Chapter Four

Race Theory

Two Stories

A few years ago I visited my aunt’s house for a family reunion. She still lived in the heart of the Rust Belt, in the same community where I’d spent so much time that it was practically my second home.

As my uncle drove me to his home from the airport, there was only one change that I noticed. Their former neighbors were no longer there. As we arrived, my uncle made an offhand comment that he was annoyed that their new neighbor repeatedly covered their driveway in grass whenever he mowed the lawn—something that could’ve easily been avoided if he’d simply mowed in the opposite direction. It was frustrating for my uncle since several members of my visiting family were allergic to pollen and it was high springtime.

The next morning, I saw the new neighbor mowing his lawn. There was indeed a mess of grass spilling onto the driveway. I walked out and waved, inviting him over for a chat. I had no idea how much I’d come to regret that.

I asked him if he lived next door, a question that seemed to annoy him, and in retrospect a piece of small talk I wish I’d skipped. I introduced myself, and after a couple more botched attempts at small talk asked him if he could mow his lawn in a way that didn’t jettison the cut grass onto my aunt’s driveway. He stuck his hand into my face, as if to signal an end to the conversation. When I asked him why he couldn’t just mow so the clippings went on his lawn, he turned his back on me and started walking back to his yard, visibly upset.

That’s when I made my big mistake. I said, “Look, I’d prefer to resolve this in a friendly way, but if we need to get a third party involved, then we can do that.” I didn’t have a particular solution in mind—asking another neighbor to weigh in on lawn-mowing etiquette, maybe.

The man charged at me, gesturing wildly and spewing curses. He came right up to my face, screaming so loud that my entire family came outside. Race played a strange part in his profane monologue. He shouted several times that my skin was three shades darker than his and I shouldn’t forget that; he kept calling Indians “you people” and saying we were the racist ones. And he yelled that if I said another word, he would go get his gun to “come back and end this motherfucker.”

I backed away, shocked and fearing for my life. My aunt had broken down in tears. The man finally declared that her presence was the only reason there wasn’t blood on the ground. Then he stalked away, leaving everyone in my family victimized—but feeling oddly victimized in his own right, it seemed, as well.

That experience changed me in many ways. I’ve thought about it many times. I felt frustrated and powerless, concerned for the safety of my aunt and uncle who still live there, but too intimidated to report the incident to the police. At first I thought maybe I’d been the victim of racism; it seemed like a natural inference. But as I told other people about what had happened, I was surprised to find that some of them thought I’d been the racist one.

You see, this time I left out one detail: the guy was black. Apparently three shades lighter than me, in his opinion. But he was black, and I was not.

That detail changes everything for some people. I told the story to you the way I experienced it, and I hadn’t thought his race was an important element at the time. But my well-educated liberal friends told me there was a different narrative I’d been missing, one that revolved around his race and mine.

A black guy was out peacefully mowing his lawn. Maybe he was having a bad day, or a bad lifetime. Some Indian guy he’d never seen before came over and demanded he mow his lawn differently. Then when he refused and went back to his business, the other guy threatened to call the cops on him. The black guy understandably blew up when a nonblack stranger threatened to sic a racist police force on him, endangering his life over a gardening dispute. So the black guy met the threat of violence with his own threat of equal violence.

I didn’t recognize that story at all, and I was the one who’d been there. Yet, after I thought about it, I realized that my friends were at least right about the other guy’s perspective. I’d been seeing him as a guy mowing his lawn, not a black guy mowing his lawn. I had no idea how race entered into things when he started yelling about how my skin was so much darker than his. I had no idea he might interpret my vague talk about bringing in a third party as a threat to call the police—I was thinking more of the homeowner’s association. And I definitely had no idea he might’ve thought I was threatening him with police violence over how he mowed his lawn.

But that story revolving around me using some superior position in a racial hierarchy to threaten him with police brutality is the only thing that makes sense of his overreaction. Realizing that made me think that these kinds of misunderstandings must happen all across the nation, even if they don’t usually go so far. My aunt’s neighbor—her black neighbor—saw the world through the lens of a particular narrative of black victimization that I was hardly aware of, and he thought I was attempting to use that narrative against him as a casual display of power.

