On police violence and blacks:
On the idea of “structural racism” in the criminal justice system:
The House of Cards of ‘Structural Racism’ in _The New Jim Crow_
Alexander Riley
If you looked around at the country’s thousands of college courses on race and racism, you would certainly find Michelle Alexander’s _The New Jim Crow one of the most commonly encountered course texts. I have seen many colleagues at my university, in numerous disciplines, enthusiastically place it on their syllabi, and she was invited by my department to give a well-attended campus talk a few years ago. I frequently find students bringing the book up in class or in their writing as what they evidently take to be a universally acknowledged authoritative source of undisputed truth, whose claims are unneedful of any defense and unassailable by any criticism.
Alexander, a former professor of law transformed into one of America’s highest profile race activists when her book became a New York Times best seller and entered the social justice pantheon of holy writ nearly a decade ago, makes a basic claim in this work that is astounding on its face but that is nonetheless at the heart of the radical Zeitgeist that currently dominates much academic and pundit discussion of race in the country. In this vision, American society constitutes a seamless system operating according to a logic of ‘structural racism,’ perfectly and malignly organized to accomplish its goals. It does this work without the need for conscious intent to make or maintain it on the part of any given individuals, and so no discernibly racist individuals are needed to make the system work. It pursues these goals inexorably and indiscriminately, under its own inevitable momentum and with its own sinister, ghostly mechanisms.
Just what are the goals of this system of ‘structural racism’? To subjugate black people, bluntly put. Alexander claims that what she is describing is evidence of a vast and exhaustive ‘caste system’ in contemporary America that is in its effects indistinguishable from slavery insofar as it basically dooms blacks to second-class citizenship. A few here or there might escape, by merest accident or luck, but the purview of the system is universal in theory and nearly so in practice. The central arm of this ‘caste system,’ Alexander claims, is the war on drugs and the systematic effort to use it to imprison vast numbers of black drug offenders for inordinately long periods of time. Through this malign mechanism, vast numbers of black lives are irreparably destroyed, and all of black America is kept in second-class status as an extension of this mass state violence.
But what is the argument and what are the facts behind the claim? Put aside for the moment the specific legal aspects of why people in prison for drug offenses are there, that is, the free will they have exercised in making the choices they have made to do the things they have done. The language of ‘system,’ and especially ‘caste system,’ implies a universal or near universal expanse, an inescapability, an inevitable entrapment of the targeted population. Let us inquire then into the simple question of how many people are actually directly affected by this massive ‘caste system’ she claims to be theorizing.
As of 2017, there are about 180,000 people in federal prisons, and about half of these are serving time for drug offenses. (All data in this paragraph are from the 2017 U.S. Department of Justice report on prison statistics). There are many more prisoners, 1,300,000 or so, in state prisons, but only 15% of these (i.e., around 200,000) have a drug offense as their most serious offense. This gives a total of around 300,000 people in the whole country in prison for drugs–out of a total prison population of just under 1,500,000. This amounts to about a fifth of the whole prison population.
There are about 325 million people in the US, so the total number of people in prison for drug offenses works out to 0.09%, some 1/10th of 1% of the overall American population. Blacks make up about 14% of the American population, which yields a total of around 46 million blacks. Even if we assumed that all of the people in prison for drug offenses are black, which is not at all close to the truth, we would be talking about 300,000 out of 46 million. This works out to 0.6%, or a little more than 1/2 of 1%. Already, one is forced to note that it is something of a strangely impotent ‘caste system’ that affects such a minuscule portion of the population purportedly being marked for systematic oppression.
But perhaps we are not counting correctly. Alexander claims there are some seven million people currently “under correctional control,” by which she means the total of those currently in prison and those on probation and parole. The trend on this number in the decade since the book emerged is slightly downward, and as of 2017 it stood at around 6.5 million. But even if all of these were black, which is clearly not close to the truth, we would still be talking about a ‘caste system’ in which 15% of the black population was enmeshed, and fully 85% of blacks, nearly nine of every ten, are free of that system.
