! This audio was played in court, captured on a neighbor's 911 call. Fellow tenants testified that GZ was a good and helpful neighbor who cared about the crime that had been hitting their complex. They had had some scary break ins lately, and by young, black men, as I recall. One woman testified how she'd hid upstairs in total fear, holding her infant, as 2 guys broke into her house in broad daylight. GZ helped her a lot afterward, as she told it, w tips and support.
Anyway, it went on like this, truth rolling out and washing away bits of spun fiction day after day. It was SO different, the news stories and the facts. Even after the trial, the media chose to stick to their Crump-ian narratives and endless virtue signaling, not bothering to insert some of the countervailing facts from the trial into their chatter. They like it hot.
Guess I'll end this long rant by saying, those 2 Trayvon talks by Glenn/John were quite something - really worth a trip into archives (good ole bloggingheads, I guess) I mean, it seemed to take them some preliminary baby steps, a sort of cautious warming up, just to eventually wade into those waters... and w good reason! I mean, I watched in dismay as Zimmerman's own top notch lawyer, Mark O'Mara, sheepishly did an awkward mea culpa about his own stellar performance! It seemed he did this to appease the piranhas in the school of mad woke that feed in our public square. I think he is a pretty decent guy and it got to him, the constant vilification. This was a minefield for anyone to tread.
So chapeaux & kudos to John & Glenn for what I see as an intrepid public examination of the Trayvon Martin story, something rarely attempted. It's a tragic funhouse of distortion, which I find to be a prime example of how bone-deep stupid and self-damaging our society can too often be. I sometimes marvel that we havent yet completely sunk ourselves under the weight of our own stupidity.
Apologies for all the subsequent "deleteds". I started doing my editing of this long thing here and couldn't stop! :) I promise, never again!
yes thats what i was referring to w/out typing it all out. i watched the trial bcoz i wanted to know why of course +found my answer in rachel's testimony. lord lord there could be no guilty verdict w the case as presented +her as the star witness. like wha? i wonder who pushed this: the lawyer or the parents. the mother doesnt appear to be all in, you know?
even rachels deposition: the guilt. the guilt i aint no know nuthing abt it. aint know nuthin abt it.
or something like that. seems somebody should have seen that rachel was not very interested in testifying +wouldn't be a strong witness on the stand +shut that down case. i wonder was it public pressure? ye olde social media? jesus i suppose we'll not soon get an interview w diamond. +that letter!! oh lord. too much
To be fair, the facts around Ferguson evolved over time, and I'm not sure of the date of publication of the article you are reading. However, errors aside, Fryer ultimately concludes that while racial bias appears to be at play in non-lethal encounters with the cops, it is *not* a factor in acts of lethal force, which, of course, is contrary to the dominant narrative and indeed was not what he himself expected to find.
While this conclusion makes intuitive sense to me insofar as I understand his basic argument, I'd be interested to hear more of your analysis as you dig into the technical meat of his work.
Thanks. You raised an important issue, which I think can be dismissed on the following grounds: Brown was shot in 2014, the Obama DOJ completed its investigation clearing the shooter in early 2015, and Fryer's article is dated July, 2017. All the facts were widely reported.
I agree that someone of Fryer's stature effectively promulgating poetic truths like "hands up, don't shoot" is quite troubling (especially when I am citing his work to argue against that very thing!)
Please do let us know what else you find.
Thanks -- you motivated me to download it, but I haven't yet read it.
Once again, an excellent piece. In my won 2016 book, "Survival: The Economic Foundations of American National Security," I touch on this question of how to reduce negative interactions between the Black community and the police. The suggestion I offered, based on research and my own experience working on similar ideas in Iraq, was to transition to a more cashless economy. The evidence is pretty strong that such a move can reduce the kind of crime that leads to these negative interactions by as much as half.
Excellent piece. I work in an organization that has both professors and serving and former military officers. These groups have very different rules of communication. As a member of both groups, I often trip on this. For example, telling a young new hire assistant professor that her lecture was the worst I ever heard did not go down well with her. Even though I deeply supported hiring her and regard her as having immense promise as a faculty member. All I had wanted to do was to convey to her how far off she was from the required teaching standard, something that had not surprised me in the least given her lack of teaching experience.
I very much appreciate John's thinking and writing. I often daydream about having a cocktail and a cigar with him and Glenn Loury and not speaking a word. I would be interested if these studies John refers to about "confrontation cadence" show a correlation, or maybe even causation, between it and the unusually high rate of black on black violence. Might we be ignoring an elephant in the room? If words are the only thing that stand between us and war, it seems painfully obvious that a "confrontational cadence" between two people who likely don't read nearly enough history might regularly escalate their words into more violent behavior. I think correlating this phenomenon mostly to the war on drugs is probably not accurate, and likely not preserving as many black lives as could otherwise be preserved???
Secondly, I agree that the war on drugs has been a magnificent disaster. I also believe that, on balance, modern medicine has also been a magnificent disaster because, it too, has killed far more people than it has saved. Having said that, both of these magnificent disasters appear to be our best choices because nobody has put forth better alternatives that can be scalable to a level that would outperform either of these two magnificent disasters.
Thank you John. You're doing our world a great service!