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Is There an Unreasonable Fear of Black Men?
When viral videos of conflicts between blacks and law enforcement officers, blacks being harassed by white women comedically known as “Karens,” or blacks being criminally profiled by overzealous white males are released, I make it a point to say as little as possible – especially on social media.
Generally, it’s very difficult to know what ensued and render judgment on what happened – and what should happen to achieve “justice” with minimal information provided in a 15-, 20-, or 25-second video clip. The Rodney King debacle should’ve taught us as much (but didn’t). Additional evidence is needed to help contextualize the incident for a better understanding of what exactly occurred and then, what should or shouldn’t happen to the relevant actors going forward. Ideally, prudence would dictate patience until supplementary evidence is made available before people dispense their verdicts and punishments.
That brings me to the recent case of Ahmaud Arbery.
For a number of reasons, the reactions to this case have been noticeably different than previous cases of what’s too easily pigeonholed as racially abusive interactions between blacks and whites. Predictably, the episode has divided conservatives and progressives. But this case has also divided black conservatives and white conservative; white conservatives and white conservatives (seen on social media), and black conservatives from other black conservatives. The same can’t be said about internal divisions between progressives because they uniformly believe that systemic racism is the omnipotent, omnipresent force that thwarts, hunts, and kills American blacks out of obligation to maintain white supremacy.
What’s behind this diversification of internal reactions among conservatives won’t be investigated here. Instead, I want to address David French’s recent opinion about what he claims is responsible for the killing of black men.
In Time magazine, French argues that “unreasonable fear” is why black men are being killed in America. Unlike an earlier piece in The Dispatch where French detailed a very well-reasoned case against Travis and Gregory McMichaels and their justification for following, confronting, and killing Arbery, here he claims that racially unjustified shootings of black men, mostly by cops, reflects America’s guilt for reinforcing the association of fear with black men.
After a brief list of examples of police-involved shootings – including the Trayvon Martin case (in which George Zimmerman was not a cop but an overzealous leader of his neighborhood watch program), French claims a sizable portion of the country – like the cops in the examples he cites, shares the view that black men unjustifiably represent “outsize perceptions of threat and danger.”
Is this really the case? Does there exist an unreasonable fear of black men that prompts itchy trigger fingers among (white) Americans?
David French thinks so. He says,
[T]here are Americans who would never pick up a weapon and try to track down a black man running on the street–or follow a young black man on a rainy night–but they understand and sympathize with those who do.
He continues,
I realized that all too many of these cases carried with them a dreadful double injustice. There was the awful death itself. Then there was the public declaration that there was something right about the alarm and even terror that triggered deadly violence.
It’s that second injustice that helps perpetuate the cycle of violence. It teaches a new American generation that when black men do even small things, then there is a reason to grab a gun–and even to fire that gun. The battle for hearts and minds must continue. It must be relentless and urgent–until at long last there is no real market for rationalization. After all, there is no reason a walk through a neighborhood at night [that]… should create in any American that terrible and fatal sense of unreasonable fear.
Is this true?
Granted, there are some who are guilty of this accusation. Some in this contingent are also legitimately racist. But is this group large enough to slander with broad strokes enough Americans for this accusation to be true by default?
Ultimately, I think the answer is found with French’s strategic but disingenuous use of the word “unreasonable.”
At this point in his journalistic career, David French has reached the point where he may have a say in the titles of his columns that are published in traditional news and commentary outlets.
In regard to this article, for argument’s sake, let’s say he did. If so, the title and a significant portion of his thesis is deliberately misleading.
French only cites obvious cases in which law enforcement officers acted too impulsively (Philando Castile) or in the case of Walter Scott, immorally. But he deliberately ignores a number of other cases that grabbed national attention in which the black men who were shot posed risks to the officers involved including:
- Michael Brown, who robbed a convenience store and tried to grab the gun of an officer that confronted him and a companion. The officer involved (Darren Wilson) shot Brown in self-defense – actions that were later legitimized by a DOJ investigation; and
- Stephon Clark, who matched the description of a man vandalizing cars in his neighborhood when officers were called. After a search and pursuit (which included a police helicopter), Clark tried to evade arrest. When confronted by officers, Clark ignored orders to submit, turned toward cops with what looked a gun (a cell phone), and was shot dead.
Additionally, the Trayvon Martin case isn’t so easily dismissed as another instance of an unreasonable threat. Let’s not forget why George Zimmerman followed Martin to begin with, and why a neighborhood watch was even necessary in the community where the deadly altercation took place.
