Yeah, No, That Study Doesn’t Debunk Police Racism
Sloppy social science and the mental gymnastics of racism deniers
Some people will say anything to deny the problem of racism in policing.
These are people who would have found ways to defend Bull Connor in Birmingham too, or Jim Clark and his goons in Selma six decades ago.
One thing about their denials has changed though — they’ve become more sophisticated.
Increasingly, such folks wrap their denial in a patina of respectable “evidence,” whereas, back in the day, they would have just said something about how those n-words were asking for trouble and left it at that.
But bullshit, even when footnoted, is still bullshit.
White racism deniers love ’em some Roland Fryer
My favorites are the white folks who send around the study from a few years ago by Roland Fryer, a Harvard academic, which concluded police were no more likely to use lethal force against Blacks than whites.
They love this one because Fryer is Black.
Apparently, if a Black guy says there’s no racism in policing — or if that’s what they think he’s saying — there must not be.