I came to blame the victimhood narrative that made us talk past each other more than I blamed him. I wish I could do that day differently, and he probably does too. I should’ve taken no for an answer; he shouldn’t have threatened to hurt me over failing to. Neither of us covered ourselves in glory, but the racial lens he was seeing the world through didn’t even give us a chance to get things right. We couldn’t disagree with each other over the simplest of things without being brought to the brink of violence. That’s America, these days.

I wanted to understand where the racial narrative that almost got me killed over a lawn came from. I wanted to know whether there was any truth to it, and whether the nation had any path forward to a world where these misunderstandings don’t happen. That’s what this chapter is about.

Critical Race Theory

It turns out the idea that any police interaction with a black person puts their life in mortal danger stems from a particular school of Critical Race Theory. CRT is a term that’s often used these days, but seldom defined. Many conservatives fear that some version of it is being taught to their children in schools, leading to a wave of bills meant to prevent that: seven states have banned teaching CRT, and more than a dozen have bans pending in their legislatures.¹ For their part, most liberals say fears over CRT in school are just—my favorite argument—a conservative talking point. They add that these bans are really just thinly veiled attempts to prevent schools from teaching America’s history of racial discrimination.

Given the extent of these disagreements and the stakes, it’s important to define terms, so I want to get clear on what CRT is and the varieties it comes in. What all forms of CRT have in common is that they divide the world into oppressors and their victims; they simply disagree on the mechanisms of oppression.

Critical theory traces its origins to the Frankfurt school, an early 1900s philosophical movement that sought to apply Karl Marx’s theories to social systems instead of economic ones. While Marx understood post–Industrial Revolution history as a class struggle, many of his intellectual descendants understood it as a racial one. When you hear conservatives call CRT “cultural Marxism,” they’re referring to this intellectual lineage. Today, all that really unites socialists and critical race theorists is broad agreement that the world should be understood primarily in terms of power structures, with dominant groups always seeking to construct the economic and legal rules of society to maintain their privileged position.

This way of thinking is actually a very old one, though it’s gained new prominence in recent years. At the beginning of Plato’s Republic, when Socrates first begins to muse on the nature of justice, he’s immediately met with a challenge from the sophist Thrasymachus, who claims that there’s no point in wondering what justice is or what it calls for: justice is just the rule of the stronger.² Society’s principles about right and wrong, claims Thrasymachus, are nothing more than rules that the strong impose on the weak to protect their wealth and social status. The strong then build up grand institutions like religion, law, and ethics to convince the weak that they ought to accept the status quo. In other words, from the first moment humans started thinking about justice, people argued that it was just a sucker’s game meant to create willing victims.

Two and a half millennia later, modern critical theorists have come full circle and concluded that Thrasymachus was right: what we call justice is nothing more than the rules the privileged have imposed on the oppressed. The rules are then dressed up with lofty language to get the victims to embrace them.

At first, the modern version of the ancient argument went by the name “critical legal studies.” In the 1970s, a coalition of leftist scholars argued that law was really just politics in disguise, a way for the powerful to control the weak. Critical legal studies concerned itself with many disempowered groups: the poor, the working class, the disabled, racial minorities, women, sexual minorities. But after only a decade, critical theorists began to focus their attention on race and gender. Discussion of class dropped by the wayside, and modern feminism and critical race theory were born. The Marxists splintered off and went their own way, abandoned by the academy. This, by the way, is an important distinction most conservatives miss in their effort to brand any idea they dislike Marxism: they have no idea how much Marxists resent identity politics for ignoring class issues in favor of race and gender. Wokeness isn’t Marxism; it’s the movement that replaced it.

Critical race theory sprang up in legal academia when American law professors interpreted US law as a subtle system of racial control meant to replace the overt oppression of slavery and the Jim Crow era. After being introduced by scholars like Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw, CRT really took off in academia in the 1990s. Interestingly, while critical legal studies had been broadly skeptical of all law, its successor CRT had to grapple with the fact that some doctrines, like equal protection law, had been a powerful force for racial civil rights. To address this phenomenon, Bell advocated an idea called “interest convergence” theory, arguing that legal victories like Brown v. Board of Education only came about when protecting racial minorities happened to serve the interests of white people.³

Even in the 1990s, CRT was only a niche academic theory, fashionable mostly in the halls of Ivy League law schools. All that changed in May 2020, when police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd. In the height of the pandemic lockdown, the murder gave millions a cause to rally behind and a public-health-approved reason to take to the streets. Floyd became far more than the victim of murder—he was turned into a martyr, one who becomes a victim to further a worthy cause. To turn victim to martyr, politicians portrayed Floyd as a Christlike figure who’d sacrificed himself for racial justice,⁴ although his death was involuntary and his personal history checkered.⁵ As activists turned Floyd’s murder into a potent symbol, public interest in CRT skyrocketed. The academic theory promised a path to ending injustices like police brutality.