But again, we know the seven million are not all black. Far from it. Typically, whites and Hispanics together make up more than half the prison population at any given time (they are around 54% of prisoners in the 2017 BJS data cited above, and blacks are about 33%). The same should hold true for the overall population of former prisoners. If we reasonably assume that the portion of the seven million who are black is equal to the portion of current prisoners who are black, we get 2.3 million blacks, or about 5% of blacks in the ‘caste system,’ and 95% outside it.
There is yet another downward correction that needs to be made. Recall that it is the war on drugs and differential sentencing on drug offenses that are the central method of the ‘caste system’ she describes. Most of those who are under correctional control are not drug offenders and former drug offenders. They are people who have committed other serious offenses–murder, rape, robbery, etc.
If we assume the percentage of all those under correctional control who are convicted drug offenders is roughly the same as the percentage currently in prison for drug offenses, we get only a fifth of the total of seven million, or 1,400,000 of those under correctional control. If all of this total were black, that would give us 3% of the total American black population. But if we assume, quite reasonably from current prison data, that only about 33% of this figure is made up of black offenders, that leaves 460,000 blacks altogether who are in prison, paroled, on probation, or convicted and released for drug offenses.
So, let’s do the math on that: 460,000 out of the 46 million blacks in the US yields 1% of all blacks in the country who are under the control of the systematic and purportedly omnipresent ‘caste system’ Alexander describes. In other words, 99% of blacks are not under the control of this insidious ‘system’ that Alexander presents as essentially equivalent to the Jim Crow system that systematically discriminated against every black in its legal jurisdiction.
Let us give her every statistical benefit of the doubt. The great majority of the 460,000 are young and male, so how effective is her ‘new Jim Crow system’ at controlling the lives of that particular part of the black demographic? Roughly half the black population is male, and about 27% of that population is between the ages of 20 and 40. This comes to around 6,250,000 individuals. The 460,000 would make up just over 7% of that number. So, even among young black males, the ‘caste system’ is 93% ineffective.
And let the reader be reminded: Alexander’s is an analysis that simply brackets the question of the details of specific cases. She points to a number of cases in her book that she claims illustrate the unequal treatment blacks receive for drug offenses they have committed, but presumably she has to admit that this cannot be true of every single case. That is, there certainly must be at least some cases of black offenders among the 460,000 in which, once we had a look at the details of the crime and the sentence, and then looked at the comparative data for non-black offenders, we would be forced to acknowledge that these specific defendants had gotten just about what they deserved, and that white and other non-black defendants who had committed similar offenses had received similar penalties. We do not know how many of these there might be among the 460,000, but they would certainly bring that number down still more, and they would thereby demonstrate that the ‘caste system’ is even less effective at incorporating blacks under its aegis than revealed in the preceding analysis.
By the very numbers Alexander presents, then, this is the explanatory power of the claimed ‘structural racism’ of ‘the New Jim Crow’: a tiny percentage of the black population is directly affected, and no argument or evidence is presented to show, even for this tiny percentage, that their situation is inevitably a matter of systematic injustice rather than the legitimate functioning of a system designed to punish those who break laws.
In the preface to _The New Jim Crow_, Alexander admits the book is “not for everyone.” Her audience, she goes on, are “people like me,” that is, those already fully convinced of the claim that America is a deeply racist society, basically unchanged since the existence of slavery. Might it be that she is here acknowledging, however unknowingly, how unsatisfactory the argumentative logic of the book, and of the very notions of ‘the New Jim Crow’ and ‘structural racism,’ will inevitably prove to be for any potential reader who comes to it with even the slightest willingness to critically examine its claims?
Black Power and the New York Times’ 1619 Project
Alexander Riley
It would be concerning enough if the New York Times’ 1619 Project were simply an effort in the radical recasting of the formative years of the American colonies and the early republic. Many with deep expertise in that historical material have responded in pointedly critical terms as to the massive historical distortions and omissions required by such a warped project.
But the Project’s ambitions extend far beyond historical rewriting. It also aims to forward an analysis of contemporary social issues and problems informed by the same radical intellectual perspective that undergirds that distorted history.
