BOSTON -- The man who identified himself as the "cooperating witness" in a bribery sting that led to charges against a former Massachusetts state senator and a Boston city councilor says he will no longer help federal authorities.
His reason? He couldn't participate in sending any white people to jail:
Businessman Ronald Wilburn tells The Boston Globe he was used by the FBI to topple two black politicians, while four months after the first arrest, no white officials have been charged.
Now it's entirely possible that Mr. Wilburn knows some white folks who ought to go to jail with Dianne Wilkerson (who is famous for having been caught stuffing money into her bra) but won't for some specious reason, but I can't help thinking he sounds remarkably spiteful all the same.
This prompts me to reflect on the furor blowing over Attorney General Eric Holder's remarks to employees at the Justice Department. To review: Holder contends that since Americans don't talk about race very much, we have a "nation of cowards" and that until we become courageous enough to personally chat about race, we'll continue to have problems with racism.
What Holder said is offensive certainly, though that shouldn't prevent us from facing the possibility of its truth. The fact of the matter is, however, that Americans are constantly bombarded with chatter about race. The subject isn't taboo at all. But being honest about it seems very much against the dictates of political correctness. Racial disparities in everything are supposedly caused by racism. But what if that's not at all the case? What if that assumption prevents us from examining more likely causes?
Heather MacDonald took up this line of argument in her characteristically erudite way in yesterday's City Journal. It's worth a careful read. She cites several items Holder ought to consider addressing with an openness to causes other than racist attitudes: the electorate, crime statistics, education, and the family. Here's what she says about education:
Commentators on NPR’s “black” show, News and Notes, recently groused about the lack of black policy experts on the Sunday talk shows but ignored the possibility that the education gap might have something to do with it. Blacks, they said, need to be twice as qualified as whites to get a job. Let’s look at the evidence. The black high school drop-out rate approaches 50 percent. On the 2006 SAT, the average score in the critical-reading section was 434 for blacks, 527 for whites, and 510 for Asians; in the math section, 429 for blacks, 536 for whites, and 587 for Asians; and in the writing section, 428 for blacks, 519 for whites, and 512 for Asians. America’s lousy showing in international math, science, and reading tests compared with Japan and Western Europe is influenced in large part by the low scores of blacks and Hispanics. If blacks and Hispanics performed at the level that whites do, the U.S. would lead all industrialized nations in reading and would lead Europe in math and science, according to a study published in the Phi Delta Kappan in 2005.
Likewise, after their first year of legal education, 51 percent of blacks labor in the bottom tenth of their class; two-thirds reside in the bottom fifth. Blacks are four times as likely as whites to fail the bar exam on the first try. Until such achievement disparities are eliminated, any allegations of racial discrimination in the absence of proportional numbers of black policy wonks—or law partners, chemists, engineers, or investment bankers—is absurd, especially when the nation’s elite institutions are doing everything they can to recruit black students, professors, and employees. Perhaps Holder could confront the stigma against academic achievement among many black youth, who deride studying and staying out of trouble as “acting white."
Until all people are judged by the "content of their character" (as Martin Luther King Jr. said was his goal) we'll continue to be a nation of cowards. But today's standards of political correctness forbid exactly that: individual character should always be left completely unevaluated, while mere statistical disparity is pronounced to be clear evidence of societal injustice. In reality, the really cowardly thing is to avoid the truth for fear of giving offense.
