My title answers the question I posed in my post Are the Police Racist? I asked:
If a statement about race is true, is one a racist for making it? Is one a racist for reporting the following?
Homicide numbers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1976–2005 indicate that young African-American males account for homicide victims at levels that are ten to 20 times greater than their proportion of the population and account for homicide offenders at levels that are 15 to 35 times greater than their proportion of the population.
I received two intelligent responses one in agreement, the other in disagreement. Here is the first:
[A leftist I am reading] argues, and this touches your point, that propaganda can consist of claims that are true and made sincerely. Such as ‘there are Muslims among us’, which is true, and does not even communicate something false (namely that Muslims are inherently dangerous to others), but rather is misleading. ‘It simply does not follow that the flawed ideological belief that makes some claim effective as propaganda is expressed or communicated in that claim’. I think he would treat the statement you quote in the same way.
Homicide numbers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1976–2005 indicate that young African-American males account for homicide victims at levels that are ten to 20 times greater than their proportion of the population and account for homicide offenders at levels that are 15 to 35 times greater than their proportion of the population.
Is that true? Damned right. Is it made sincerely? Surely so. But it is effective propaganda because misleading, according to him. Bizarrely, he says that the word ‘welfare’ does not appear on any banned list, yet always conveys ‘a problematic social meaning’. Even a word like ‘mother’ is problematic (has a ‘harmful social meaning’) whenever it is used. F--k me.
BV: Leftists subscribe to the hermeneutics of suspicion. Thus they refuse to take what conservatives say at face value as expressing a sincerely held opinion based in empirical fact. If I cite the FBI statistic, I am speaking in a 'code' using 'dog whistles' that other conservatives can hear. So if I say that blacks as a group are more criminally prone than whites, what I am really saying is that blacks have to be kept in their place or hunted down. I am legitimating their alleged unjust 'mass incarceration.' I am condoning the alleged murder of the likes of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown of Ferguson. (The truth, of course, is that these two youths were not murdered but brought about their own deaths by their immoral, illegal, and extremely foolish behavior.) Thus leftists ignore the manifest meaning of what the conservative says and seek out some latent 'ideological' meaning, where ideology has the Marxist sense of a legitimation of existing relations of power and domination.
It has been said, correctly in the main, that for a conservative, leftists are wrong, whereas for a leftist, conservatives are evil. It is because they regard us as evil that they refuse to accord us respect as rational interlocutors with a point of view worth examining. This is why they exclude conservative speakers and shout down those who somehow make it onto campus. This is why they pepper us with purely emotive epithets such as 'fascist' and the 'phobe' constructions which are designed to impugn our sanity.
So when I cite the FBI stat to explain why blacks are 'over-represented' in the prison system I am accused of retailing racist propaganda when I am simply speaking the truth.
I am one of those conservatives who think that leftists (including most contemporary liberals) are not merely wrong but morally defective people. They deny the plain truth and slander their opponents. They don't value free speech. They have no understanding of the values of the university. They enable and apologize for barbarians.
Part of what fuels their destructive worldview is the false empirical belief that every group is equally competent and qualified at everything so that if one group does worse than another the explanation has to be that they have been put upon, held back, oppressed, marginalized, victimized. So women and men are innately just as good at the STEM disciplines -- which is false -- and if you suggest otherwise as James Damore did, you lose your job at Google. Even more absurd is the belief that men and women as groups are equally competent in all combat roles in the military and that to suggest otherwise is to promote unjust discrimination.
My theory is that the Christian metaphysical belief that we are all equal before God as persons got secularized after the death of God (in Nietzsche's sense) into a false empirical belief that we are all equal in empirical fact, and that indications to the contrary can be explained away in terms of racism, sexism, ageism, etc.
The other response I got in effect points out that truths about race and ethnicity can be asserted with scurrilous intent. Now that of course is true. I've made the point myself more than once.
Suppose I encounter a man in a wheel chair, a man without legs. If I say, "You, sir, have no legs!" I speak the truth, but commit a low-level moral offense. There are truths the enunciation of which is morally contraindicated in certain circumstances.
So of course a racist could cite the FBI statistic in a scurrilous way.
But the issue is precisely this: if you speak the truth about race it does not follow that you are a racist. For your intentions may be good and what you say may be something that needs to be heard.
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