Confirmation of WHOSE Bias? | Center for Equal Opportunity

The Los Angeles Times had an op-ed last week that discussed “police shootings of young men of color” in terms of “confirmation bias.” Now, I’m prepared to believe that people tend to perceive ambiguous situations in ways that confirm their existing views, but that seems quite inapposite to, for example, the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases. While one can criticize the police response in Mr. Garner’s case, no one misperceived what he was doing (and there were nonwhites among the police involved there as well as whites), and of course there is no doubt that Michael Brown was a criminal and that there is strong evidence that his being perceived as a threat was, to put it mildly, quite reasonable.

No, the best example of “confirmation bias” in the headlines today is, instead, the willingness of the Left to swallow hook, line, and sinker the Rolling Stone campus-rape story, as Linda Chavez explains in her column last week.

Oh, and as long as I have the floor, let me link here to a piece I did for National Review Online in March 2008, right after then-presidential candidate Barack Obama gave his widely-praised speech in Philadelphia on race relations (prompted by criticism of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, an unpaid campaign adviser and pastor at Obama’s Chicago church). My piece was entitled, “Want to Hear a REALLY Honest Speech about Race in America?,” and with all due modesty I think what it says on race relations in the United States remains true and is quite relevant in light of the ongoing Ferguson protests.

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You win some, you lose some: A federal district court has ruled that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which doesn’t like it when private employers balk at hiring people with criminal records, has to reveal its own internal policies in this area, which the agency had resisted. On the other hand, the Montgomery County, Md., public-school system has announced it wants to bring the racial makeup of its faculty in line with the racial makeup of its students (never mind the lack of any legal basis for this discrimination, as we have now pointed out to their lawyers), and the New York Fire Department has said that it’s going to jettison a physical test for probationary firefighters, perhaps because of its “disparate impact” against women.

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In Senate testimony last week, the head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights lamented, “In one form or another, laws that disenfranchise individuals with felony convictions have existed in the United States since its founding. In fact, 29 states had such laws on the books at the time of the ratification of the Constitution.”

Now, let me first note that it is useful to have another instance (there are plenty more) where a proponent of re-enfranchising felons concedes that these laws were on the books even when there was no conceivable racial motive for them (since it is often suggested that these laws are all rooted in the Jim Crow era). After all, blacks were generally not allowed to vote in ante bellum days anyhow — even in the North, let alone in the South — so there was no need to use felon-voting restrictions as an indirect means to keep them from voting.

But of course what is most eye-catching about the quote is its premise that there were more than 13 states at the time of the ratification of the Constitution. I was tempted not to ridicule the testimony for what may have been a typographical error, except (a) I’m not sure how a simple typo would explain this, and (b) if you google “states had such laws on the books at the time of the ratification” you’ll see that this language is taken verbatim from a formal report joined by a number of organizations in the Civil Rights Establishment and submitted to the United Nations, of all places, and that it has been quoted elsewhere and with approval.

So, I’ve decided to go ahead and ridicule all involved for their historical ignorance.

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The Center for Equal Opportunity’s chairman, Linda Chavez, recently joined National Review’s Jay Nordlinger and columnist Mona Charen to “talk about Ferguson, the New York asphyxiation case, and our never ending race preoccupations in America.” You can listen to the podcast here (Linda’s part makes up about the first half-hour).

You can also see CEO quoted recently in the Washington Post here and the Daily Caller here.

For the latter, I was discussing the Obama administration’s new guidelines on racial profiling. I’m linking here to Senate testimony I gave in 2012 on this topic, making these basic points: “(1) care must be taken in defining the term “racial profiling”; (2) the amount of racial profiling that occurs is frequently exaggerated, and care must be taken in analyzing the data in this area; (3) with those caveats, racial profiling as I will define it is a bad policy and I oppose it, with (4) a possible exception in some antiterrorism contexts.”

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