A fact that wasn’t shared too widely was that the gated community where Zimmerman lived had been robbed – at least eight times in the 14 months before the altercation. Several of the victims and witnesses described the thieves as being young black men, and unfortunately, Martin fit that description. I’m not defending Zimmerman’s actions on that fateful evening. However, one should be able to understand the frustration, insecurity, and desire of community residents to stop thieves from taking that which is not theirs.
But more to the point. French intentionally ignores what gives life to the regrettable stereotype with which he finds fault: the sad and frustrating fact that 2 to 3 percent of the black population commits a disparate percentage of violent crime.
I’m not defending the vigilantism of the McMichaels which led to the killing of Ahmaud Arbery and I’m certainly not saying that Arbery deserved to die.
I’m simply noting what is obvious to those who value intellectual honesty: that the criminal activity of a disproportionately small subset of black men negatively stigmatizes and stereotypes all black men – myself included – as dangers and public threats. To acknowledge that truism is heterodoxy in our current cultural climate where subjective feelings and white guilt are prioritized over data-driven facts. This criminal stereotype in many occasions (but not all), is a contributing factor in the deaths of black men as are the guns used by cops (or wannabe proxies) to shoot them.
That this small, racial demographic subgroup reinforces criminal stereotypes is an important aspect as to why people reach the conclusion that black men menace society. I have a personal file of more than 200 stories that show the breathtaking variety of black criminality and 99 percent has absolutely nothing to do with people holding an “unreasonable fear.” As a matter of fact, it’s precisely because of these stories, again, which stigmatizes all blacks, that mainstream America –– including other blacks –– possess the functional and in many cases, life-preserving generalization that black men are threats to public safety.
Sadly, FBI statistics reinforce this categorization. In 2018, blacks accounted for 37 percent of reported violent crimes, 54 percent of robberies, 53 percent of reported murders, and 89 percent of crimes committed against other blacks. Just this past weekend alone, 39 people were shot and ten others were killed in Chicago even though stay-at-home orders are still in place.
Additionally, when it comes to interracial crimes, blacks killed more whites (69 percent) than whites killed blacks (31 percent). One would never know this if one had to rely only on media reporting.
Jesse Jackson once lamented about walking and hearing footsteps behind him only to be relieved that they weren’t black. He said,
“There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see someone white and feel relieved.”
He also expressed his observations about black criminality in ghetto areas saying,
“This killing is not based upon poverty; it is based upon greed and violence and guns.”
Considering that these examples, buttressed by painful statistics that unfairly and overwhelmingly tarnish black men, can we still call this feeling “unreasonable?”
French says that “hearts can change.” No question they can – and they have. Despite legislative victories resulting from the civil rights movement, it wasn’t until American hearts changed that our country was able to heal and move forward.
But I think French lays the contemporary burden of responsibility to change upon the shoulders of mainstream America. This means that white people bear the overwhelming obligation to fix this problem. There certainly are white people who lack moral self-awareness and are in definite need of a spiritual self-assessment to change what compromises principled thoughts and behaviors.
But excluding blacks from contributing to this moral renovation is paternalistic and reinforces notions of black helplessness and inability. French won’t say what I’m about to say for whatever reason(s) and many whites are afraid to say what I’ll say because of the swift “cancel culture” repercussions that accompany any recognition of black humanity (on equal terms with their counterparts), black obligation, and free will. So, I’ll say it. White people who agree with me but who nevertheless choose the pragmatic path to self-preservation can thank me later.
If hearts are going to change, we’re compelled to mention what blacks can and should do to diminish this “unreasonable fear”: immediately resume self-policing of the pernicious and counterproductive behavior in black communities. This includes vociferous and consistent condemnation of blacks who do their level best to keep negative stereotypes alive, full stop.
Jesse Jackson also said,
We’ve got the power right now to stop killing each other . . . There is a code of silence, based upon fear. Our silence is a sanctuary for killers and drug dealers. There must be a market revolt. The victim has to rise up.
Blacks do have the power but they refuse to use it.
Blacks in the post-civil rights era have stopped calling balls and strikes when it comes to self-destructive and self-debasing behavior, and it’s exactly why we have so much of it. It’s no secret that once you destigmatize bad behavior, bad conduct is normalized. This behavior then became associated with black culture, being “authentically” black, and so on. When blacks sit silently as the violent statistical minority abuse and destroy our reputations, then attempt to rationalize this humiliating behavior – it becomes legitimized, and blacks as a whole become associated with it.
So, if blacks continue to sit silently and withhold disapproval, then they can’t complain when mainstream America reacts accordingly.
It bears repeating – all of this in no way condones what the McMichaels did or that Arbery (and more recently, George Floyd) deserved to be killed. It’s the larger, deliberately misleading narrative that I’m concerned with.
