Statistics vs the racial grievance grift

False narratives around crime and police shootings distort our perceptions of the social world, and curtail free thought.

Feb 18, 2024

This three minute clip from a talk by Roland Fryer, a Harvard economist, is worth watching. It provides an insight into the level of pushback anyone who seeks to challenge The Narrative around race is likely to receive. ‘People lose their minds’, he says. That’s about right.

Fryer and his team of researchers carried out a large-scale empirical analysis of police use of force. Against his expectations, and in stark contrast to the dogma peddled by race-grifters everywhere, Fryer discovered no evidence of bias against African Americans in US police shootings. In fact, his work found that while black and latino suspects are slightly more likely than whites to be frisked by cops, they are actually marginally less likely to be shot in similar circumstances.

As soon as he announced this, enormous pressure was placed on him not to release the results of his work. It would undermine left-liberal orthodoxy, so he was told he should suppress it (for the ‘good of everyone’, of course…) and that if he didn’t, his career would be over. He decided not to bow to the mob, and was consequently forced to live under police protection.

This is what happens if you challenge a cult. But what we’re talking about here isn’t just a cult, it's an elite ideology that has seeped into all key areas of our cultural and political life. The result has been a diminution of free speech, a warping of the public’s perceptions of pressing social phenomena, and the subordination of truth to the demands of quasi-religious groupthink.

Its tenets get shoe-horned into every second TV show, taught as part of mandatory DEI sessions at major corporate institutions, and are parroted by fake-crying celebrities at every single awards ceremony. Politicians at once stoke it up and bow before it, university students go mental when speakers fall foul of it. Academics who criticise it put their livelihoods at risk, while those who produce absolute rubbish in support of it get promoted.

In certain settings, anything other than vocal adherence to this fact-lite liberal worldview, or at least quiet acquiescence in the face of outlandish and at times demonstrably false claims being made by its advocates, can land you in a tough spot.

Top Democrats signalling their unshakeable faith in whatever they’re told to believe in

There are far too many examples of this to even begin to try and include them all here. One sad one is Richard Bilktzo, a teacher who took his own life two years after being publicly and falsely smeared as a ‘white supremacist’ by a ‘diversity trainer’ (read, fraud), then thrown under the bus by his colleagues (see this article on it - it will make you feel sick). Another is

Zac Kriegman

, a data scientist at Reuters who, amidst the moral panic of 2020:

‘started to witness the spread of a new ideology inside the company. On the internal collaboration platform…people would post about “the self-indulgent tears of white women” and the danger of “White Privilege glasses.” They’d share articles with titles like “Seeing White,” “Habits of Whiteness” and “How to Be a Better White Person.” There was fervent and vocal support for Black Lives Matter at every level of the company. No one challenged the racial essentialism or the groupthink.’1

Kriegman, a statistics expert, was uncomfortable observing the clear misuse and abuse of data for political purposes. He pointed to academic research, including Fryer’s, that contradicted the party line. In response, he describes how:

‘A handful of BLM supporters, all of them white, said that, as a white person, I had no place criticizing BLM. They called my review of the academic literature “whitesplaining” (failing to note that many of the academics I cited were black). I was publicly derided as a “troll,” “confused,” “laughable,” and “not worth engaging with or even attempting to have an intelligent conversation” with. One colleague said: “I do not believe that there is any point in trying to engage in a blow-by-blow refutation of your argument, and I will not do so. My unwillingness to do so doesn't signal the strength of your argument. If someone says, ‘The KKK did lots of good things for the community—prove me wrong,’ I'm not obligated to do so.”

Notably absent from the attacks directed at me was even a single substantive challenge to the facts I was citing.’ (My emphasis).

To cut a long story short, for stating basic facts Kriegman was fired (predictably). His experience is not a unique one by any means, but it does provide a useful snapshot into the degree of ideological-capture at large, supposedly neutral media outlets. In a blog post he describes how, when reading Reuters’ reporting, he:

‘started to see how the company’s misguided worldview about policing and racism was distorting the way [it was] reporting news stories to the public.’

In one story, Reuters reported on police in Kenosha, Wisconsin shooting a black man, Jacob Blake, in the back—but failed to mention that they did so only after he grabbed a knife and looked likely to lunge at them.

In another story, Reuters referred “to a wave of killings of African-Americans by police using unjustified lethal force,” despite a lack of statistical evidence that such a wave of police killings had taken place. (In 2020, 18 unarmed black Americans were killed by police, according to The Washington Post database [a significantly higher number of unarmed white Americans were shot in the same year - and every other year, yet receive vastly less coverage].)