This is how modern CRT’s most well-known practitioners suddenly rose to fame. In the month after Floyd’s death, sales of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist spiked several thousand percent.⁶ Overnight, a once-niche academic theory became the prevailing wisdom. DiAngelo popularized the idealist school of CRT, focusing on changing beliefs about race, while Kendi popularized the competing materialist school, emphasizing eliminating disparities in racial outcomes.⁷

DiAngelo and her disciples, often found in corporate boardrooms and universities, are the ones who carefully monitor language and thought—by eliminating biased words, they hope we can eliminate biased beliefs. This branch of modern CRT implores people to constantly check their privilege and tells them they’re obligated to check the privilege of others. It is a religious approach that treats racism as a sin that all people must recognize in themselves so they can be cleansed. DiAngelo’s main solutions to racism essentially involve confessing sin, encouraging others to do so, and self-flagellating in public.

In contrast, Kendi focuses almost entirely on eliminating racist outcomes instead of racist thoughts. According to him, any practice that leads to unequal racial material outcomes is racist by definition: “A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups… There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy.” The remedy to policies leading to unequal racial outcomes, says Kendi, is countervailing racial discrimination: “Someone reproducing inequity through permanently assisting an overrepresented racial group into wealth and power is entirely different than someone challenging that inequity by temporarily assisting an underrepresented racial group into relative wealth and power until equity is reached. The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.”⁸

A terrifyingly simple view to some; appealingly so to others. DiAngelo holds that the system the strong use to control the weak is linguistic; Kendi says it’s political. Both their antiracist theories are watered-down versions of CRT meant to increase the ease of public transmission. Liberal pundits love to mock concerned parents as country bumpkins who don’t understand that CRT is only taught in law schools, but this is only a semantic shell game. You don’t have to get a law degree to know that the divisive way race is taught to children has something to do with academic theories about race. The popular versions are crude, but they’re straightforwardly derived from academic CRT.

There are more sophisticated, rigorous versions of CRT, particularly in the materialist school that Kendi draws from. One of these is responsible for the belief that the criminal justice system is biased against black people from top to bottom. This narrative of black victimhood is called “the New Jim Crow.” It’s the one my aunt’s neighbor must’ve been taking as gospel.

The work that popularized this narrative, appropriately enough, is called The New Jim Crow, and was written by Michelle Alexander. The book was highly influential when it came out in 2010; it brought an existing strand of CRT to public attention. Though more popular among journalists and academics than suburban book clubs, sales still rose from five thousand to sixty thousand in the month after George Floyd’s murder. Like Kendi, Alexander argues that racist policies create unequal material outcomes for black people, but while Kendi stipulates that all policies leading to unequal outcomes are automatically racist, Alexander presents a narrative of intentional racism in the US criminal justice system, grounding it in history and empirical data.

The New Jim Crow story of black victimization begins at the same place the victimhood narratives from the last chapter did: the Reconstruction era. In the last chapter, I gave you my story of how the Oppression Olympics developed out of this period. Now I’ll tell you the other side of the story, the narrative critical race theorists offer to explain how modern oppression came about.

