Trawling the left-liberal blogosphere I find, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/10/1/214336/432 , "Are African Americans Overreacting to Bennett's comments?, " which in the comments notes the Tuskegee experiments and forced sterilization.
Trawling through the rightist press I find, (heh, sure go ahead Pugster pour gasoline on the fire!) http://www.nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200510030831.asp October 03, 2005, 8:31 a.m. Bennett One More Time Let's stick with what he said, not the racist baggage of the critics.
The most obvious problem with the Bill Bennett controversy last week is the p.c. aspect of it — namely, that some topics, such as the nexus between race and crime, simply cannot be discussed without people of good will being painted as bigots.
The most pernicious problem, though, is much more subtle. And recognizing it is a necessary lesson in how the ethnic grievance industry's narrative has extorted us into refraining from serious discussions of serious problems.
Central is Bennett's comment that the overall crime rate would be reduced if every black baby were aborted. (Which, he made abundantly clear, he was not recommending and thinks a morally reprehensible notion.)
Now, let's leave aside that if Bennett had his druthers there would be no abortions of black babies, and that his most vitriolic critics are pro-abortion folks who would be content to see all black babies aborted if that were their mothers' "choice."
The striking thing I have heard — in my mail, in debating this controversy publicly, and in much of what has been written about it — involves something Bennett did not say. Indeed, it is something he did not even imply. Yet, his critics have been all too anxious to assume it as the jumping off point for their oh-so-insightful critiques.
It is: the spin that Bennett was claiming there was something innate about black people that disposes them toward crime.
Bennett did not say anything like that. His remarks were, quite obviously, based on blacks as they live in our society. He could just as easily (and, for his sake, less consequentially) have picked out any identifiable ethnic, racial, or other group whose rate of committing crime is higher than the national rate.
Bennett's comments, palpably, were not a commentary on what makes black people tick. They were a reflection of an inarguable statistical reality — namely, that blacks, considered as a single community, commit crimes at a higher rate than the national average. Many concerned black leaders acknowledge as much.
(Cf. Frontpage symposium I read last night with Marc Cooper, Debra Dickerson, Jennifer L. Hochschild and Carol Swain, " Katrina, Race and Silence, " which lauches off by citing the odious Jared Taylor, racist mofo on disproportionate rates of Black crime http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19676 , M.P. )
Bennett did not say that the reason for this fact is that blacks are somehow preternaturally disposed toward felonies. He left open the very issues we discuss all the time when we consider why people commit crime — perhaps it is poverty generated; perhaps it is a problem of single-parent homes (and especially the absence of fathers, which suggests to boys that abdicating parental responsibility and fatherly guidance is a norm); perhaps it is a deficient education; perhaps it is an amalgam of many factors.
The salient point here is that Bennett did not purport to resolve why the black crime rate is high. And he most assuredly did not suggest that it is high because of something immanent in the black condition.
He was merely dealing with life as we find it. And that, of course, holds forever open the possibility that if the conditions inducing people to behave a particular way were changed, their behavior, too, would change. And that applies regardless of your racial background.
Bluntly, Bennett did not come close to saying black people were hardwired to commit crimes. To the extent he is being pilloried for having said or implied such a thing, such criticisms are ill-informed at best, and in many cases willfully dishonest.
You want to say Bennett could have picked a better example? Fine. But realize you'll be demanding an impossible standard if you want talk radio to be honest, and frank, and courageous enough to deal with the topics political correctness and the mainstream media want banished from civilized discourse. Which is to say, topics that depart from the "conventional wisdom" they seek to script.
But if you're going to criticize the example he articulated, at least deal with it on its own true terms. Bennett wasn't offering an assessment of congenital "blackness," so stop condemning him as if he were. He was dealing with life as it currently is — a life in which it is true not only that blacks commit crimes at a rate higher than the national average but that blacks are more likely to be victimized by crime than any other identifiable group.
If we are ever going to move forward, we are going to have to deal a lot more with the validity of what people actually say, and a lot less with the bogeymen we like to imagine they mean.
— Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
More rightist punditry on the left-liberal reaction to Bennett, http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19693 The Rules of the Great American Race Game By John Zmirak FrontPageMagazine.com | October 3, 2005 The current flap over former Secretary of Education William Bennett's remarks last week reveals just what a bizarre set of taboos Americans have imposed on themselves when it comes to race—and what a political booby trap leftists have managed to rig around the subject, ready to explode in a burst of career-destroying shrapnel at the slightest misstep. Yes, it was insensitive of Mr. Bennett to notice the fact that black Americans commit violent crimes in highly disproportionate numbers. It's worth making a special effort not to incriminate the vast majority of law-abiding black citizens—many of whom grow up poor in broken homes, subjected to stronger temptations than those of us who grew up differently. Given the history of eugenics in the last century, one can understand a certain touchiness on the subject. But the ferocity with which liberals pounced on Bennett—so soon after accusing President Bush of racism for FEMA's failure to (do black Mayor Ray Nagin's job for him and) rescue black New Orleanians—betray a profound political cynicism, and a willingness to seize crassly (and selectively) upon human tragedy to make cheap rhetorical points.
