The right-wing magazine Quilette just published an article by John McWhorter, who is an associate professor in the linguistics department at Columbia University with the title “Racist Police Violence Reconsidered” Given his training in writing, he knows how to draw his readers in with an emotional story about a White victim of lethal use of force to make the point that police sometimes kill White people, too. This is followed by the statement that “plenty of evidence indicates, however, that racism is less important to understanding police behavior than is commonly supposed”.

In a scientific article, this would be the time to mention the scientific evidence that is supposed to support this claim. But McWhorter is no scientist. He is a writer and cannot be held to the scientific standards of criminologists and other social scientists. With one sentence, a fact has been created. The idea that police is racially biased and kills disproportionately African Americans is wrong. But why does everybody believe it to be true? McWhorter has a ready explanation for this. The biased liberal, reverse-racist media cover police brutality only when the officer is White and the victim is Black. “Had Tony Timpa been black, we would all likely know his name by now. Had George Floyd been white, his name would likely be a footnote, briefly reported in Minneapolis local news and quickly forgotten.”

Well trained in propaganda, McWhorter then presented more cases of White victims in equal numbers to Black people. For every Black victim, there is a White victim in his narrative that is based on his personal selection of cases. After creating the illusion that there is a White victim for every Black victim, he is ready to repeat his claim that we have been manipulated by the liberal media. “So, the perception that the police regularly kill black people under circumstances in which white people would be merely disciplined is in fact a misperception.”

But is it a misperception? That would require actual scientific information about the influence of race on lethal use of force by police officers in the US. This evidence is reviewed after the conclusion has already been offered that the common assumption of racial bias against African Americans is a misperception.

McWhorter next explains correctly that African Americans are a minority in the United States. If police were unbiased in the lethal use of force, we would expect a lot more victims to be White than Black. He then correctly states that ” it remains true that black people are killed at a rate disproportionate to their percentage of the population.”

So, it is NOT a misperception that police kill disproportionately more African Americans. There is racial disparity in the use of force. This invalidates the claim that we all believe that racial bias exists because we have been manipulated by the liberal media.

McWhorter then makes a distinction between racial disparity and racial bias. “However, these figures are not necessarily evidence of police racism. According to the Washington Post‘s database, over 95 percent of the people fatally shot by police officers in 2019 were male, and no serious-minded person argues that this is evidence of systemic misandry. So what, then, accounts for the disproportionate representation of black men among those killed by cops?”

This is a controversial topic that has been examined in numerous articles by social scientists in scientific journals. But McWhorter does not cite these studies, presumably because he lacks the training to understand the sometimes complicated statistical methods that have been used in these articles.

Like a novelist, he creates facts with the stroke of a pen. “The socioeconomic gap between blacks and whites is doubtless an important contributing factor.” and “This disparity in poverty rates means black people are also disproportionately presented in violent rates of violent crime” Here we go again. Police is not racially biased. The real reason why they kill more Black people is because Black people are more criminal. Blame the victim. To give this biased narrative some credibility, McWhorter cites only one scientific article that supports his story. “Contrary to his expectations, Harvard economist Roland Fryer has found that while white men are actually more likely to be killed by cops,” as if an economist is more credible than criminologists or other scientists because he is at Harvard. That is not how science works. You also have to cite evidence that contradicts your claims (Young unarmed nonsuicidal male victims of fatal use of force are 13 times more likely to be Black than White).

In the end McWhorter softens his stance a bit. “This disparity cannot explain every fatal police shooting,” “This is not to say that race has nothing to do with policing issues in America.”   But these sentences are mere rhetorical devices to signal that the author is balanced and reasonable, when the truth is that the author is ignorant about the science on racial bias in policing, including use of force.

I have no reason to believe that McWhorter wrote this terrible article because he is motivated by racism, but it is not clear to me why McWhorter wrote such a biased article that is so hurtful to many African Americans who are traumatized by the callus killing of innocent African Americans. All I can say is that McWhorter lacks the competence to write about this topic because he is either too lazy or not trained to follow the actual science on this topic. In Germany we say “Schuster blieb bei Deinen Leisten” (“Every man to his trade.”) Please follow this good advice, Dr. McWhorter.