That intellectual perspective has its own history. It began to develop in earnest about a half century ago, in the tumult and chaos of Black Power radicalism of the late 1960s. It is there, in the catastrophically wrong turn the civil rights movement took, that the warped worldview that would eventually come to dominate the study of race in the contemporary world of higher education and then filter out to become widespread throughout American political culture has its origins. Until the middle of the 1960s, the civil rights movement had been dominated by a very different set of perspectives. Figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, and James Farmer were vigorous opponents of the racial status quo of the times, but they built their analysis of its nature largely within the parameters of traditional American cultural frameworks. Constitutional Republicanism and Protestant Christianity were central cultural systems for these critics. In short, they believed that American culture and formative principles were sound and simply needed to be fully implemented to correct existing problems regarding race relations.
By the later 1960s, newer, younger, extremist voices had arisen in the black civil rights world. An essential early incarnation of this new radical voice can be found in the now largely forgotten book Black Power. This book, co-written by a young radical political scientist, Charles Hamilton, and one of the most controversial figures in the student organization SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee), Stokely Carmichael, created in its title the term that quickly came to represent the entirety of the radical racial identitarian movement that took off in the ‘60s and ’70. In addition to presenting a new, revolutionary way of looking at civil rights politics, it basically invented the radically oriented set of ideological tools for talking about racial inequality in America that have in the half-century since the book’s publication been embraced by much of elite American culture.
The argument of this remarkable book, published in 1967, is that the situation for blacks as a whole had markedly deteriorated, and that prospects going forward would be dismal unless blacks as a group took up a revolutionary perspective. To repeat: this is in1967. That is to say, it is after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965; after the initiation under Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty of an unprecedented level of spending—much of it in the form of direct redistribution of resources—on urban social problems; after the first two thirds of the twentieth century’s “Great Migration” of blacks from the poor rural South to the materially more prosperous and politically free North. The positive benefits of this population shift can scarcely be overemphasized. By 1970, four in ten blacks lived in the North, and in the two decades between 1940 and 1960, the black middle class had grown enormously.
In this context, Carmichael and Hamilton claimed—against the evidence—that black circumstances were more dire than they had been since the Emancipation Proclamation. They went so far as to compare the black situation in 1967 to those of the “post-colonial” struggles in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere in the world. Blacks in the U.S. faced, in their view, a “unique case of colonialism.”[1]
It is a well-established rule in the sociology of social movements that the possibility of radicalization is heightened in moments of the movement’s advance and success. More material resources and more freedom for expression, which become available precisely as social movements make notable gains, frequently translate into the rise of angrier, more insistent voices than had been in evidence previously. As objective deprivation decreases, relative deprivation—the distance between the objectively improving situation of blacks and the ideal of equality to which they aspire—sparks the intense emotional force that we saw take shape in the many violent urban disturbances of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
But once we understand in social science terms how such perspectives could arise, and why radicals shouting emotionally charged but impractical, incoherent slogans might have gotten traction on the street, how could such a patently counterfactual case as that of Black Power be argued in an intellectual setting? Not very convincingly, it turns out. In order to make even the beginnings of a case, Carmichael and Hamilton needed fresh theoretical tools, devised not with an eye to more accurately and objectively understanding social reality but instead with the intention to mask obvious progress as oppressive stasis and decay. By every measure, explicit, noticeable, and damaging episodes of racism and prejudice were shrinking in the country in the late 1960s. The clearest evidence of how much white opinion had moved on this was in the fact that still white-dominated media sources in the North almost uniformly presented images of Southern mobs chanting ugly slogans at black students integrating schools and colleges with evident disgust and dismay. All the opinion data show a similar situation. At the end of WWII, fewer than half of whites in the U.S. believed in equal opportunity for jobs among the races. By 1972, just a few decades later, nearly all whites (97 percent) believed it.[2]
To counter these inconvenient facts, which could be multiplied here ad nauseam, Carmichael and Hamilton invented the notion—now nearly universally accepted as doxa in much of the academy—of institutional racism. This novel concept was defined as “acts by the total white community against the black community . . . less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts . . . [yet] no less destructive of human life . . . [and] originat[ing] in the operation of established and respected forces in the society.”[3] Here is the beginning of the seemingly limitless intellectual deception on this matter that is now dominant in the social sciences and much of the humanities.
