Victor Davis Hanson writes approvingly in National Review of his father's policy of teaching his kids to employ age-and-racial profiling when evaluating the threat posed by passersby:
[Attorney General Eric] Holder[, in an address to the NAACP,] noted in lamentation that he had to repeat to his own son the lecture that his father long ago gave him….about the dangers of police stereotyping of young black males….
Yet I fear that for every lecture of the sort that Holder is forced to give his son, millions of non-African-Americans are offering their own versions of ensuring safety to their progeny.
In my case, the sermon — aside from constant reminders to judge a man on his merits, not on his class or race — was very precise….[H]e once advised me, “When you go to San Francisco, be careful if a group of black youths approaches you.” Note what he did not say to me. He did not employ language like “typical black person.” He did not advise extra caution about black women, the elderly, or the very young — or about young Asian Punjabi, or Native American males. In other words, the advice was not about race per se, but instead about the tendency of males of one particular age and race to commit an inordinate amount of violent crime.
It was after some first-hand episodes with young African-American males that I offered a similar lecture to my own son. The advice was born out of experience rather than subjective stereotyping.
There's so much wrong with this. I hardly know where to start.
(1) "The advice was not about race… but instead about the tendency of males of one particular age and race to commit an inordinate amount of violent crime."
Let's deal with the misdirection first. It's rather precious to claim that a statement about "males of one particular age and race" is, not in fact, about race. Especially when you take care explicitly to point out that males of the same age but of different races are excluded.
Second. A "tendency" is something an individual, not a population, has; it means a "proneness to a particular kind of thought or action." There are certainly individuals out there who have a tendency to commit an inordinate amount of violent crime. An example of a person who had a tendency to commit an inordinate amount of violent crime would be Ted Bundy, who certainly committed more than his share. You can, I suppose, generalize to some groups by using a bit of circular reasoning, and truthfully say, "Serial killers have a tendency to commit an inordinate amount of violent crime."
But you don't get to say, "young black males have a tendency to commit an inordinate amount of violent crime."
You can say something like, "Statistically speaking, young black males are overrepresented among perpetrators of violent crime." This is, sadly, true.
And it is not equivalent to the statement that Hanson made, which implies that any young black male has a tendency to commit crime — not just A crime, but "an inordinate amount" of it! No evidence of malfeasance visible? The tendency must be latent! It's just lurking deep inside him, waiting to leap out!
Am I being pedantic? Yes, because I believe that words have meanings that matter.
Perhaps Hanson was being careless with his language, but perhaps not. Perhaps the lesson sank in exactly as he describes it. Young black males are dangerous.
(2) "The advice was born out of experience rather than subjective stereotyping."
More misdirection. What Hanson means to say is that his decision to stereotype was born out of experience — anecdotes that he, personally, lived through. It's understandable that Hanson wants to justify himself by explaining where the decision came from. It's laughable to pretend that somehow that makes it not "stereotyping."
(3) These are the words of someone who doesn't live in a neighborhood with many young black males. I live in the residential urban core of a medium-size American city. I live blocks away from several public schools and charter schools and a Catholic school whose stated mission is to serve students from underprivileged backgrounds. If I was to "be careful" every time I was approached by a group of black youths, I'd have to "be careful" every time I went outside. Especially right after school let out.
It would be positively ridiculous for me to give this advice to my kids as they head out the door, because it would have to be enacted so often as to be entirely useless. Roughly a quarter of the other children on the playground, many of the people they pass on the way to the convenience store for candy, the motorists who stop at the light to let them cross, will be "young black males."
Hey, I understand human nature. The unfamiliar sets off internal alarms. That's one of the ways we protect ourselves and our kids: by "being careful" when we see the unfamiliar. When you first move into a neighborhood where lots of people are a different race from you, or culturally different from you in some other way — if it's the first time you've ever lived in a place where that's the case — the internal alarms are likely to go off way more than they should. Because all the people are unfamiliar in some, obvious, way, and you haven't learned — as you will with familiarity — to ignore this red herring and returned to judge the safety of people in more useful ways.
And there are many more useful ways. There are, in fact, other cues that you should be looking for to tell you whether someone, or a group of someones, is up to no good. There are environmental cues that you should be looking for to tell you whether you are in a place that is relatively safe, or in a place that is relatively dangerous for you. A good overview of these cues can be found in Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his own reply to Hanson's piece, gives some examples:
Those of who have spent much of our lives living in relatively high crime neighborhoods grasp this particular stupidity immediately. We have a great many strategies which we employ to try to protect ourselves and our children. We tell them to watch who you are walking with, to not go to neighborhoods where you don't know anyone, that when a crowd runs toward a fight they should go the other way, to avoid blocks with busted street-lights, to keep their head up while your walking, to not daydream and to be aware of their surroundings.
