Another prejudiced liberal prejudicially condemns prejudice

A reader sent me the following article from the Scientific American. The title and sub-title sum up the theme pretty well:

Buried Prejudice: The Bigot in Your Brain
Deep within our subconscious, all of us harbor biases that we consciously abhor. And the worst part is: we act on them
By Siri Carpenter

I didn’t have to go far in this article—two paragraphs—to discover the author’s staggering incomprehension:

“There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life,” Jesse Jackson once told an audience, “than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

Jackson’s remark illustrates a basic fact of our social existence, one that even a committed black civil-rights leader cannot escape: ideas that we may not endorse—for example, that a black stranger might harm us but a white one probably would not—can nonetheless lodge themselves in our minds and, without our permission or awareness, color our perceptions, expectations and judgments.

Siri Carpenter thinks that Jesse Jackson in his famous remark was admitting to the operation of a prejudice within himself about black youth that his conscious mind virtuously rejected but that, to his mortification, was still operating anyway, making him think ugly thoughts against his will. She has it completely wrong. Jackson was not speaking of some supposed regrettable prejudicial belief of his that black youth are dangerous. He was speaking of the regrettable reality that black youth ARE, in fact, dangerous. Furthermore, not once in the article does Carpenter mention the extremely high rates of violent crime by black males that stoked Jackson’s fear. And this article appears in the “Scientific” American. Carpenter is probably under 35 and a product of schools that have literally destroyed the ability of intelligent young people to think and reason.

Given that Carpenter, always on the lookout for prejudice, didn’t understand that her prejudiced belief in the ubiquity of prejudice led her to the further false belief that Jesse Jackson’s statement of pained regret about black violence was self-criticism over his own anti-black prejudices, perhaps she ought to write her next article on:

The liberal prejudice against humanity:
How our prejudicial belief in the ubiquity of wrongful prejudice is so engrained that we can’t see what’s in front of our face and make false and unjust generalizations about people

* * *

However, the ubiquitous prejudice about which Carpenter is so concerned is not evenly distributed among all groups. She writes:

Using a variety of sophisticated methods, psychologists have established that people unwittingly hold an astounding assortment of stereotypical beliefs and attitudes about social groups: black and white, female and male, elderly and young, gay and straight, fat and thin. Although these implicit biases inhabit us all, we vary in the particulars, depending on our own group membership, our conscious desire to avoid bias and the contours of our everyday environments. For instance, about two thirds of whites have an implicit preference for whites over blacks, whereas blacks show no average preference for one race over the other.

Here we have the nutty and supremely destructive liberal belief that prejudice consists not just in false and derogatory beliefs about other groups and and unjust animus against other groups, but in mere preference for one’s own group. In this view, it is bigoted—morally wrong—for people to prefer the company of those who are similar and familiar to themselves over those who are different and unfamiliar, a belief that would render all societies, all families, all voluntary associations of people, morally bad.

As for the lack of any black preference for other blacks that Carpenter asserts, I would have to see the data before I believed it. If it is true, I would not be surprised that the reason for it is that in many cases whites treat blacks more decently and humanely than their fellow blacks do, and that this common experience among blacks cancels out the normal, prejudicial preference for their own. Of course, that’s just a prejudicial assumption on my part.

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Jim N. writes:

This is great news! If my alleged racism is nothing but a meme that has buried itself in my subconscious, I’m not responsible for it and can’t be held accountable. I’ll just walk around repeating “Black is beautiful” (a conscious attempt to undermine any subconscious prejudice) while secretly building up an arsenal of white sheets and Uzis in my basement for reasons I don’t quite understand.

Paul Nachman writes:

Note that the Scientific American article also butchers an important detail of the Diallo case:

On February 4, 1999, four New York City police officers knocked on the apartment door of a 23-year-old West African immigrant named Amadou Diallo. They intended to question him because his physical description matched that of a suspected rapist. Moments later Diallo lay dead. The officers, believing that Diallo was reaching for a gun, had fired 41 shots at him, 19 of which struck their target. The item that Diallo had been pulling from his pocket was not a gun but his wallet. The officers were charged with second-degree murder but argued that at the time of the shooting they believed their lives were in danger. Their argument was successful, and they were acquitted.

See Heather Mac Donald’s tentative account from that summer, which is backed up by the Wikipedia entry on Diallo.

It’s not clear to me if this is actually an article from the print magazine. (I went to the site.) If it is, though, we should refute it with letters, both on the Diallo carelessness and on the larger point—best data for that is the reporting by crime victims that Jared Taylor emphasizes and that Mac Donald emphasized, in her latest at City Journal:

Let’s start with the idea that cops over-arrest blacks and ignore white criminals. In fact, the race of criminals reported by crime victims matches arrest data. As long ago as 1978, a study of robbery and aggravated assault in eight cities found parity between the race of assailants in victim identifications and in arrests—a finding replicated many times since, across a range of crimes. No one has ever come up with a plausible argument as to why crime victims would be biased in their reports.

Plus there’s your point that if whites are inveterately racist, the only solution is separation.

LA replies:

I also noticed that error when I read the article. Unlike what Siri Carpenter says, the police did not knock on Diallo’s apartment door, or on the door of his building. They were on the watch for a rape suspect, they saw Diallo approach his building, they called out to him to stop, and he didn’t stop but kept walking and then at the doorway of his building turned suspiciously and seemed to be taking something out of his pocket.

Reality says: when police officers tell you to stop, you STOP. Diallo didn’t stop because (1) he was an illegal alien and thus and thus afraid of police; he was not in a good faith relationship with this country. He was already geared to disobeying the laws of this country and sneaking away from the law, not obeying the law. Also he was a sub-Saharan African and probably of low IQ. When people from a very backward society sneak illegally into a more advanced society with very different customs from their own, misunderstandings and worse are likely to happen.

This misbehaving illegal alien brought on his own death.

Police once entered my building and drew their weapons on me, thinking that I was the intruder that I had called the police about. You can bet I raised my hands quickly, saying, “I’m the one who called you!” But you know what black “intellectuals” and “leaders” told their people in the wake of the Diallo case? If police tell you to stop, don’t cooperate with them. The leaders thus give their followers advice that is likely to get them killed. Which they will then blame on racist whites.

Also, you write: “Plus there’s your point that if whites are inveterately racist, the only solution is separation.” I don’t remember having said that.

James M. writes:

Liberalism’s teaching on racism and prejudice can literally be fatal. How many whites have guiltily suppressed their racism and got into situations in which they realize, too late, that they should have listened to it? Many murders, rapes and beatings must have followed. And non-whites play on that white guilt, particularly with women: “Oh, you’re rejecting me because I’m black/Hispanic etc.” Liberals also claim to believe in science and reason, but ignore both when it suits them. Rhodesia-Zimbabwe has been a laboratory where liberal ideas on race have been tested and conclusively disproved. South Africa is merely confirming the results. The “Bigot in Your Brain” is the voice of wisdom and should be listened to.

LA replies:

I don’t remember the details, but just a few weeks ago I linked a terrible story about two young white people who were approached by a dangerous looking man and one of them was afraid and the other said that was prejudiced and then they were attacked. (Sorry if I’ve gotten it wrong. If someone can remember that post I’d appreciate it.)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 10, 2008 05:20 PM | Send