The examples Carmichael and Hamilton use to illustrate institutional racism are also among the favorites of contemporary partisans of this worldview. The black unemployment rate is higher than the white rate, we are told, and blacks have a more difficult time securing a mortgage.[4] These statements were true in 1967 and remain so today. But only people who do not understand the basic logic of social science explanation could think that they are self-evidently “acts by the total white community against the black community” or that they unquestionably demonstrate the effects of unjust bias against blacks. The hard questions of explaining social outcomes are in this way not so nimbly leapt over. The reasons why people are employed or unemployed, offered mortgages or denied them, are numerous and complicated. Explicit prejudice might indeed play a role, but this has to be discovered empirically, not asserted as an a priori inevitability, especially when there is voluminous evidence, as there was in 1967, that American whites are rapidly becoming less prejudiced than they had been. What of the possible role of racial differences in educational training, testing performance, and evidence of income and savings, wealth, and accumulated debt, or of anecdotal or perhaps more systematic employer knowledge of differential job performance between groups, to name just a few other potentially relevant variables?
It is indeed possible that “the operation of established and respected forces in society” may yield unequal outcomes for different groups, but that fact does not tell us anything about the moral nature of those “forces.” A 100-meter race track and a random group of runners sprinting its length are quite likely to produce something other than total equality of outcome. By the malformed logic of Black Power, we are justified, absent any other information, in asserting that the race track itself is evidence of institutional racism if members of one racial group perform systematically better than those of another. To ask what training regimens are adhered to by different groups of racers, or what evidence might exist of group differences in capability for running the kind of race defined by this track, is taboo in this framework.
And how can we hope to demonstrate the action of “the total white community against the black community” in any set of “forces” at work in a vast and complicated national society such as the United States? This extreme structuralist logic fails any conceivable empirical test. Indeed, was even Jim Crow an example of institutional racism by this definition? Jim Crow clearly affected the lives of Southern blacks in broad and negative ways, and ideas about the inferiority of blacks were the demonstrable belief driving it, but all of this can be recognized and effectively described without the illicit and brute causal leap to the universalist Manichaeism of the untenable concept of ‘institutional racism’ that Black Power makes. For the only rationally supportable—and morally responsible—view is that Jim Crow was not “an act by the total white community.” It was a result of myriad specific acts by individuals from a subset of the larger group “American whites,” that is, white Southerners who voted or otherwise acted directly within Southern legal and political systems to establish racially exclusionary laws and policies. Some number, unknowable with any precision but certainly significant, of white Southerners either took no part in the political and legal decision-making that produced Jim Crow—because they failed to vote or otherwise directly participate in electoral politics or the shaping of law—or they opposed it.
The venerable axiom of the “Solid South,” united during the Jim Crow period under the pre-New Deal Democratic Party, is a useful shorthand for rough description of Southern politics, but as soon as one examines details in close relief, the simplification by which Carmichael and Hamilton want to go from this imprecise generalization to claims about the action of all whites falls apart. An easy way to see the degree of complexity in white Southerners’ political views during the period is to examine Presidential election results during the pre-Civil Rights era. Many Republican candidates for president in this period—McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover—carried or nearly carried some Southern states. Hoover won six out of these sixteen states. And even when the states of the former Confederacy voted for Democratic candidates, the state votes were in many cases far from landslides. Millions of votes were cast by white Southerners for Republican candidates for president during this period. And some of the Republican presidential candidates for whom whites in the South voted had positions on Jim Crow and racial politics more generally that were decidedly more pro-black than the positions of their electoral opponents. Harding straightforwardly argued, in a 1921 speech before a multiracial Birmingham, Alabama audience, for equal educational opportunity and equal rights of citizenship for blacks. In his 1923 State of the Union speech, Coolidge expressed the belief that the rights of blacks were “just as sacred as those of any other citizen.” Yet in the stunted analysis of Carmichael and Hamilton, the many white Southerners who voted for these men to serve as the nation’s leader are functionally indistinguishable on the race question from the most extreme elements of the Ku Klux Klan.