The Reconstruction Amendments tried to fix the flaws in the Constitution, but it quickly became clear they could be circumvented. After the Slaughterhouse Cases rendered the privileges and immunities clause toothless, former Confederate states created literacy tests and poll taxes to disenfranchise former slaves and their descendants for more than a century. The Fifteenth Amendment said that states couldn’t deprive anyone of the right to vote over their race or status as a former slave, but that left plenty of room to deny it for other reasons.⁹ These pretexts ended up inadvertently disenfranchising poor and illiterate white people too, so a half-dozen states created “grandfather clauses” in the 1890s, allowing men to vote if their ancestors had been able to.¹⁰ The biggest remaining obstacle to efforts to recreate the Antebellum South was the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the law. For this, former Confederate states turned to Jim Crow laws, on the theory that statutes could make black and white people separate but equal.¹¹

Almost sixty years later, Thurgood Marshall struck a major blow against Jim Crow laws when he successfully won a unanimous Supreme Court opinion declaring separate but equal inherently unequal in Brown v. Board of Education.¹² But the Court said little about when and how states ought to enforce desegregation; that was the main task of the civil rights movement. Led by Martin Luther King Jr. and his method of nonviolent resistance, the civil rights movement brought down the Jim Crow era for good over the next decade and a half, culminating in the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

All of that is accepted history, but here’s where CRT comes in: while for many decades the prevailing wisdom was that equality under the law had finally been achieved with the civil rights movement, some critical race theorists began to argue that just as Jim Crow laws had been a backlash to the Reconstruction Amendments, there was a subtle but powerful legal resistance to the civil rights acts of the 1960s. Legal scholars like Michelle Alexander argued that immediately after the civil rights acts, conservative politicians like Barry Goldwater¹³ and Richard Nixon¹⁴ attempted to appeal to racist white people by oppressing black people under the guise of tough-on-crime laws, especially the war on drugs that began in earnest under Ronald Reagan.

Alexander assembles detailed empirical evidence to show that the war on drugs harms black people more than white ones. In particular, she focuses on the harms of mass incarceration, arguing that the American criminal justice system disproportionately labels black men criminals, which then creates a racial undercaste that faces discrimination in arenas such as housing, employment, voting, welfare programs, and education. Mass incarceration, she says, creates “a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.”¹⁵ While Americans of all races consume illegal drugs at similar rates, black people are arrested for it far more often. Alexander points out that in some states, black men are imprisoned on drug charges twenty to fifty times as often as white men.¹⁶ Other sources reach similar conclusions, although less extreme: one DOJ report examining some of the same data sets Alexander uses found that black people constitute 13 percent of illicit drug users but 36 percent of drug-possession arrests, with differences in frequency of use, type of drug, and place of use only accounting for 10 percentage points of the gap.¹⁷

This is where police abuse against black people enters the New Jim Crow narrative: “The absence of significant constraints on the exercise of police discretion is a key feature of the drug war’s design.”¹⁸ Alexander argues that the war on drugs caused the Supreme Court to erode the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures until police were able to stop and interrogate black people with few restrictions, often stopping them on the pretext of minor traffic violations and intimidating them into granting consent.¹⁹ To encourage police departments to wage the war on drugs, she says, the federal government shoveled tons of cash and military equipment their way, often tying funding and equipment to high drug arrest rates.²⁰ As another powerful financial incentive, civil asset forfeiture laws allowed police departments to keep most of the cash and assets they seized in raids of suspected criminals, in most cases without even charging anyone with a crime.²¹

In the decade since The New Jim Crow was released, the narrative of US police being at war with black people has only grown stronger as a series of cases of police violence have received intense media scrutiny. Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd were among those who died at the hands of police officers. In some cases, as with Floyd, the killings were later found to be murder; in others, like Brown, the officers’ use of force was deemed justified. But the facts of individual cases hardly mattered, set against the backdrop of the story that a racist police force was the latest tool of oppression in a centuries-old system of white supremacy.

In fact, when an officer kills a black suspect, no matter what the facts of the case are, the default presumption these days is that the officer is guilty until proven innocent, especially if they’re white—and then if the criminal justice system does find them innocent, that’s simply taken as evidence that the system itself is racist. This new dogma was displayed vividly in the case of Ma’Khia Bryant, a sixteen-year-old black girl who was fatally shot by a white police officer moments before she could stab another black girl. Coming right on the heels of the conviction of Derek Chauvin for Floyd’s murder, the narrative of police brutality was at its strongest: LeBron James immediately posted a picture of the officer who’d shot her with the caption “YOU’RE NEXT #ACCOUNTABILITY.”²² White House press secretary Jen Psaki told press that President Biden had been briefed and the shooting underscored the need to address systemic racism in policing.²³

White House officials, media, and celebrities didn’t feel any need to wait for facts to emerge; the now-entrenched narrative that police violence is the newest form of systemic racism told them all they needed to know. It’s become part of the fabric of America, something everyone is expected to know, accept, and apply to every police interaction with black people. That’s how we got today’s “defund the police” movement. It’s probably also how my aunt’s neighbor thought I was threatening his life when I spoke vaguely about having a third party help us resolve our lawn-mowing dispute; it’s why he threatened mine.

