I follow The National Review on Facebook because I like to keep an eye on what passes for intellectualism on the right. I don’t read every article, but I read the headlines, and if something seems particularly saucy, I’ll dive in.
They recently published an essay by Andrew McCarthy titled, Systemic Racism? Make Them Prove It, in which he argues that systemic racism does not exist, and if it does, it is the fault of progressives, since “they are the system.”
The judges, the top prosecutors, the defense bar, the experts who craft the sentencing guidelines and the standards of confinement — overwhelmingly, they are political progressives.
To be sure, he doesn’t accuse these political progressives of racism; instead, he sees them as “professionals [who are] doing the best they can.”
He continues:
Still, the legal elites will insist there is systemic racism…because the outcomes the system produces are not “equal” — equality being a utopia in which the racial composition of those arrested, convicted and sentenced aligns perfectly with the proportion of that race in the overall population, as if all racial and ethnic groups committed crimes at exactly the same rates.
I had to stop reading at that point.
Notice how McCarthy conflates arrests, convictions, and sentencing with the committal of crimes as if the former somehow gives us a real sense of the latter.
We currently have a President of the United States who brazenly violated the Hatch Act and certainly obstructed justice (not to mention the complete catalog of his criminal acts and cruelties), and yet, after 50+ years of criminal activity, this bonafide conman and historically recognized practitioner of systemic racism has never been charged with a felony.
No member of Big Tobacco spent a night in jail for knowingly giving cancer to millions upon millions of customers. No member of Big Oil will do time for lying to consumers about the economic realities of recycling, thereby encouraging the continual production of virgin plastic and the continuing degradation of our planet.
You don’t have to look any further than the FinCEN Files to see the vast criminal activity taking place in the financial sector ($2 trillion worth of dirty transactions), and yet how many felony convictions will this scandal likely result in? None.
McCarthy’s conflation reveals his deep misunderstanding of systemic racism. He’s incapable of noticing the crimes that don’t result in arrests, convictions, and sentencing, the crimes that the dominant caste generally gets away with.
McCarthy wants to force progressives to prove systemic racism (and to be sure, it’s easy to prove), but for evidence, he’s only willing to accept information produced by the system as it exists, which is racist. If a white-collar criminal destroys the lives of thousands of people, as President Trump did with Trump University, the chance of them being arrested, convicted, and sentenced is next to zero, but a black man selling loose cigarettes can be murdered on camera by law-enforcement officers who in turn will not be charged with a crime.
Unfortunately for those who want to rebut Mr. McCarthy, it is impossible to provide reliable information regarding the commitment of criminal acts broken down by race. If no one is arrested and charged with a crime, or no accusation is made to a reporting authority (as is the case for most sexual violence), how could we know a crime was committed?
The charge of systemic racism comes from a 400-year-long collection of lived experiences. It comes from anecdotes, memories, past and present traumas, cell phone footage, investigative journalism, documentary films, songs, and local, state, and federal policies (past and present). It is supported by a wide range of statistical evidence relating to the different (and sometimes starkly tragic) challenges a person is likely to face in their life simply because of the color of their skin.
According to the systemic racism argument, law enforcement in the United States (as well as other systems and institutions) reinforces the unwritten rules of our racially divided caste system. It argues, among other things, that rich, white men generally get away with committing whatever crime they want, while poor persons of color get arrested, charged, and sentenced for crimes they did not commit.
But to prove such an argument, Mr. McCarthy would like progressives to produce evidence that rich, white men commit just as many crimes as poor, black men. The only way to do that would be to interrogate their priests for confession rates, and I recall a papal law against that.
Mr. McCarthy writes that, for progressives, “equality [is] a utopia in which the racial composition of those arrested, convicted and sentenced aligns perfectly with the proportion of that race in the overall population, as if all racial and ethnic groups committed crimes at exactly the same rates.”
While he doesn’t say it outright, his statement implies an affinity for the countering thesis: racial and ethnic groups commit crimes at different rates. He doesn’t develop this counter thesis, however, because: a) it’s racist as fuck, and b) he can’t demonstrate evidence for it. Like me, all he can do is demonstrate evidence of convictions and not the committed acts.
Instead of supporting his terrible, racist counter-thesis with evidence he can’t provide, he transitions to accusations of systemic racism in academia, calling the Middlebury College President a “doyen of higher education” whose observation that racism occurs on her campus seems to have really troubled Mr. McCarthy.
He asserts that those who claim to see evidence of systemic racism are practicing “Marxism and voodoo, mainly.” This is how he denies the concept of disparate impact, which recognizes that a system designed to be neutral can still have discriminatory effects.
For an example of disparate impacts, look at the Fair Housing Act of 1934. A creation of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, the act was designed to make homeownership more accessible to Americans, but it did so in ways that reinforced the 300-year-old caste system. Nothing in the Fair Housing Act of 1934 would have predicted this effect. The act is, in essence, race-neutral, but in effect, it was incredibly harmful to black Americans.
Though Mr. McCarthy writes for a supposedly intellectually rigorous publication, his argument misunderstands the basic premises of systemic racism and reveals his desire to maintain a status quo where “professionals [who are] doing the best they can” continue to be given the benefit of the doubt over the subordinate caste members who have been crying out for 400 years for relief.
