Keeping Some Perspective on Ferguson | Center for Equal Opportunity

I hate to make light of a situation involving death, riots, and torched police cars, but one really has to laugh at the Left with regard to Ferguson.

Bit by bit it became clearer and clearer that it was the conservative narrative that was more plausible: a thuggish convenience-store robber who was assaulting a policeman, not a gentle giant cold-bloodedly gunned down by a racist cop.

But of course an embarrassed apology was not forthcoming, and the Left plunged ahead with its insistence that Michael Brown’s death proved something or other and presented a great vehicle for the always-needed national conversation on race. And so now, as another conservative notes, the claim is, “The prosecutor presented a case that was insufficiently biased” — and he’s quite right that, “if your argument comes down to a complaint that grand jurors were given ‘all the evidence,’ that’s pretty weak tea.”

So that’s pretty funny. And what is the Left’s prescription now, going forward? Why, fewer parking and traffic tickets, of course! That and racial quotas for police departments, in violation of the civil-rights laws and to ensure that we have less-qualified cops out there. Just what we need.

Long-term, the Left’s perhaps most commonly proposed reform these days for neighborhoods like those in Ferguson is to make it easier to obtain and use illegal drugs there by decriminalizing them. Now, reasonable people can disagree about the War on Drugs, but smoking more dope will, to make a dry understatement, do nothing to address the real social problems here: first and foremost, the appalling out-of-wedlock birthrates, as well as dropout rates, poverty, and of course other crime.

My handy online dictionaries define “enabler” as “a person who encourages or enables negative or self-destructive behavior in another” or “one who enables another to persist in self-destructive behavior … by providing excuses or by making it possible to avoid the consequences of such behavior.”

So the enablers’ favored approach: Let’s not focus overmuch on criminal and other self-destructive behavior, or talk about the out-of-wedlock birthrates that feed crime or a dysfunctional inner-city culture that romanticizes thugs and disparages “acting white.” Let’s talk instead about dubious statistical disparities and ill-defined “institutional racism.”

As I say, it’s hard not to enjoy a good laugh. One other bright note: The Left’s bankruptcy here is so obvious that one hopes that anything it proposes will not get taken very seriously. But of course it’s quite possible that there the joke may be on me.

The Eric Garner case is different, by the way, but that’s not to say that the policemen there had criminal intent either, let alone any racial intent; note also that his fellow policemen that day included at least a couple of nonwhites, and the grand jury itself was about half nonwhite, with that half including both blacks and Latinos. So the policemen may have behaved wrongly, but not criminally or racially.

Here’s hoping the crowds and critics act more responsibly than they have in Ferguson, and that the call to draw global racial conclusions from an ambiguous (at best) local tragedy is rejected.

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Readers may recall that one of Eric Holder’s many inglorious moments was his attempt to block Louisiana’s school-voucher program, on the grounds that it might somehow lead to less racial balance — and despite the fact that minority students were among the program’s principal beneficiaries. The mechanism that the Obama administration used here was an old desegregation order; there are, unfortunately, a lot of these old orders still out there, and they can be used for all kinds of politically correct mischief.

The Supreme Court has made clear that, once a school system has been desegregated, control should be returned to the local authorities, who of course remain bound by the Fourteenth Amendment but who also ought to be able to try innovative school-assignment policies designed to help all children, regardless of race. Sadly, though, judges and litigants are too often enervated by inertia and do nothing.

Anyway, the Center for Equal Opportunity has for years been pushing for courts to revisit these old orders, and Jack Park had an excellent op-ed last week on this topic here, since the issue may be getting some much-deserved attention soon in Alabama.

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The College Fix has an interesting article about a debunking by two mathematicians of a “widely touted study [by Scott Page] claiming diversity is a better attribute than ability in spurring productivity and problem solving ….” As to the math, I won’t say anything more on that angle of the matter, but I will quote this testimony I gave to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission years ago:

Likewise, the title of Scott Page’s new book The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies might lead one to believe that it proves racial and ethnic diversity is good for business, but in fact its claims are more limited than that. Indeed, much of what Professor Page has to say is similar to part III of my April testimony— specifically, that for many jobs diversity of any sort is irrelevant; that in any event it is what he calls “cognitive” diversity that ultimately matters, not skin-color diversity per se; and that employers should “avoid lumping by [racial] identity” and should “avoid stereotypes” (and, of course, Professor Page does not address the legal prohibition on racial discrimination, even when it is said to be justified by believed “cognitive” differences).

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The always interesting Orlando Patterson had a piece in last week’s issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, “How Sociologists Made Themselves Irrelevant.” His basic thesis is that, after studies in the 1960s by Daniel Patrick Moynihan et al. were criticized for blaming the victim, “for several decades, sociologists have taken pains to distance themselves . . . from studies of the cultural dimensions of poverty, particularly black poverty.” Professor Patterson laments this. I’ll quote my two favorite paragraphs:

The great irony in that overreaction is that throughout that 40-year period of self-imposed censorship within the discipline, the vast majority of blacks, and especially black youth and those working on the front lines of poverty mitigation, have been firmly convinced that culture does matter—a lot. Black youth in particular have insisted that their habits, attitudes, beliefs, and values are what mainly explain their plight, even after fully taking account of racism and their disadvantaged neighborhood conditions. Yet sociologists insisted on patronizingly treating blacks in general, and especially black youth, as what Harold Garfinkel called “cultural dopes” by rejecting their own insistence that their culture mattered in any understanding of their plight.

And:

Black youth, and people generally, are not offended by attempts to change their values, habits, and even their modes of self-presentation if they are first persuaded that it is in their own interests to do so. Jackie Rivers and I learned this firsthand from our study of a group of inner-city youth, many with prison records, undergoing a demanding job-training program that aimed to alter those aspects of their cultural styles and attitudes toward work that made it hard for them to get or keep a job. None of them considered this a threat to their identities, as individuals or as black people.

Which brings us back to Ferguson, doesn’t it?

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