Black Victimhood

The New Jim Crow narrative is worth taking seriously. It’s certainly a more rigorous version of CRT than the trendy antiracist theories that are taking the academic and corporate world by storm. DiAngelo and Kendi’s theories are characterized by how they define opposition to them as racist. To DiAngelo, when a white person disagrees with her claims about systemic racism, that’s just proof of their white fragility, and when a nonwhite one does, that’s proof that they’re white-adjacent. To Kendi, any policy that permits unequal racial outcomes is by definition racist, so any critic of his antiracist solutions is also necessarily racist; an anti-antiracist must be racist, the argument goes. It is a vast improvement that theories like the New Jim Crow rely on historical and empirical claims and are falsifiable through data.

But it’s still designed to be a narrative of black victimhood, and that exposes it to certain weaknesses. To make a neat analogy between the criminal justice system and Jim Crow laws, New Jim Crow theorists have to emphasize whatever similarities they can find and deemphasize differences. Because of its rhetorical success, the metaphor is expanding beyond criminal justice and becoming ever looser; President Biden often casually labels Republican-led voting reform “Jim Crow 2.0.”²⁴ Democrats have taken to calling the filibuster part of the New Jim Crow too. While the Jim Crow analogy makes black victimhood narratives powerful and easy to understand, it always obscures relevant facts.

The biggest failing of the approach is that the Jim Crow analogy requires writers like Alexander to argue that the criminal justice system not only disproportionately harms black people, but that it’s intentionally designed to do so. This is the provocative claim that really animated public interest in the cause, but that same incendiary nature is also divisive. There are two main flaws with the idea that the war on drugs and mass incarceration were created by white backlash to the civil rights movement: first, violent crime skyrocketed in the years before tough-on-crime laws, and second, black people were often the ones pushing for them.

Legal scholar James Forman Jr. offers one of the most compelling critiques of the New Jim Crow narrative in general, and of Alexander’s account of it in particular.²⁵ He writes,

But in emphasizing mass incarceration’s racial roots, the New Jim Crow writers overlook other critical factors. The most important of these is that crime shot up dramatically just before the beginning of the prison boom. Reported street crime quadrupled in the twelve years from 1959 to 1971. Homicide rates doubled between 1963 and 1974, and robbery rates tripled. Proponents of the Jim Crow analogy tend to ignore or minimize the role that crime and violence played in creating such a receptive audience for Goldwater’s and Nixon’s appeals.²⁶

Alexander mentions these increases in reported crime rates, but she glosses over them, saying there was controversy over their accuracy and calling them “fairly significant” instead of conveying their full scope.²⁷ Interestingly, in later editions of The New Jim Crow, the phrase is changed to “fairly dramatic,” perhaps in response to Forman’s criticism.²⁸ He goes on to observe that the white backlash narrative requires New Jim Crow theorists to ignore, understate, and explain away strong black support for tough-on-crime laws:

In The Politics of Imprisonment, Vanessa Barker describes how, in the late 1960s, black activists in Harlem fought for what would become the notorious Rockefeller drug laws, some of the harshest in the nation. Harlem residents were outraged over rising crime (including drug crime) in their neighborhoods and demanded increased police presence and stricter penalties. The NAACP Citizens’ Mobilization Against Crime demanded “lengthening minimum prison terms for muggers, pushers, [and first] degree murderers.”²⁹

Black support for being tough on crime isn’t just a thing of the past; it’s still present today. It is a bitter irony that the white liberals loudly pushing the “defund the police” movement on the basis of the New Jim Crow victimhood narrative are drowning out black communities who want to keep police present constant or even increase it.

