Review Essay (“On Race, Cops. Fake News, and the True Inconvenient Truth: An Anti-Racist Manifesto.”) 

James M. Thomas
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
University of Mississippi.
Third Reviewer

Like many of my colleagues, I am often asked and gladly accept opportunities to review scholarship. I have a deep commitment to the sociological enterprise. Reviewing the research and writing of my colleagues is an important service toward that commitment.

Often, the works I review follow some conventions of the discipline – there is a primary claim or question that requires study, there is engagement with what published research has said on the matter, there is some evidence that the claim or question will be subject to systematic observations and analysis, and there is an engagement with theory to explain any patterns identified through systematic observations and analysis.

The extent to which any given manuscript accomplishes each of these conventions varies. My role as reviewer, when and where possible, is to help strengthen each of these components so that the research and writing, when published, meets the standards of the discipline and contributes to the advancement of our knowledge and understanding of our social worlds.

On occasion, I am also asked to review essays that are more provocative in their substance. These essays rarely follow the above conventions. Nevertheless, they are at least grounded in some evidentiary standards. This allows for a distinction to be made between these essays and lay writings where little else is required (and often little more is present) other than the author’s strong opinion.

“On Race, Cops, Fake News, and the True Inconvenient Truth” certainly does not belong in the first camp. None of its claims are deeply engaged with contemporary research on policing, racism, and police violence. Nor are any of its claims grounded in systematic observations or analysis. Finally, there is no engagement with social theory – whether they are theories of police and community interactions, theories of police violence, theories of criminal behaviors, or any other explanatory frameworks.

“On Race, Cops, Fake News, and the True Inconvenient Truth” is little more than a polemic on the contemporary Black Lives Matter social movement, and adjacent movements that seek redress to the enduring legacy of anti-Black racism in the United States. Nevertheless, this polemic doesn’t fit within the second camp. Its claims are certainly provocative, of course. The author proclaims, for example, that

• the #BlackLivesMatter movement diminishes the traditional civil rights movement (p.1); a claim entirely removed from the concrete history of the modern Civil Rights Movement, and entirely ignorant of the active participation of law enforcement and the court systems in the decades-long nightmare known as lynching.
• drawing attention toward police violence against Black people is anti-American slander (p.1)
• because police killings of Black people are rare the problem is overblown (p.2)
• for the past 45 years the only sanctioned form of racial discrimination in the US has been in favor of Black people, and at the expense of White people (p.5)
• avoiding young Black males in public spaces is a matter of self-preservation because they are “crime-prone” (p.9); a claim not at all removed from late nineteenth and early twentieth century racialists’ insistence on the prevalence of a “criminal gene” among the poor and Black populations.[1]

The above list is not exhaustive. I simply grew tired of restating what social scientific research has shown to be wrong. None of the above claims, or others made within the essay, stand up to even modest scrutiny or a cursory review of the existing literature. Nor is the author engaging in any sort of good faith effort that might advance our collective understanding how and why, when police commit violence, they do so disproportionately against Black people.

The author cites a 2019 paper, for example, that asserts benchmarking the relative counts of police killings on relative crime rates eliminates racial disparities in police killings. Yet a more recent study, published in the very same journal as the original, showed that this benchmarking methodology “does not remove the bias introduced by crime rate differences but rather creates potentially stronger statistical biases that mask true racial disparities, especially in the killing of unarmed non-criminals by police.”[2]

The fact that Black people, including unarmed Black people, are more frequently killed by the police is now a routine finding in social scientific research. One study reveals that Black men are 2.5 times more likely than White men to be killed by police during their lifetime.[3] Another study analyzed 990 fatal police shootings from 2015, finding that Black victims were twice as likely to have been unarmed as White victims.[4] Elsewhere, researchers show that in police shootings in which the victim appeared to pose a minimal-or-less threat to the police, Black people were three times more likely to be killed than White people.[5] What makes these findings even more significant is that police administrative records are subject to the same racist practices as those used to arrest, detain, and even kill Black people. The result is that many studies that examine the prevalence of police violence toward Black people underestimate it, and in some instances mask it entirely.[6]