To recap the Bennett flap: Mr. Bennett is being condemned for a slip of the tongue which contravened the rules of polite discourse which govern how crime is depicted in mainstream media. Bennett was speaking on the radio about an assertion by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, who claimed in their ludicrously overpraised book Freakonomics that abortion decreases crime—essentially by imposing capital punishment in advance on babies who are more likely to grow up as felons. Let's leave aside for a moment how morally repulsive this idea is—reeking of precisely the same eugenic logic preached by Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, who called for "more children from the fit, fewer from the unfit." Worse than evil, this argument isn't even valid. It has been comprehensively dismantled by the clear-thinking and candid Steve Sailer, who showed that the crime decline attributed by Dubner and Levitt to legal abortion in fact had far more to do with a decline in the popularity of crack, and the election of mayors such as Rudolph Giuliani in New York. Since blacks are disproportionately the victims as well of violent crime, any improvement in public order will save far more black lives and livelihoods than white. Of course, because most such tough-on-crime mayors are Republican, they won't get the credit for this.
Now you'd think that a couple of economists who spoke with thinly veiled enthusiasm about culling entire social classes before they are born in order to kill off future criminals would find themselves exiled from decent society. I know I wouldn't sit down and eat with this kind of creep. But far from ostracism, Messrs. Dubner and Levitt are heroes. Their book is a massive best-seller, recently excerpted by the New York Times. How did they manage this coup? Because they didn't mention race. They presented their argument about thinning out the crop of future felons, and conveniently left out the fact that most of these children aborted would be poor, and either Hispanic or black. This allowed the reader to fill in the blank—and fantasize about suppressing the crime rate a little more, and maybe reclaiming some blighted neighborhoods as well, by arranging for "fewer children from the unfit." I once heard people talking precisely this way at a cocktail party, and stepped in to ask them, "By that logic, why don't you just carpet bomb the ghetto? That would cut crime too." Without cracking a smile, one of them said, "That wouldn't be as politically palatable." I steered clear of this knot of sociopaths for the rest of the evening.
Now Mr. Bennett, in his commentary, was making the same point I was, which Steven Sailer reiterates—that the theory presented by Dubner and Levitt is "impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible." But in the course of his comments, Bennett made the mistake of noticing the African elephant in the bathtub—the fact that since the residents of America's prisons are disproportionately black, people who daydream about emptying those prisons by killing off their residents before they are even born are fantasizing about killing black people. This fact was noticed decades ago by no less a race-baiter than the Rev. Jesse Jackson, when he called legal abortion "black genocide." That hasn't stopped Jackson from supporting legal abortion, however—or cozying up to President Bill Clinton, who as commander in chief ordered the withdrawal of U.S. peace-keeping forces from Rwanda, leaving millions of defenseless Tutsis to be slaughtered with machetes, while our and other nations' blue helmets sped off to safety in other countries. Now which U.S. president was it, again, who doesn't care about saving the lives of black people? (For a scathing look at Clinton's blatant disregard for millions of African lives, see the powerful new documentary Broken Promises: The UN at 60, narrated by Ron Silver—coming soon to theaters.)
The irony gets richer; Reverend Jackson's son, the Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., has insisted that "William Bennett should be censured and fined by the Federal Communications Commission for his repugnant and barbarous remarks." Do you think the younger Jackson has forgotten his own father's remarks—or that he's unaware that black Americans are the primary targets of those who would promote abortion in order to thin out the ranks of the poor? Or is he simply and cynically ignoring the facts?
Instead, I would suggest, the younger Jackson is playing masterfully by the rules of racial rhetoric as they are currently laid out in American discourse. As this affair makes clear, among these commandments, three are the greatest:
1) Thou shalt ignore any statistics that cast racial minorities, even provisionally, in an unflattering light.
2) Thou shalt condemn anyone who mentions these statistics as a racist, even if you know that he is not a racist. The truth is not important. The important thing is the taboo.
3) Thou mayst entertain and promote racist fantasies of eliminating poor babies, Hispanic babies, and black babies in the womb, so long as you don't mention their race. It's okay to kill them, but not to mention their race.
Now that we've gotten all that clear, we can watch as Mr. Bennett is hounded into apology after apology, and perhaps driven out of public life, while the upper-class leftists who live in gated communities or high-rises with doormen indulge their bloodthirsty daydreams, secure in the knowledge that they're not racists. Not at all.