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Not a Post-Racism Society: Bennet, Blacksand Crime
Posted by Kevin

Bill Bennett, long the primary moral philosopher of the said something horrible on his syndicated radio show:

CALLER: Well, I don’t think that statistic is accurate.

BENNETT: Well, I don’t think it is either, I don’t think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don’t know. But I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.

There is no doubt that this is a racist comment. To give Bennett the benefit of the doubt, let us suppose that Bennett was making the argument that poverty is a contributing factor to high rates of crimes, and that he meant that aborting all blacks would lower the crime rate because blacks are disproportionately represented in the poverty statistics. But it is still a racist comment — numerically, whites are far and away the primary demographic in poverty. Bennett would be associating ALL blacks with poverty, which is hardly a realistic picture.

But that is such a stretch, involving such convoluted logic, that it is hard to escape the obvious implications of what Bennett said. Bennett, when talking about crime, immediately though of African-Americans, and immediately thought that the removal of all blacks would lower the crime rate enough to notice. The racism on display in astounding.

It is even more astounding when you consider who Bennett is — a well respected public intellectual who was the primary public moral philosopher for the GOP and the right wing. He is an enormously influential person, and he has been even more influential in the recent past.

And he is a man who casually spouts racist nonsense in order to make a point. Now, considering that Bennett made a career of telling the country that most social problems — unemployment, poverty, drug use, crime — where primarily the effect of personal decisions and minimally affected by structural issues, it is not unfair to ask how much his unconscious racism influenced his conclusions. And we then are left with the specter of a major public intellectual harboring significant if unconscious racist tendencies influencing the public debate. How can we then argue that racism does not have a significant effect on public life?

September 29th, 2005 Politics, Culture | 7 comments