Jim Crow can be discussed in properly social scientific terms, of course, but those terms must be far stricter and more careful than the absurdly loose language of Hamilton and Carmichael’s institutional racism. The Jim Crow system consisted of legal codes and rules written by legislators who had ideas that define members of different racial groups differently as a matter of law, and these codes were generally—though not invariably–enforced by others, sometimes because they shared the ideas behind the codes, sometimes because of the obligation of their structural position in an occupational hierarchy, and sometimes because of both. Of crucial importance to this more careful definition of Jim Crow—and any other social situation of more or less systematic discrimination and differential treatment based on race—is that it makes clear that individuals are the only possible actors in human societies. “Forces,” the term Hamilton and Carmichael give as the agents of institutional racism, cannot act or hold racist ideas, or indeed any ideas. The theoretical move away from individuals as the agents in society to vague structures and “forces” is entirely unmerited, deeply anti-scientific, and motivated entirely by political ideology.
Institutional racism is manifestly here at its birth, already a phantom, an entirely fictional entity invented to “explain” any negative outcomes that accrue to blacks by indiscriminately blaming “the total white community,” without the need to carefully inquire into particulars or to comparatively examine the contribution made by other potential causes of such outcomes. It is to be accepted on faith, whatever the state of the evidence.
Black Power sweepingly rejects the policy goals and the vision of race relations of the King/Wilkins/Farmer civil rights movement. It instructs us that American society must be fundamentally “revamp[ed],”[5] and this must include the destruction of what the authors label “Anglo-conformity.” By this, they mean nothing less than the entire Anglo-Protestant institutional basis of American society and culture. The English language and all other “English-oriented cultural patterns” are to be removed from their position as “dominant and standard in American life.”[6] We are not told what will replace these deeply moored social institutions.
An entire chapter details the impossibility (a mere “myth,” in the authors’ terms) of black-white coalitions working toward peaceable relations between the races. The reason is simple: “[N]o matter how ‘liberal’ a white person might be, he cannot ultimately escape the overpowering influence—on himself and on black people—of his whiteness in a racist society.”[7] The totality of the shift in Black Power from the early (and successful) civil rights movement is perhaps at its sharpest in the authors’ account of their differences with “[o]ne Negro woman, prominent in civic affairs,” who criticized black rioters in one of the myriad urban disturbances of the period in the following terms:
We want a type of relationship [between whites and blacks], built on solid ground, which will endure through the years—a relationship depending upon mutual trust and respect. This does not derive from rowdyism and lawlessness . . . We insist on equality of opportunity—under law and under God—but we are not radical street demonstrators, losing control of our good instincts. Nor will we endorse or support those who work without purpose or concern for law and order. Let all of us—white and colored—join hands in securing justice, obedience to law and good will which will bring progress in every area of our common life.[8]
Carmichael and Hamilton’s response to this heartwarmingly magnanimous and unifying message demonstrates a total estrangement from the deepest meanings of American civic republicanism and Anglo-Protestant spiritual values. Blacks like this woman, they sneer, are “clinging to a set of values and a rhetoric which never applied in . . . this country.” Non-radical blacks foolishly subscribe to “Christian love, charity, good will . . . [and] the American dream,” but wiser heads know that these principles were “not originally intended to include them and [they do] not include the black masses today.”[9]
It could not be clearer that the creators of the 1619 Project have fed intellectually from the fruit that fell from this tree of extremist black thought. Black Power is in fact something of a theoretical template for the 1619 Project, fifty years in advance of it. In the Project’s lead essay, Nikole Hannah-Jones views American history from just this blinkered Manichean set of lenses. Whites are everywhere in it, at every moment of American history, the very image and emblem of visceral hatred and cruelty, and nothing more. It is not just the American Founding that is racist to its core; every facet of white identity, from the beginning to the present moment, is directed in a laser focus to the oppression of blacks. This perverse framework is precisely the inverse of the view of the brutal white racist Hannah-Jones wants to see in every American white. In this radical prism, all whites become inhuman monsters monomaniacally obsessed with the crushing of the souls of black folk, who are depicted universally as stunning moral superheroes. Indeed, it is blacks who made everything valuable and worthwhile in the country, the brilliant and creative collective authors who produced “the one truly American culture,” under the burden of the unrelenting white effort to betray every virtuous principle they had mendaciously planted in the founding documents.[10]
What is the truth of America in the vision of the 1619 Project? It is “that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of black resistance.” Only blacks believed in the ideals of the founding; the whites who produced its documents were the basest liars and hypocrites. Every bit of the labor to achieve American principles of equality, from slavery to Emancipation to the Civil Rights Movement, was performed, in Hannah-Jones’ narrative, by blacks alone and unaided, with whites everywhere resisting and undermining black liberation.