In Minneapolis, for instance, after Floyd’s death, black residents were the driving force defeating a proposal to replace the police department with a public safety agency; in one poll, 75 percent of black residents opposed cutting the size of the police force while only 51 percent of white ones did.³⁰ A national poll found that 81 percent of black people wanted police to spend the same amount of time in their communities or more—blacks and Hispanics had the highest support of all demographics for increasing the police presence in their communities. This is a recurring pattern: in 2015, shortly after the Ferguson protests, 38 percent of black people wanted more police in their communities, while only 18 percent of non-Hispanic whites did.³¹

This consistent pattern reveals one of the biggest dangers of black victimhood narratives like the New Jim Crow: as the victimhood narrative becomes common wisdom, it replaces the voices of black people themselves. Eventually, well-educated white people end up making policy decisions on behalf of black ones, so confident in what they want that they see no need to listen to them. Even worse, on the occasions when black people do speak out against the victimhood narrative, politicians, media, and activists will be tempted to say that they don’t really know what they want, that their desires have been corrupted by white supremacy. This is how dark-skinned people who resist progressive views on criminal justice end up getting called Uncle Toms.

The New Jim Crow narrative of systemic racism infecting the criminal justice system also obscures relevant facts by implying that mass incarceration, rather than the root causes of it, is the biggest problem facing black communities. Because civil rights activists are constrained by their analogy, they frame mass incarceration through the lens of drug use, where they can make the clearest statistical case that black people are treated unfairly because all races use illegal drugs at the same rate while black people are arrested more for it. But violent crime is another major cause of imprisonment, and the evidence suggests that black people commit violent crimes at higher rates than other races. As Forman notes, “the African American arrest rate for murder is seven to eight times higher than the white arrest rate; the black arrest rate for robbery is ten times higher than the white arrest rate. Murder and robbery are the two offenses for which the arrest data are considered most reliable as an indicator of offending.”³² Since people of all races commit crimes most often against members of their own race,³³ the victims of these disproportionately high violent crime rates are overwhelmingly black.

Black people are therefore harmed twice by the New Jim Crow victimhood narrative’s focus on drugs instead of violent crime. First, that focus leads activists to ineffectively try to reduce mass incarceration through addressing drug offenses instead of violent ones. Second, since the only reasonable way to reduce incarceration for violent crimes is to reduce the crimes themselves, the victimhood narrative prevents society from helping black people by fighting violent crime. Instead of doing the hard work of addressing the educational, economic, and cultural causes of violent crime, the Jim Crow analogy offers the false hope that we can reduce mass incarceration simply by remedying inequitable drug laws.

In fact, New Jim Crow theorists have already succeeded in plucking the low-hanging fruit of reducing incarceration by addressing imprisonment over drug offenses. In his 2017 book Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration, criminal justice expert John Pfaff points out that most US jurisdictions have already slightly reduced incarceration rates by modifying sentencing laws. Pfaff criticizes the New Jim Crow’s focus, calling it “the Standard Story,” and argues that further decreases in incarceration will have to come from addressing violent crime.³⁴ Notably, a couple years after Pfaff wrote, President Trump signed the First Step Act into law, which reduced federal prison sentences for nonviolent crimes in a variety of ways.³⁵

Although addressing the root causes of violent crime is a complex task, there is still low-hanging fruit to be picked here: shift money from prisons to policing. Pfaff argues that “Hiring a police officer is probably about as expensive as hiring a prison guard, for example, but investing in police has a much bigger deterrent effect and avoids all the capital expenditures of prisons.” He points to estimates that money spent on policing is at least 20 percent more effective than money spent on prisons. So there’s one easy starting point to reducing both incarceration and crime: fund more police instead of more prisons.³⁶

The real solutions to the violent crime that disproportionately harms black communities, though, have to be cultural. Ensuring equal access to education and economic opportunity will go a long way, and these are race-neutral policies we ought to be pursuing anyway to create a fair merit-based society; I discuss how to do this later in the book.³⁷ But in my opinion, the single biggest cultural cause of black Americans’ problems is our country’s lack of emphasis on stable families.

This is the account given by Adam B. Coleman in Black Victim to Black Victor: Identifying the Ideologies, Behavioral Patterns, and Cultural Norms That Encourage a Victimhood Complex.³⁸ Coleman argues that narratives like the New Jim Crow and Kendi’s and DiAngelo’s theories make black people see themselves as victims. This sense of victimhood then makes them attribute their hardships entirely to others, not recognizing that they have the capacity to improve their own lives.

