A "few bad apples" does not a "systemic racism" make

Blocking out the noise from radical activists

Photo by Jeff Ackley on Unsplash

By James Pew

The police are often accused of “systemic racism” - a political term with its origin in the radical left, and which holds a narrative that everyone must accept. Evidence or argument that undermines its central premises are not tolerated, and even though in some instances, indications that some racism may be a factor in non-lethal police interactions, that is not the case when police use lethal force. 

As will be discussed in the following passages (and in subsequent essays on the topic of social unrest in Canada), everyone is made less safe by the blind acceptance of naive and dangerous ideas - like “defunding the police” because of “systemic racism.” The politically motivated exaggerations of activists, often involving claims of “systemic injustices,” demoralizes and fosters resentment, and adds fuel to the woke totalitarianism on the rise. In my view, radical activist rhetoric is at least partially responsible for the dramatic increase in social unrest we have seen in recent years in Canada and throughout Western societies.

Always ignored by the activist class, are plausible explanations for the existence of social disparities. The naive assumption is that unequal outcomes are simply due to “systemic injustice.” With regards to racial differences related to police violence, a correlation with mental distress has been observed in a new study coming out of the Psychology department at Stetson University. More on this below.

In my view, “systemic racism” is bogus. As I wrote regarding police services and racism in yesterday’s essay, Reinvesting in the police, it comes about through an “unsubstantiated analysis that black Canadians are disproportionately incarcerated because of the immorality of the system rather than the crime rate of black Canadians.” However, the reader may wish to take in the richly detailed essay by anonymous historian Mr. M, called A Moral Chimera for an expanded discussion of terms like “systemic racism” which have their origins in the highly illiberal black radical tradition. From Mr. M’s essay:

“The illiberal black activist movements, collectively the black radical tradition, are personified for many Westerners by the figure of Malcolm X. In contradistinction to King, Malcolm X believed that racial integration could never occur in America-as-it-is, that racism and capitalism are inextricably linked, and consequently, “black liberation and socialism are directly linked.”¹ Invoking Malcolm X will signal to many readers what the black radical tradition entails, but here is a list of words and concepts stemming from that same tradition which may not register as “black radical” (but which should!): African-American, intersectionality, identity politics, systemic racism, black power, Black (spelled with a capital “B”), anti-black racism, visible minority, critical race theory, blackness, whiteness and lived experience, decolonizing (America). The origin of these terms and concepts will be contextualized and documented in the discussion to follow below.” (not below here…in the Moral Chimera essay)

Also worth noting, is the long tradition of radical leftist social agitators directly protesting against the police and undermining their authority using violence inducing anti-police rhetoric. A radical tradition that goes back to the early 20th century when Vladimir Lenin was the key figure in the genesis and indoctrination of anti-police ideology. This was expanded on in an essay I co-wrote with Mr. M called From Police Brutality to Race Relations, from that essay:

“In framing his version of vanguard activism (which argues that revolutionary movements must be spearheaded by an elite group of workers and intellectuals, the ‘conscious element’ of the party that directs the uncomprehending masses), Lenin associates calling out police violence with revolutionary ideals. In his 1902 work ‘What is to be done?’ Lenin states that to attain true working class consciousness, workers must be trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence and abuse no matter what class is affected; further, the champion of the people should be one ‘who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears … who Is able to generalize all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation’…”

A look at what’s happening south of the border

I first became interested in American researcher, Professor Christopher J. Ferguson, Department of Psychology, Stetson University, when he shared with me this report examining the impact of news media coverage of police shootings.

From the study:

“This study sought to examine whether national perceptions of race relations were shaped more by actual fatal shootings of unarmed Black men or by news media coverage of police shootings or, put more directly, whether it had a factual basis or was driven by societal narratives…Results indicated that perceptions of race relations were correlated with news media coverage but not actual fatal police shootings of unarmed Black men…These results suggest that race relations are associated with news media coverage in ways that reflect underlying cultural shifts rather than direct association.”

