(Apologies and full credit to Weapons Grade Stupid)
A top conservative publication published a column on Wednesday advising young white children to stay away from black people, despite firing a columnist roughly a year ago for writing a very similar piece in a different publication. Victor Davis Hanson, a scholar of military history and longtime National Review foreign affairs columnist…like innumerates Richard Cohen and Kathleen Parker before him, is relying on a common mathematical fallacy, called the base rate error, to draw fictitious conclusions about the danger posed by black men. Even if black men are more likely to be violent, and that’s a big if, it still doesn’t follow that all others should avoid them: because the absolute rate of crime is extremely low, any individual black man is almost certainly not going to be a criminal. But, as Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it in a sterling critique of Hanson, “one of the effects of racism is its tendency to justify stupidity.”
Those of you who remember “race realist” John Derbyshire (Why would you? He’s contributed nothing of value to society.) will recall the ridiculous racist screed that got him fired from National Review. Not that writing for any publication run by Rich Lowry is something to be proud of, but Derbyshire violated even Lowry’s abysmally low standards and found himself out on his butt. Upon firing the “race realist,” Lowry stated that Derbyshire was guilty of expressing views that National Review “we’d never associate ourselves.”
Yeah…about that unequivocal moral line in the sand drawn by Lowry. As with all lines in the sand, the effects of time tend to erase them, and now Lowry’s fish-wrap seems to be advancing exactly the sort of views he previously disavowed. No great surprise there, I suppose; hypocrisy in the service of the cause is one of the hallmarks of modern Conservatism…or at least Rich Lowry’s flavor of Conservatism.
Call me naive, but I was hoping that here in the 21st century we as a society would have progressed beyond fear-mongering and racism. I’d have thought we’d be able to get past paranoid race-based stereotypes. And I would have been wrong. WAY wrong. That we still prefer to judge a man by the color of their skin instead of the content of their character isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of the progress we’ve made…because it would seem there hasn’t been much.
Racism really is a great way to justify and rationalize stupidity. Same as it ever was.
