The Conversation We Aren't Having

Shortly after the Michael Brown tragedy in Missouri, I did a few things.  I thanked my lucky stars to have come as far as I have in life; I reflected on the good fortune of being young, healthy, employed, and a resident of a safe neighborhood.  I shook my head in a bit of despair at the predictable political polarization around partisan lines that commenced from the moment the story hit national news (more on that sentiment later.)  But perhaps most profoundly, I engaged in a bit of reflection on my own experience in America, starting with the question – “As a young black male, do my experiences dealing with the police jive with the reality that is being portrayed in the media?”  In other words:  have I been harassed, bullied, racially profiled, and generally mistreated by police officers in the places in which I have lived?

The answer to that question is a pretty resounding “no.”  In fact, as I thought through my entire life, I could only recall three situations in which I had come in direct, unsolicited contact with local police.  Two occurred when I lived in Florida and involved minor traffic infractions in which I was in the wrong both times (a “rolling stop” at a stop sign and an expired car registration); in both of those instances I was polite and, after what could at the very worst be categorized as a supremely mild chiding, I was shortly on my way with nothing more than a verbal warning.  The other was a routine post-9/11 bag check as I was entering the DeKalb Avenue subway stop in Fort Greene, Brooklyn; the NYPD officers were courteous and efficient, my selection appeared to be totally random, and I was on my way in less than 2 minutes.  This is difficult to reconcile with supposedly broad trends:  I’m approaching age 30 and the far tail end of the “young black male” demographic that is supposedly so tortured by the police; and I have traveled extensively and therefore had the chance to experience the police forces in a far, far broader swath of America than the vast overwhelming majority of black men my age.  One might, of course, argue that my experience is unique and not representative as I have never as a teen or adult lived in a majority black neighborhood or inner city ghetto environment.  While that’s true, I could easily rebut it by noting that the predominantly white areas in which I have lived hardly seem like places in which the “racist cops” hypothesis would be disproven, assuming that the hypothesis is a valid one.  The neighborhood along Riverside Drive (in the 80’s of the Upper West Side) in which I lived for my first 2.5 years in New York City, for example, was 80% white and only 4% black (a tiny percent of which, let me assure you, were blacks in my age cohort); even my current section of Hell’s Kitchen is hardly a bastion of ethnic diversity, coming in at 69% white, 10% Hispanic, and 4% black.  Clearly my skin is not the same shade of the vast majority of folks in my neighborhood, and yet – despite literally living right across from the local police precinct – I never have any issues with the cops.  Frankly, I couldn’t be happier to have a large NYPD precinct directly across from my apartment building; I figure it probably encourages the hoodlums, thugs, and miscreants of this city who might want to engage in crime in Midtown to take their escapades a few blocks away from my vicinity.

Inferring broad societal trends from personal anecdotes is always a tricky situation, at its very best.  Yet, the incongruence between my experience and what I hear reported in the media is stark.  In fact, if I had to enumerate all of the environments in which I have experienced racial slights or racial discrimination – being categorically snubbed like a leper by gay white men my age at bars; the quasi-incredulous, quasi-suspicious glares from old white people when I enter airport lounges or take my seat in the first class cabin; wine store clerks who are surprised at my choice in French champagne; clients of mine who have been visibly shocked upon meeting me in person for the first time, after phone conversations – none of those situations would involve the police.  So clearly my experiences are either many standard deviations out on the distribution’s long tail in terms of how young black men interact with their police, or something else is amiss.  As I’ll explain, I firmly believe it is the latter.

Of the many elements of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s policy platform which alarm me, one that I find particularly odious (as should all law-abiding citizens) is the notion that racial outcomes in law enforcement and criminal justice practice should mirror racial population demographics.  In other words, if a given city has only 10% black citizens, no more than 10% of arrests, criminal prosecutions, etc. should come from this group – regardless of the actual amount of crime committed by the group.  In the fantasy land inhabited by extremists like Mr. de Blasio, I must assume that all groups commit crime (and violent crime in particular) at uniform rates.  Unfortunately, in reality we know that this is not the case; whether it makes us comfortable to say it or not, black men my age as a group do not commit crime at rates identical to elderly white women.  For just one of countless statistical examples, in New York City approximately 75% of violent crime is committed by blacks, despite blacks only comprising 25% of the City’s population – and of that 75%, rest assured that a large majority is committed by black men in my age cohort in hellhole ghetto neighborhoods such as Brownsville and East New York.  Thus, it might go a long way towards assuaging Mr. de Blasio’s copious “equality of outcomes” white guilt to allow lawless thugs to massacre each other and terrorize innocents in Central Brooklyn sans policiers while having the NYPD harass law-abiding white or Asian citizens out for drinks in the Meatpacking District.  The utility of this practice in terms of actual crime prevention, unfortunately, is much more dubious.