Blacks could stop this almost overnight if they wanted to. But they don’t, because some religions still require human sacrifice and black identity politics is one such religion (cult, actually).
After what our black ancestors went through to gift us this freedom, it’s unquestionably unfortunate that we’ve allowed ourselves to shame our reputations and their sacrifices.
David French choosing the phrase “unreasonable fear” in proximity to black men isn’t correct. A more accurate term would be “unfortunate fear.”
Blacks holding themselves accountable demonstrates self-love and self-respect and ultimately shows people that they needn’t fear blacks.
Published in Culture
Paternalistic, with a lot of White Savior Complex. No surprise coming from David French.
I’m reminded of one of his multitudinous screeds against evangelical Trump voters where he only singled out white evangelicals. Why? Does he think black evangelicals have no agency? Are black people somehow excused if they vote for Donald Trump?
(I think you wrote about that one, too, Derryck.)
My reading list is a French-free zone, so I won’t pretend to have read his piece. But I have no idea how anyone would know if there’s an unreasonable fear of black men. Are there rational criteria for establishing this or do we need to be mind readers?
I am wary of all minorities, especially blacks. It is best to avoid such people as much as possible. If they are up to no good then it is best to let them have their way unless it is directly damaging to yourself and thus giving yourself no choice. Even then if you are forced defend yourself you are at extreme risk from the political might they wield. If minorities shop or eat at a place I frequent then I will go elsewhere and let them have it. If I have to work with such people it is best to avoid them much as possible, do not engage in conversation except what business requires, since any conversation is a political bomb that can end your career. I know too many that have made a mistake in this area and have seen the results.
I did indeed!
You made a whole lot of very consequential assertions and I agreed with all of them. There is no button for that, so I’m using Reply.
If the proggies launch a final offensive, and we need to send a small group of intellectuals to a secret elaborate bunker underneath a resort hotel in West Virginia to keep the American dream alive, you are among my nominees.
It’s my understanding that as for interracial violence it is 90% black inflicted upon white. If this is true then it would be rational for whites to be fearful of blacks. I don’t know for a fact that this statistic is correct. I personally have not been a victim of black violence nor for that matter any violence. It is also my understanding that black violence perpetrated upon blacks is 90% by other blacks. Again I don’t know that as a fact. My only reason to make these comments is to add to the conversation.
But can he cook?
Count me among white people who think that prejudice against black men is not “unreasonable,” particularly when it comes to crime.
When there is a better than even chance that if I dig into media accounts of a violent crime I discover that the perpetrator is a black man, even though black men constitute less than 15% of the male population in the US, developing a bias against black men does not strike me as unreasonable.
As we have been seeing in the last few days in Minneapolis (and have previously seen in other episodes), if I see that black people are apparently unable or unwilling to control their anger to the extent that they trash the property of innocent bystanders (what does trashing a Target store or burning down an Autozone store or a new apartment building have to do with a complaint against the city police department), is it really unreasonable of me to conclude that special suspicion should be directed to black people?
I feel bad for the many law-abiding and otherwise upstanding black people in the United States, but the behavior of a non-trivial number of black people who are apparently unable or unwilling to control themselves causes more than some of us to be suspicious of black people in general.
How about this? The reasonableness of fear of black men should not be judged by the percentage of crimes against the person committed by black men, but by the percentage of those perpetrators committing crimes against the person to the black male population as a whole. I’d suggest that crime statistics and incarceration rates are not a very accurate gauge of this since they include numbers influenced by circumstances that the average white is unlikely to encounter.
I watched an interview with Maj Toure, the founder of Black Guns Matter and left thinking he and I have the same perspective,and I wouldn’t mind meeting him on the street.
And for what it’s worth, Jesse Jackson’s quote emphasized black-on-black crime.
There’s no easy answer to this. There can’t be when the primary factor is something so arbitrary like skin color. I have a long story, but I’m on my smart phone and posting with it sucks. Hers part one:
I grew up in the ghetto in Chicago. I’m white. My ghetto used to be a Polish immigrant entry point which was mostly a Mexican immigrant entry point by the time we moved. In the ghetto there’s all kinds of people. Some you should avoid altogether. Being part of it, you kind of just know; little signs and word of mouth that aren’t readily apparent just by looking at skin color. I assume it’s the same in black ghettos and Mexican ghettos. They know who’s a bad guy and who’s alright but maybe just a little rough around the edges. Skin color has nothing to do with it when you’re all mostly the same skin color.