When you start getting down to particular neighborhoods the advice gets even more specific–don't cut through the woods to get to school, stay away from Jermaine Wilks, don't go to Mondawmin on the first hot day of the year etc. There is a great scene in the film The Interruptors when one of the anti-violence workers notes that when she sees a bunch of people in a place, and then they all suddenly clear out, she knows something is coming down. My point is that parents who regularly have to cope with violent crime understand the advantages of good, solid intelligence. They know that saying '"stay away from black kids" is the equivalent of looking at 9/11, shrugging ones shoulders and saying, "It was them Muslims."
(4) When police release a description of a suspect who's been seen in such-and-such a neighborhood, the description usually includes age, race, and gender. I have heard people use this as the rationale for evaluating the threat level of passersby via age-race-gender profiling. But here's the thing: The reason for including very obvious but general characteristics like age, race, and gender in a suspect's description is not to pinpoint a suspect ("young black male" or "middle-aged large woman" would describe a large number of the inhabitants of many neighborhoods) but to quickly exclude people who do NOT fit that description from the search. It's like reading resumés: when the pile is too big to deal with, you make it smaller as simply as possible, by throwing out all the people who obviously don't have the credentials you're looking for. The pile that is left may or may not contain your target, but at least it's more manageable.
Apply this concept to the "be careful of young black males" advice, thinking, "Well, it's just a quick way to size up the situation, maybe you don't have time to conduct a more thorough evaluation," and you're treading in dangerous territory indeed: the unspoken belief that people who aren't young black men can automatically be trusted not to be dangerous! Here's the thing: If safety is on the line, you owe it to yourself to conduct the thorough, reality-based evaluation, not the cursory evaluation based on externals that aren't actually predictive.
(5) Still not convinced? Still think it's a handy safety rule to teach your kids to avoid young black males? (After all, they are overrepresented among perpetrators of violent crime!)
Let's suppose, for a rather awful moment, that growing up with an ingrained fear of young black males would, in fact, marginally increase the safety of our youngsters. Suppose what Hanson seems to believe were really true.
Would the end justify the means?
Would a tiny increase in safety — caused by an increase in caution around Those People — caused by drumming into our children a fear of Those People — be worth the damage we would be doing?
I don't want my kids to grow up judging random people's dangerousness on superficialities like age, race, and gender.*
I'm not confident that you can undo the damage from "young black males are potential trouble" by following it up with "but you should always judge a man on his merits" (as Hanson claims his father did).
I think it's a short mental step from "that kind of person is likely to be more dangerous" to "that kind of person is likely to be less worthy."
I think it's a short mental step from "sometimes, judging people on looks alone is the right thing to do" to "often, judging people on superficialities is the right thing to do."
I think kids might take that extra step without their parents knowing.
I don't believe a marginal increase in safety justifies even every useful precaution one might take. I enjoy downhill skiing, and I don't stay on the easy slopes just because they're safer. I could keep my kids physically safer by locking the doors and never letting them outside; but they have growing to do, and that growing will be so much healthier if they can do it out in the world where there are dangers as well as wonders.
Even if teaching them to be more fearful of people who are of particular races would make them safer on the outside — I won't risk what it might do to their hearts.
(My heart hurts when I think about how many times I have not been able to shield their ears from some other adult saying to another, "You know how those ______ are," in some family gathering or another. Or the jokes. I'm not anti-joke. Humor is complicated. But I am anti-make-impressions-on-my-impressionable-kid.)
And, frankly, I haven't seen a whit of evidence that it would make them safer. I can think of many reasons why it wouldn't. I have to agree with Coates that "this is the kind of advice which betrays a greater interest in maintaining one's worldview than in maintaining one's safety."
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*She says, although admittedly she tells children that when they need to choose a safe person to ask for help in a strange situation, they should seek out a woman. A mommy in particular. (This is advice straight out of de Becker's book.) But I maintain that the situation of "you are vulnerable and need help in a stressful situation, choose the right person to ask for assistance" is a bit different from "you are not in any particularly dangerous situation, choose which people to be afraid of". Correct me if I'm wrong.
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