As I alluded to earlier, my disappointment with America’s polarized reaction to the events in Missouri was as palpable as it was predictable.  It is tragic, to me, that we appear to be so stupid and superficial as a society to have yet again lost out on the opportunity to have a serious, nuanced conversation on the root cause of these issues.  Instead, yet again here we are engaged in the usual trite figure-pointing about racist white cops (from the left) or outrageously antisocial black behavior (from the right.)  And while I certainly don’t claim to have all of the answers or a societal panacea in this area, I would like to offer a few thoughts.

During my recent vacation, I completed reading the new bestseller “Please Stop Helping Us” by Jason Riley.  While Mr. Riley – who works for The Wall Street Journal – and I have sharply divergent political views and a two decade age differential, it appears we had largely identical experiences in terms of our interaction with the larger black community as teenagers and young adults.  In the book, Mr. Riley describes the experience of frequently receiving the disdainful label of “acting white” among both his family and community blacks for earning good grades, being a diligent student, speaking proper English, not engaging in criminal behavior, and not self-segregating his social circle along racial lines (i.e., not hating white people.)  If I had to summarize one true root cause of the mess in black neighborhoods and the inner city ghetto, this pernicious and pervasive mentality would be it.  No amount of real or imagined white racism, brutality by police officers, poverty, or lingering effects from slavery and Jim Crow can explain the continued existence and seeming ineffaceable nature of this self-destructive, borderline nihilistic mentality.  When young black men are raised in a cultural environment in which “black authenticity” translates to engaging in petty crime, a total lack of interest in academic performance, idolizing the violence and misogyny associated with gangster rappers, and largely spitting in the face of assimilationist middle-class American values, none of us can be surprised when those young men grow up into brainless hoodlums responsible for a disproportionate amount of violent crime in urban areas from coast to coast.  And while his conservative policy prescriptions for ameliorating this situation range from far-fetched to pathetic, Mr. Riley did an excellent job of demonstrating how this anti-intellectual, anti-assimilationist mentality among blacks has little, if anything, to do with racism and poverty.  Case-in-point to me are my maternal grandparents, who despite being born into the Jim Crow racism and poverty of Kentucky in the 1930’s, succeeding in remaining married for around 30 years (until my grandfather’s death in the 1980’s) and raising a family based solidly on American middle class values (even if not always a middle class income).  It was in the milieu of those values that my mother became the first in our family to attend college, leading directly to my path to management in Corporate America and the Ivy League.  Had either my mother or I rejected those values, I would not be sitting here today as the person that I am.

While there are indeed bad cops out there who abuse their power, the latest attempt at demagoguery against the police is yet another red herring.  If Officer Wilson is found to have acted improperly in his encounter with Michael Brown, I hope that the full weight of the law is thrown at him (for the record, I have no idea what happened there as I wasn’t at the scene, though the store robbery video isn’t exactly a sweeping vindication of Mr. Brown’s character and motives during the timeframe of his death.)  However, the number of young black men like Mr. Brown who will be murdered this year at the hands of other young blacks surpasses their killings by white cops by an order of magnitude.  As my opening anecdote suggests, as a young black man myself I fear little from the police, who in my view are largely responsible for New York City’s remarkable level of safety.  On the other hand, were I to venture into certain parts of the City after dark, I would literally be taking my life into my own hands - and not because of the NYPD.

President Obama has boldly attempted, on numerous occasions, to bring attention to the plight of the black underclass in a typically Obama-esque, even-handed manner:  asking for pragmatic ways in which we can change the paradigm of reform in those communities – including increased government spending where it makes sense – while firmly calling out the antisocial pathologies and cultural values so prevalent in black communities today which exacerbate underlying inequities, drive young black men into lives of poverty and crime, and inject additional poison into the already quite toxic race well in America.  And while I commend our President for those efforts - this is precisely the collective conversation we need to have from Maine to Hawaii, and it is a desperately overdue conversation - it is clear that nothing will be accomplished in that arena so long as our Congress remains a thoroughly disgraced, dysfunctional institution, and so long as Americans are happy to avoid the root causes discussion due to political correctness and our own personal biases.

Let’s give our cops the respect and the benefit of the doubt that they deserve.  And while we’re at it, let’s have the conversation, finally, about the difficult things that really matter and that really must fundamentally change if we wish to live in a more equitable society across racial lines.