Intentionally Getting It WrongI have to admit, I thought this Bill Bennett controversy would last about five minutes. I underestimated the Left's willingness to lie, to distort, and to obfuscate. Eugene Robinson
checks in today with an op-ed in the WaPo that provides an example.
In defending his words, Bennett has said he was citing "Freakonomics." So why did his "thought experiment" refer only to black children?
Levitt's thesis is essentially that unwanted children who grow up poor in single-parent households are more likely than other children to become criminals, and that Roe v. Wade resulted in fewer of these children being born. What he doesn't do in the book is single out black children.Does he have to? Leaving the question of "unwanted" aside, is it not transparent that children who grow up poor in single-parent households are disproportionately black? Weren't we supposed to be having a national discussion about poverty and race in the wake of New Orleans?
If he was citing Levitt's work, Bennett could have said that to lower the crime rate "you could abort every white baby" or "you could abort every Hispanic baby" or "you could abort every Asian baby," since every group has unwanted, poor children being raised by single mothers.Again, let's leave the unwanted part out because that's unknown and unknowable. Is there any denying that blacks are overrepresented in the pool of poor children being raised by single mothers?
So now that we have Bennett on the couch, shouldn't we conclude that he mentioned only black children because, perhaps on a subconscious level, he associates "black" with "criminal''?
That's what it sounds like to me. I grew up in the South in the days when we had to drink at "colored" water fountains and gas stations had separate "colored" restrooms; I know what a real racist is like, and Bennett certainly doesn't fit the description. But that's what's so troubling about his race-specific "thought experiment" -- that such a smart, well-meaning opinion maker would so casually say something that translates, to African American ears, as "blacks are criminals."See, that's where he starts distorting. Nobody thinks Bennett believes that blacks are criminals, except for the race-baiters. Disproportionately criminals, yes. Even
Leavitt admits that, while hastening to reassure us that it's not a "black thing":
It is true that, on average, crime involvement in the U.S. is higher among blacks than whites. Importantly, however, once you control for income, the likelihood of growing up in a female-headed household, having a teenage mother, and how urban the environment is, the importance of race disappears for all crimes except homicide. (The homicide gap is partly explained by crack markets). In other words, for most crimes a white person and a black person who grow up next door to each other with similar incomes and the same family structure would be predicted to have the same crime involvement.It was about ten years ago that Jesse Jackson made his comment about how guilty he felt when walking the streets at night to feel relieved when he discovered that the footsteps behind him were of a white person. Why? Does Jesse think "blacks are criminals"? Or does he think that they're
more likely to be criminals?
Bennett is too intelligent not to understand why many of us would take his mental experiment as a glimpse behind the curtain -- an indication that old assumptions, now unspoken, still survive. He ought to understand how his words would be taken as validation by the rapper Kanye West, who told a television audience that "George Bush doesn't care about black people," or by the New Orleans survivors who keep calling me with theories of how "they" dynamited selected levees to flood the poor, black Lower Ninth Ward and save the wealthy French Quarter and Garden District.
I have a thought experiment of my own: If we put our racial baggage on the table and talk about it, we'll begin to take care of a lot of unfinished business.Sigh. So now Bennett's responsible for validating the kooky theories of Kanye West and New Orleans survivors. And Robinson says he wants to talk about race; after the treatment Bennett has received, are there any whites who want to hold that "dialogue"?
