Ask yourself this question: What state of affairs would have to exist to demonstrate to the satisfaction of most reasonable people that there was no institutional racism in this country? In what empirically demonstrable ways would the country look different if there were no institutional racism?
It seems extremely difficult to give a cogent answer to those questions. One common attempt is to point to racial inequities in society and to assert that if there were no institutional racism there'd be no racial disparities, but that doesn't work. There could be a host of reasons for those inequities that have nothing to do with racism.
Even so, in recent days people point to the number of blacks that are killed by police officers as an illustration of the racism afflicting our police departments, and argue that were there no institutional racism police wouldn't be killing blacks with such frequency.
The problem with this argument is that the statistics don't support it. A study by Yale law school researchers found that there was no racial disparity in the use of lethal force by police. They wrote that "on the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we are unable to detect any racial differences in either the raw data or when accounting for controls."
There is, however, a caveat here that I'll address in a moment, but first statistics published by the Washington Post (paywall) provide some detail.
According to the Post since January 01, 2015, 4,728 people have died in police shootings. About half of these (2,385), were white, and about a quarter (1,252), were black, the rest were Hispanic (877) and other racial groups (214).
So, in absolute numbers police kill almost twice as many whites as they do blacks, but it doesn't serve the progressive media's apparent desire to create racial conflict in this country by publicizing the deaths of white victims at the hands of police so most people never hear about these incidents.
Furthermore, nine unarmed black persons were shot and killed by police last year whereas nineteen unarmed whites met their deaths by being shot by police. That shows that police are sometimes guilty of horrendous abuse, but it doesn't show that they're guilty of racism.
The Post goes on, however, to qualify their data:
As a share of the population, though, things are very different. Black Americans account for less than 13% of the U.S. population but the rate at which they are shot and killed by police is more than twice as high as the rate for white Americans.
In other words, blacks are about 13% of the population but about 25% of those killed by police, whereas whites, who comprise about 60% of the population, make up 50% of the deaths at the hands of police.
Thus, as a percentage of the population blacks are indeed killed at a higher rate than whites. This is important, but we can't conclude from it that it demonstrates racism. Indeed, it's certainly possible that racism is the reason for the disparity, but there are many other factors that could result in these numbers.
For example, blacks tend to live in areas of high crime and violence, whites don't. The fact that police officers in urban areas are more likely to encounter violent men and are more likely to be under greater stress from their day-to-day responsibilities is at least as likely an explanation for the disparity as is racism.
This may also explain a significant finding by the Yale study mentioned above. The researchers did find racial differences in the level of non-lethal force used by police:
On non-lethal uses of force, there are racial differences – sometimes quite large – in police use of force, even after accounting for a large set of controls designed to account for important contextual and behavioral factors at the time of the police-civilian interaction.Interestingly, as use of force increases from putting hands on a civilian to striking them with a baton, the overall probability of such an incident occurring decreases dramatically but the racial difference remains roughly constant. Even when officers report civilians have been compliant and no arrest was made, blacks are 21.3 (0.04) percent more likely to endure some form of force.
But it must be emphasized that racial differences are not necessarily evidence of racism. Again, it may be that an officer working in a high crime neighborhood is, because of stress, or even fear, prone to use physical force preemptively.
Such use of force may be completely unwarranted, it may show a need for more and better training or removal from the force, but it's not necessarily an indication of systemic or institutional racism.
Moreover, there was no mention in this study, at least that I saw, of the race of the police officers. Black officers using unnecessary force against black suspects would comprise a portion of the WaPo's statistics, but it'd be quite a stretch to attribute their abuse to racism.
My point is that we're much too uncritical in our acceptance of the idea, incessantly promoted by our media and politicians, that our society is thoroughly racist. People believe this because they want to believe it or because, like the crowd watching the emperor parade by stark naked, they don't want to be thought to be out of touch so they succumb to peer pressure.
Whatever the reason, the evidence, at least insofar as the law enforcement institution is being considered, is simply not sufficient to support the conclusion that it's infected by systemic racism.
As I wrote in Monday's post our promiscuous resort to racism as the explanation for every disparity between the races is unhelpful and counterproductive.