And in yet another, Reuters referred to the shooting of Michael Brown as one of a number of “egregious examples of lethal police violence,” despite the fact that an investigation conducted by the Justice Department—then run by Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder—had cleared the police officer in question of all wrongdoing. '

A pattern was starting to emerge: Reporters and editors would omit key details that undermined the BLM narrative. More important than reporting accurately was upholding—nurturing—that storyline.’2

Reuters is not the only organisation guilty of this. Whether it’s via endless Hollywood productions that present a make-believe world in which police and societal racism is everywhere, or through media coverage that’s then amplified by race-baiting politicians and ‘activists’, the 'political messaging on police brutality that the public receives is divorced from reality’.3

A recent comprehensive study of media output and public attitudes by

Zach Goldberg

, for example, found that unarmed fatal black shooting victims receive between 11 and 21 times more coverage than unarmed fatal white shooting victims. Black victims were four times more likely to be featured in the New York Times, and ‘more than five times more likely than white victims to be mentioned at least once during an MSNBC, CNN, or Fox News broadcast’.4

There is an agenda at play here. Events that can be used to depict society as racist (occasionally justifiably, usually not) are massively amped up, while events that might raise questions that run counter to that narrative - eg, that highlight the need to address cultural factors underpinning rampant gun crime in certain communities, and the resultant detrimental impact on community cohesion and social life - are buried, ignored, or talked about in obfuscatory terms.

A recent review of hundreds of articles published by major papers over a span of two years found that major papers ‘downplay the race of non-white offenders, mentioning their race much later in articles than they do for white offenders. These papers are also three to four times more likely to mention an offender's race at all if he is white’. This, the researchers concluded, speaks to an ‘alarming editorial trend in which papers routinely omit information from news reports, presenting readers with a skewed picture of who does and doesn't commit crime.’5

Thus white-on-black crime is hugely over-reported, while the markedly greater amount of black on white/other ethnic group crime is underreported, and (I would be willing to wager) massively underrepresented in cultural productions (‘award winning’ TV, film, novels, etc). In 2020, there were 876 White-on-Black homicides, vs 1,877 Black-on-White homicides. While it should be noted that this is still a pretty small percentage of all crime (and some on the right undoubtedly over-egg it to a ridiculous degree) it is nevertheless a remarkable disparity, especially given the fact that the black population of the US is around 5 times smaller than the white population. Yet Google ‘black man shoots white man’, and 8 of the top 10 results are stories about, or related to, white people shooting black people…

Progressive myths may be near-ubiquitous but they fail to withstand even simple probing. If, as woke-think would have us believe, disparities in crime rates are purely, or even primarily, due to ‘structural racism’ and ‘white supremacy’, why do Asians in the US (a non-white minority) commit fewer violent crimes than whites, and far fewer than blacks? The answer, of course, is that a univariate focus on racism is not just insufficient, but totally misleading.

Some racism - though far less than we’re routinely told there is - does exist of course, as do instances of corruption, and unforgiveable police brutality. Structural factors, arguably including historic oppression, interract with culture, and there is no doubt that the American police could do with being significantly demilitarized (along with the neighbourhoods they’re working within).

But notwithstanding any of this, even if you entirely eradicated police racism altogether (I’m all for that, obviously), the cultural (and other) causes of violent crime would persist. Over 12000 black people - yes, 12000(!) - die from gun violence each year in the USA alone. The majority at the hands of other black people. That is the sort of death toll you’d expect in a small war. Yet societal outrage is channeled away from the, or at least a, central issue - high crime rates in some black communities - and instead towards a handful of police shootings and white-on-black murders. Academics and grifters ramble on about ‘Whiteness’ and try to get vital police units defunded, while grave social problems get hushed up and go unaddressed.

Moreover, the assertions of the cultists, too, go largely unquestioned, creating a feedback loop. It becomes ‘self-evidently true’ that extreme police and racist violence is commonplace (even though it isn’t). This in turn allows moral entrepreneurs to make further wacky and at times openly bigoted assertions (‘white supremacy is everywhere always’, politicians who mention crime rates are ‘fascist’, the police are ‘fascist’, society is divided between ‘the oppressors and the oppressed’, and so on). Truth gets subsumed by dogma.

Wilfred spittin’ straight facts. FYI I recorded a great podcast with him - I’ll put a link to it in the comments.

For all that liberals love to complain about ‘misinformation’, and to ‘clamp down’ on its spread (ie, censor their opponents), when it comes to race-related issues - and many other ‘culture war’ subjects (see my other articles) - they are in the sway of fact-lite, conspiratorial thinking themselves. One incomplete interpretation of events is permitted - namely, racism is everywhere, explains almost everything, and is the biggest issue we face - and huge social pressure is brought to bear on bringing anyone who rejects this univariate woo-woo into line.

We should oppose this. To understand society, we must be free to investigate and discuss the reality of the actually existing social world, in all its (sometimes uncomfortable) complexity. When people start shaming you for doing that, they’ve lost the intellectual argument.

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