Demeanor. Dress. Attitude. Crossing all appropriate social and personal boundaries. Listen to your gut. These are what to look for. Oh, also, everyone should be looked at warily, never flash your cash, always be aware of who’s around you and what they’re doing, avoid certain areas, try to stay in groups, be prepared to make it clear that any encounter will not end cleanly and without injury for any potential attacker. Hang out with devils and others will think you’re a devil too, and eventually you’ll get burnt.
Dogs often bite people. We should be wary of dogs.
Well, some dog breeds account for the majority of fatal injuries. We should be wary of those breeds.
Then again, those attacks tend to occur in certain areas with unleashed dogs. Those dogs usually belong to inconsiderate owners who encourage the aggression. An aggressive dog can be recognized by growling.
The point is: It’s easy to identify one condition — it’s a pit bull or a beagle, a big dog or a small dog, leashed or unleashed, sitting quietly or snarling — and suggest a response on that alone. But most of us, often subconciously, react to real situations based on a bunch of overlapping information. It’s a big snarling pit bull and the malicious thug who owns it left it unleashed. I should be wary.
A stereotype is simply logical pattern recognition as applied to people. Prejudice is refusing to consider anything that contradicts one’s preconceived expectations. Stereotyping is not prejudicial. It’s an observation, not a judgment. Recognizing a pattern does not prevent you from acknowledging exceptions or significant conditions.
When someone feels threatened because a black man is walking behind her, the black man in question is probably not neatly dressed, not looking with interest at other things or smiling, not chatting calmly with a friend or on the phone. They are probably not walking in a crowd or through a wealthy area. He’s probably slovenly dressed, talking like a gangsta, jeering, eyeing her hungrily or menacingly, etc. They are probably in a high-crime area or alone at night.
I don’t mean that a black man can be expected to act that way. I mean that if he is acting that way, she would be smart to assume the worst.
She would be recognizing a type which for particular areas is most common among a particular race. If she was in Tokyo instead of Harlem, she would look for danger signs among Asians. If she was in backwoods Arkansas, she would look for the danger signs among rednecks.
Nobody sees Walter Williams, Charles Payne, or Phylicia Rashad and feels threatened. Ethnicity is often a contributing factor to first impressions, based on public stereotypes and personal experiences. But it is always just one factor among many, especially in modern America.
I have special concerns over this issue, especially the Arbery shooting. In the 90s, the racial atmosphere was not as bad as in the past, and more importantly appeared to be on a natural and ineluctable course toward improving, and fulfilling Martin Luther King’s dream.
Now (and counter-intuitively since 2007 it seems) black/white relations are more and more under stress. Social divisions seem to be increasing along with the general economic disparities and polarization.
EVERY LIFE MATTERS.
With the Arbery shooting, the shooter was (to read some lawyers’ opinions) legally justified, even if he was morally wrong to try to make a citizen’s arrest or whatever he was trying. I fear for my wife. And it is not well for me to say, “Well, she would never be suspected of anything, or she would never put up foolish resistance, or she wouldn’t open her mouth and question those who were suspecting her of anything.” In fact this surreptitious excusing of racial aggressors, whether police or vigilantes, is insulting in that it means that, based on race, once being profiled and approached it is the responsibility of the one being profiled to wait patiently for an equitable resolution. This seems closer to pre-1960s Jim Crow than post-Great Society color-blindness.
I try to imagine this video: A Minnesota police officer is kneeling on the neck of a fallen inebriated forgery suspect, the suspect’s silver-haired head and shoulders can be seen by the police car’s tire. He’s white, and wearing a well-tailored suit. When the suspect stops struggling, the officer gently releases his knee and asks if he is ready to get into the police car. The police then pull him to his feet and place him in the patrol car and drive away. And the video is never released.
I can’t believe that they would have done what they did if he had been white, and richly attired.
I understand but respectfully disagree, and I think that this attitude is part of the current problem of race relations in the US.
I understand the argument that I could have arrived at my prejudices about “blacks” (who were “others” as I grew up) and “whites” (“our people, us“) purely by rationally analyzing crime statistics, or by rational analysis of personal experiences (which aggregate themselves indirectly into statistics) without any irrational influences. But when I reflect on my instinctive prejudices (against people I instinctively regard as “blacks”, for example), which were present from early childhood and only diminished over a long period of intellectual, moral, and spiritual development, I don’t see them as being justifiable by reason and biased data from experience, but rather as being dependent for their existence on tribal instincts, tribal culture, and man’s sinful vanity. I remember these childhood experiences and cultural inputs very clearly, and I understand now how I came to my instinctive prejudices.
Before talking about unreasonable fear we should look at the actual data on police killings: I believe there is no significant difference in the rates of police killing blacks vs. whites. It’s been a number of years but I think the DOJ’s uniform crime statistics database is useful here.