In an email exchange, Professor Ferguson shared a new study he has just completed which had the aim to test the “relationships between complaints of excessive use of police violence and racial/ethnic population demographics, allowing for social and mental health variables.” The results included some interesting findings, like “the strongest associate of complaints to police departments that their employees had used excessive force was experiencing mental distress in the community”

From an uncorrected proof of this hot off the press study:

“While politicians, scholars, and activists are currently debating the extent to which race/ethnicity is associated with excessive use of force by police, previous research on this issue has been both been nuanced and inconsistent, with some scholars suggesting that class and social stress are more problematic in this respect than race/ethnicity (Reilly, 2020). Our analyses of databases of complaints against the police and population health in California support the suggestion that social class is likely to be more influential than race per se, with community-level mental distress having the strongest relationship.”

Considering these results, I asked Professor Ferguson to comment on the “defund the police” movement (which is predicated on a belief in “systemic racism”), and why he thinks we are seeing a renewal of political support for reinvestment in police:

I think that the political left had a utopian view of human nature...that policing is a net negative and, so long as you provide some basic services to people (hence the push to fund social services, which is not a bad thing so long as it doesn't replace policing), then they will naturally behave well, and hence police and prisons won't be necessary. Unfortunately, that's a fundamental misread of human nature which, by evolutionary design, is a complex mixture of social cooperation but also selfishness and aggression. Most of human history has been exceptionally violent. Homicide rates in hunter-gather societies are estimated to be many, many times higher than those in modern industrialized societies. This only really changed with the advent of modern policing in the UK in the 1800s, and the development of standardized, largely non-corrupt criminal justice systems. It turns out we need deterrence (the threat of punishment) to drive down societally destructive behaviors.

In the last few years, we seem to have very rapidly rediscovered this. As the BLM movement delegitimized policing, homicide rates in many urban environments soared. Unfortunately, this burden has fallen particularly on low-income communities. Police departments have been hit by massive retirements/resignations, police aren't patrolling as deeply into high-risk neighborhoods out of fear of being the next cop caught on camera, and conversely the deep suspiciousness of policing that BLM stoked is making people in high-stress communities less trusting of and, hence, less cooperative with police.

This is not to say that policing is not without need for some reforms. Police are often not well-trained to deal with mental health crises (very commonly at the root of many deaths...whether of white, black or Latino men...at the hands of police). They sometimes escalate situations to get compliance when someone in a mental health crisis is going to have difficulty responding to that. So I think a constructive look at how police are recruited, trained, supported and also transparency and accountability can be good. But if we want good policing, that means funding them more for training, salaries and benefits to attract the best recruits, etc.

But what we've done for the last 10 years or so has been deeply fueled by misinformation and moral panic. I think we can say that the BLM organization has not been a constructive influence, too often squandering donations on mansions, consulting salaries, etc., and doing very little to actually help struggling communities. Charles Love has an excellent book documenting the many problems with BLM. And I think that we're seeing a generation of youth has been raised on a lot of bad information (whether coming from K12 or social media) about race, racism, slavery and the United States that's leading them to think that the United States (and the West) is some kind of exceptional and unusual slavery/racism state, despite considerable evidence that the US is one of the least racist countries at present and, unlike where slavery existed in almost every other society worldwide, went through considerable sacrifice both to voluntarily eliminate slavery and, during the Civil Rights Movement, institutionalized racism. We can both acknowledge the sins of our past, but also acknowledge that many aspects of both our past and present are extraordinarily virtuous. So I do think we need to look at K12 and how we're teaching some of these issues as I think we've clearly fallen off the beam there into at least some degree of left-wing indoctrination (I've actually got some research on this forthcoming but, in the meantime, Eric Kaufmann has demonstrated this admirably in both the US and UK).” - Christopher J. Ferguson

I couldn’t agree more about Charles Love (the book referred to is Race Crazy) and Professor Eric Kaufmann too! - (Here is an Eric Kaufman article relevant to the education K12 comment made in the paragraph above).

I’ll leave it at that for today. The next essay will add to the discussion by including some of the consequences that I believe anti-police rhetoric propagated by activists is responsible for (at least in part).

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Thanks for reading, for more from this author checkout First Nations Greed and Corruption - by James Pew

1. Thomas 1972, 47.