So, once these claims are made subject to proper social scientific scrutiny, what are we left with? Little more than race craft, supported by misdirection and a willful ignorance of the subject matter, and yet still chock-full of hubris in its masquerading as serious critique.[7] Perhaps more serious than even the author’s abuse of facts is the underlying motive. Ultimately, these polemics ask the rest of us – experts and laypersons alike – to entertain and engage with the idea that Black people’s lives are so insignificant that we ought to question whether even just one state-sanctioned murder of a Black person is worth our time and attention. We are left trying to prove something that does not require any proof, because it is such a basic principle of humanist inquiry - Black lives DO matter! In entertaining the question of whether Black lives matter, we miss the more important questions at stake – where, when, how, and for whom do Black lives matter?

Fortunately for the author’s sake, there are any number of popular press outlets that would entertain this silliness. Unfortunately for the author, the field is already quite crowded, and few of those outlets are willing to give space to what amounts to an even less interesting version of a Heather MacDonald book talk.

Notes

[1] see, for example, Charles B. Davenport, “Crime, Heredity, and Environment,” Journal of Heredity 19, no. 7 (July 1928): 307–13.

[2] Cody T. Ross, Bruce Winterhalder, and Richard McElreath, “Racial Disparities in Police Use of Deadly Force Against Unarmed Individuals Persist After Appropriately Benchmarking Shooting Data on Violent Crime Rates,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 12, no. 3 (April 1, 2021): 323–32.

[3] Frank Edwards, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito, “Risk of Being Killed by Police Use of Force in the United States by Age, Race–Ethnicity, and Sex,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 34 (August 20, 2019): 16793–98.

[4] Justin Nix et al., “A Bird’s Eye View of Civilians Killed by Police in 2015,” Criminology & Public Policy 16, no. 1 (2017): 309–40.

[5] Joseph Wertz et al., “A Typology of Civilians Shot and Killed by US Police: A Latent Class Analysis of Firearm Legal Intervention Homicide in the 2014–2015 National Violent Death Reporting System,” Journal of Urban Health 97, no. 3 (June 1, 2020): 317–28.

[6] Dean Knox, Will Lowe, and Jonathan Mummolo, “Administrative Records Mask Racially Biased Policing,” American Political Science Review 114, no. 3 (August 2020): 619–37.

[7] For the analytic framework of race craft, see Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Race craft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2014).

References

Davenport, Charles B. “Crime, Heredity, and Environment.” Journal of Heredity 19, no. 7 (July 1928): 307–13.

Edwards, Frank, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito. “Risk of Being Killed by Police Use of Force in the United States by Age, Race–Ethnicity, and Sex.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 34 (August 20, 2019): 16793–98.

Fields, Karen E., and Barbara J. Fields. Race craft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. London: Verso, 2014.

Knox, Dean, Will Lowe, and Jonathan Mummolo. “Administrative Records Mask Racially Biased Policing.” American Political Science Review 114, no. 3 (August 2020): 619–37.

Nix, Justin, Bradley A. Campbell, Edward H. Byers, and Geoffrey P. Alpert. “A Bird’s Eye View of Civilians Killed by Police in 2015.” Criminology & Public Policy 16, no. 1 (2017): 309–40.

Ross, Cody T., Bruce Winterhalder, and Richard McElreath. “Racial Disparities in Police Use of Deadly Force Against Unarmed Individuals Persist After Appropriately Benchmarking Shooting Data on Violent Crime Rates.” Social Psychological and Personality Science 12, no. 3 (April 1, 2021): 323–32.

Wertz, Joseph, Deborah Azrael, John Berrigan, Catherine Barber, Eliot Nelson, David Hemenway, Carmel Salhi, and Matthew Miller. “A Typology of Civilians Shot and Killed by US Police: A Latent Class Analysis of Firearm Legal Intervention Homicide in the 2014–2015 National Violent Death Reporting System.” Journal of Urban Health 97, no. 3 (June 1, 2020): 317–28.