Anyone who has consulted real history or sociology on this understands that we are here entirely in the realm of fantasy. The true lines of the story of race relations in this country include plenty of racist whites and heroic blacks, to be sure, but they also include innumerable whites who actively opposed slavery and black subordination in every period of the life of the country, and they show us also countless blacks who contributed little or nothing to their own liberation, or who even undermined that project. This is the reality of history and social life: messy, complex, contradictory, difficult. But Hannah-Jones’ aspiration is clearly not so limited as to speak as a mere historian or social scientist. She wants to be an author of myths.
The tortured reasoning and logic of Black Power can readily be seen as the blueprint of Hannah-Jones’ essay. In both, anecdote constantly serves as evidence of the broadest claims about whole swaths of history and the beliefs and behaviors of large social groups. In place of any real examination of the complicated reasons for racial disparities, these disparities are simply listed in a condemnatory litany—blacks do less well in educational outcomes, employment and income, involvement in crime and the criminal justice system, etc. Then it is asserted that the list itself constitutes evidence of American racism and the impossibility of absolution short of a complete demolition of traditional American economic, political, social, and cultural systems. No other factors can conceivably be involved in the explanation, and no evidence is needed to illustrate the racism beyond hand-waving at “institutional,” or “structural,” or “systemic” (the three are essentially interchangeable in this literature) factors that need never be delineated or explained in any serious way.
Why do black students drop out of school more frequently? Why are their test scores lower? Why do they have less success securing good jobs? Why are they so overrepresented in the criminal justice system as defendants? The very business of truly scientific social analysis, of exacting and difficult examination of social problems with objective methods and theoretical equanimity, is rejected. A suggestion is even made in Black Power that social science itself, in its 1967 incarnation, is insufficient for adequately studying this topic precisely because there are not enough black social scientists. The black understanding of American culture and the psychology of American whites, it is asserted, is superior by virtue of their “alienation and detachment.”[11] Who you are determines the quality of social science of race relations you are capable of producing.
By 2019, we see the fruits of this identity-epistemology project begun in the late 1960s. Nearly all the figures associated with the 1619 Project are nonwhites, and one is on very safe grounds imagining that these are people who more or less universally accept the basic premise set out by Carmichael and Hamilton that only blacks can adequately study and understand the situation of blacks. The radically subjectivist approach of Carmichael and Hamilton is today taught as a respectable methodological take on the social sciences in universities across the country, thanks to the growing numbers of social science faculty influenced by this worldview.
Few today read Black Power outside the ranks of academic historians of extremist political thought in the 1960s. But Nikole Hannah-Jones and the other writers behind the 1619 Project have drunk deeply of the drafts distilled over the decades from the original cask of Carmichael and Hamilton. Understanding the deeply flawed nature of the 1619 Project requires tracing it back to the equally anti-intellectual and ideological efforts in sociological reasoning that grew out of extremist black political thought of the turbulent 1960s.
[1] Stokely Carmichael, Charles Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (Random House, 1967), 2-3.
[2] Krysan, M., & Moberg, S. (2016, August 25). Trends in racial attitudes. University of Illinois Institute of Government and Public Affairs. Retrieved from http://igpa.uillinois.edu/programs/racial-attitudes
[3] Carmichael and Hamilton, op. cit., 4.
[4] Ibid., 9, 22.
[5] Ibid., 60, 61.
[6] Ibid., 62.
[7] Ibid., 61.
[8] Ibid., 141.
[9] Ibid., 140-141.
[10] Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written,” New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2019.
[11] Carmichael, Hamilton, 180.
