DON’T NEED NO STINKIN’ FACTS
The central problem with race relations in America is that we can’t have an honest debate about race relations in America. Honest debate can’t be permitted because only one narrative is: Every problem afflicting Black Americans is the fault of white Americans.
The degree to which this orthodoxy discourages not just honesty and debate but also intellectual rigor and even logic itself was fully on display in the aftermath of the fatal beating of a Black man by five Black police officers in Memphis, which many progressives blamed, with a straight face, upon “white supremacy.”
That a tragic incident had to be shoehorned into the narrative despite the possibility (high probability?) that it had nothing to do with race, let alone white racism, led Charles Cooke to conclude in National Review that “there is no circumstance in which the killing of a Black American will not be deemed the product of white supremacy. If the cops act consciously in the name of white supremacy, that’s white supremacy. If the cops don’t act consciously in the name of white supremacy, that’s white supremacy. If the cops are white, it’s white supremacy. If the cops are not white, it’s white supremacy too. Whatever the input, whatever the details, the result is always the same: white supremacy. That’s not logic; it’s magic.”
Without a means of proving a theory or assertion false, there is no way or reason to test it; without laying out what effective refutation of a claim would consist of, we move from the world of logic and reason into the world of faith and superstition (again, in
Cooke’s words, “magic”).
In the case of American race relations, when someone (and it is difficult to go through a day without that someone) claims that white supremacy is stronger than ever, does that person also specify what evidence they would accept for their claim to be disproven and how we might acquire it?
When considering the claim that racism has increased over time, it might, for example, be useful to look at rates of interracial marriage, on the assumption that they are correlated with racial attitudes to the extent that a nation experiencing a significant increase in such marriages would be unlikely to experience a significant increase in racism (as it happens, the percentage of interracial marriages increased more than sixfold, from just 3% in 1967 to 19% by 2019).
In addition to actual interracial marriages, we could look at survey research on attitudes toward such unions, on the assumption that those most opposed would also be the most racist; thereby conceivably providing us with something of a racism barometer.
As such, the latest Gallup poll on the subject (from 2021) shows that 94% of adults now approve of interracial marriages, compared to 87% in the last survey from 2013 and just 4% from the first time Gallup asked the question in 1958. (Nor does there appear to be, as media narratives would suggest, much regional difference in such high levels of approval. Red-state regions, the South and Midwest, were at 93%, and so-called blue state regions, the East and West, were at 94% and 97%, respectively.)
Such data on a particular indicator (interracial marriage) doesn’t prove much by itself, but the standard narrative becomes less impregnable when we agree that it should be subject to testing with actual facts and data.
There is in this a certain logical relationship that any fair-minded, wellintentioned person should be willing to accept — if you declare a proposition to be true it should be possible to collect evidence in support of it, such that if we fail to find such evidence and perhaps even find evidence to the contrary we have reasonable grounds for casting doubt on the proposition’s truthfulness.
An honest person who claimed that Georgia’s new voting reform law represented a form of voter suppression (even “Jim Crow on steroids”) should be willing to modify that claim if Black turnout increased rather than decreased in subsequent elections (as has occurred).
And that honest person would retract their claim altogether and perhaps even throw in an apology to the good people of Georgia if shown the results of a recent University of Georgia survey which indicated that not a single Black respondent said they had a “poor” voting experience in the state in 2022, with 73% rating it as “excellent” and another 24% as “good.”
Or we can just stick with the lazy, dishonest tendency of calling anyone who disagrees with us a racist.
And hope that that makes race relations better.
Bradley R. Gitz lives and teaches in Batesville, Ark.