@markcamp You are too kind. Thank you for your words of encouragement.
Heh.(TM)
Be it Minneapolis, Ferguson, etc., etc. it always angers me that this kind of “protesting” *always* reinforces the worst negative racial stereotypes of blacks. What angers me just as much are various police departments in cities set ablaze and looted simply standing by and allowing these people to reinforce negative racial stereotypes while allowing their respective cities to be burned to the ground. All while blacks justify this destruction and call it “justice.”
If this is justice, then justice is no longer meaningful in any real way.
I feel threatened by Mr. Williams’ vastly superior expertise in economics. /rim shot
Interestingly enough, The Washington Post has kept stats on police-involved shootings for several years now. Every year, the number of unarmed blacks shot and killed by police has gone down. As a whole though, cops still shoot and kill more whites than blacks.
Also, I linked the UCR stats in the original post.
It all depends on the high school yearbook picture.
Speaking of citizen’s arrest, would anybody dare to arrest that cop that was snuffing out the life of George Floyd?
They couldn’t get close enough; he pulled out his mace, and the second officer was standing guard and warning people back.
I completely failed to see that link! Time to increase the font size or buy a bigger monitor. Also, I noticed the link to the excellent City Journal.
I blame it squarely on the creation of the 24/7 news cycle by the Liberal Media (that tired old phrase). Ever since this has started, the Media has gone out of its way to find the single most damning White on Black racial incident they can publicize, and then convince their audience that this is the norm. The proliferation of camera phones and video cameras in general has served to boost this abhorrent practice.
The average person , especially the young, doesn’t have the critical thinking skills to separate single incidents publicized in the news from actual trends that are happening around the country. In a country of 330 million people, no one can be expected to know what real trends are happening outside of their own small neighborhood or sphere of family and friends, without relying on accurate reports from knowledgeable outside sources.
On top of this, still pictures and especially videos go right to the emotional part of the brain while bypassing any logic or reason. If every one of these heinous incidents were reported only by written reports, hardly anybody would get riled up. We hear about millions dying in other parts of the World, but without pictures and sound, it means almost nothing.
Circumstances often matter more than skin color: In my college days I hung out with a crowd that included two black guys, one with a ‘fro (yeah, I’m dating us) and another with a razor cut, and both typically clothed in ratty T-shirts and jeans. Nobody thought a thing, because we were all computer nerds and
dressed like slobswere paragons of forthcoming fashion. If I’d run into the same two guys dressed the same way, not knowing them, on the streets of Detroit of the time, I’d likely have reacted very differently, and it would have been rational not unreasonable, for plenty of reasons cited above.Same thing with the Hispanic guys I knew in Silicon Valley years later. Lot of difference between knocking back cervezas while griping about the management, and perhaps meeting the same guys coming out of a 7-11 in the wee small hours in a not-so-good part of town.
What bugs me is how incidents like Arbery and Floyd and the rest get turned into caricatures and stereotypes overnight by the media and wokesters, and we’re all expected to take sides based on some political line instead of trying to understand what went down, and why. Supposedly as a white conservative I ought to say Arbery had it coming, but I’m also a firearms instructor, and learned and teach that while there’s forgiveness for a rightful shoot in self-defense, it doesn’t apply if you started the confrontation yourself. Which the shooters did in that case.
What bugs me about incidents like this is that the left seems mostly interested in yelling at white people about the unforgivable sin of being white. They really don’t seem to care about whether justice is done.
I saw a video of two white “citizens” and “hicks” as they called themselves, standing guard during the Minneapolis riots, and they were wearing AR-15s. Isn’t a high-powered rifle less of a close-quarters, defensive weapon than say a Glock? I’m all for open carry and self-defense, but it looked like potential overkill. Any thoughts?
Instead of a like button on everything, that should be replaced with a sliding scale –
100% disagree
50% disagree
0% neutral, but still read it
50% agree
100% agree
The slider would let you pick the exact percentage of agreement or disagreement you want to show. Genius! I should patent that.
Following comments will probably show 200 different places where this is already done, dashing my hopes for internet fame and fortune.
Indeed. The left is rarely interested in real solutions because those involve hard work changing the lives of individual people–which usually means persuading those people to change their attitudes and behaviors. Real solutions do not promise the pleasure of fomenting hate and exercising arbitrary power over helpless innocents–not to mention the wholesale theft of property. Violence and terror are much more fun for certain sorts of personalities.
“The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”
–an SDS radical, quoted by David Horowitz
“The worse, the better.”
–often attributed to Lenin, but more likely said by the Russian revolutionary Nikolay Chernyshevsky