Writing from personal experience, Coleman begins his critique by saying that the root of the problem comes down to absent fathers. He points out that a whopping 70 percent of black households have a single parent, usually a mother.³⁹ In contrast, only 38 percent of white households are single parent, and 20 percent of Asian ones.⁴⁰ Coleman then traces the absence of black fathers to a host of evils for their children. He writes about how this abandonment creates lost boys and lost girls who grow up feeling unwanted and fill that need for approval with the cheap substitutes of sex and gang violence. When they grow up, “These lost men find lost women and create children who will subsequently struggle with finding acceptance in the world.”⁴¹ In other words, when black fathers abandon their children (as Richard Williams allegedly abandoned his first family) that creates a vicious cycle of abandonment that perpetuates itself.

No doubt critics would object that Coleman is wrong to place the lion’s share of the blame at the feet of black fathers instead of inquiring into the forces that make black men leave their children in disproportionate numbers. We face a chicken-and-egg question: did mass incarceration cause black men to leave their children behind, or did paternal abandonment create the violent conditions that caused mass incarceration? Coleman takes the latter view, arguing that the absence of a paternal authority figure causes young black men to lack respect for the authority of law.⁴² He also argues that a single mother simply doesn’t have the time to both support and discipline her children.⁴³ While boys perpetuate the cycle of single-parent families by embracing crime, he claims, girls do so through promiscuity—Coleman cites evidence that girls whose fathers left them before the age of five are seven to eight times more likely to become pregnant as adolescents, while those abandoned by their fathers between six and thirteen are two to three times likelier than average to become pregnant.⁴⁴

The causes of America’s high number of single-mother black families are complex, multifaceted, and interlinked, and Coleman grounds his argument more in personal experience than rigorous statistical evidence. It may be that the chicken and egg both played important causal roles in the high level of violent crimes committed by black people, regardless of which came first. But I do agree with Coleman’s diagnosis that the root cultural cause of the crime problem is the lack of a stable family structure among black Americans. Regardless of how the cycle of absent fathers started, the important thing is that it be resisted, not encouraged. The official Black Lives Matter website, for instance, originally had a statement saying the movement stood for “disrupt[ing] the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”⁴⁵

Knowing the cause of black violent crime is important, because you need an accurate diagnosis to get an effective policy treatment. Modern America’s victimhood-narrative mindset suggests that we ought to embark on an endless debate about which came first, mass incarceration of black men or their abandonment of their children. That’s because the most crucial question from the perspective of a victimhood narrative is who to blame—do we blame black fathers or white cops? Or maybe white voters? In the eyes of a tale of victimhood, carving up causal origins and divvying up the right share of blame is the most important task, because it establishes who is the victim and who is the villain, which in turn establishes who bears the burden of remedying the plight of black Americans.

But the divisive, impossibly difficult question of deciding who’s to blame and how much only seems like the crucial task if you view the world through the lens of victimhood. There are other questions we could ask, like “How can I help?” Knowing that absent black fathers cause violent crime, which in turn causes mass incarceration, which in turn leads to unequal material outcomes in many walks of life gives everyone a head start on figuring out how the nation can move forward. We can know that we ought to reject BLM’s leap to suggest the nuclear family just simply isn’t part of black culture; we can know that we ought to tailor our economic and educational efforts at ensuring equal opportunities to address the harms created by single-parent families.

My family and my aunt’s neighbors are haltingly finding a way to move forward without debating who’s to blame for our argument. Everyone still has to live together, after all. A couple of years after that guy blew up at me, my aunt got a knock on her door one evening. She answered it and was surprised to see it was the neighbor’s wife. She apologized for what he’d done that morning, saying that as they’d gotten to know everyone in the neighborhood, they heard a lot of good things about our family and came to the conclusion that everything must’ve somehow been a big misunderstanding. It was a big misunderstanding; I wasn’t thinking even a fraction of the things he thought I was about the relation between black people and police.

I’m still not sure why it was his wife that did the apologizing. I think the guy himself must’ve been embarrassed. I’m a bit embarrassed about it all, too; everyone I tell this story to gently tells me never to put it in print. Next time I see my aunt’s neighbor—her black neighbor—I’m leaving the subject of his lawn alone. I’ll probably just nod at him, he’ll nod at me, and we’ll take it from there.