It hasn’t been a good week for Pamela Price. First, there was the scandal of her cutting plea deals for those murderers who brutally invaded the home of a man and then killed him. The story received widespread news coverage and fed into the narrative that Price is soft on criminals, especially when they’re Black.
Then there was the spectacle of Price’s “Chinese name,” a P.R. stunt that accomplished nothing except to further unite Asian-Americans against her.
Price has made much of the fact that “disparate outcomes” in criminal charging and sentencing of Black men is at the root of her approach as District Attorney. She ran on a promise to “eliminate racial disparities in case dispositions,” citing statistics such as these:
Racial Disparities in Alameda County
• For every 1 white youth arrested in 2021, there were more than 18 Black youth arrested.
• Between 2016 and 2020, 100% of children transferred to the adult system in Alameda County were Black males.
• In 2017, Black youth in Alameda County were 65.3 times more likely than White youthto be prosecuted in adult court.
So let’s talk about “racial disparities in case dispositions.”
“If people were permitted…to argue that any part of the difference in outcomes between the races was attributable to anything other than racism, the entire logic of civil rights law would break down.”
That’s how the historian Christopher Caldwell put it, in his book, “The Age of Entitlement,” which I referred to yesterday. He was referring specifically to 1978’s historic Bakke case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court kinda-sorta okayed affirmative action—a decision that took the Court 45 additional years to finally resolve when, last year, it outlawed affirmative action completely in colleges and universities.
In this blog I’ve talked extensively about how absurd it is to allege that all differences in outcomes are due to race, the assumption on which affirmative action is based. Why are so many “Black youth” arrested? Why are more Black drivers pulled over by cops? Why are more Black men in prison relative to their percentage of the population? Why do Black school children have such dramatically lower achievement levels than White, Asian or Latino students? According to progressives like Price—as Caldwell said—the answer can only be “racism.”
This explanation worked for much of the latter half of the twentieth century, which is when affirmative action insinuated itself into most institutions, from corporations to charities to public schools and universities. In fact, the assumption that “racism” underlies almost every part of the American culture was blindly accepted by the academic establishment as recently as 2016, when the American Psychological Association asked “What’s behind the racial disparity in our educational system?”
They determined that, while “many factors contributed to the achievement gap,” one often-overlooked “dynamic” is “in the way black students are treated by teachers and school administrators.” Since “black students are more likely to be suspended or expelled, less likely to be placed in gifted programs and subject to lower expectations from their teachers,” the achievement gap can be explained only by malevolent attitudes by White teachers.
The APA never even considered the alternative explanation, namely that factors other than “racism” may be responsible for the achievement gap. Why are so many Black students “suspended or expelled”? Maybe because they’re acting in violent, unacceptable ways. Why are so many young Black men being arrested? Maybe because they’re committing so many crimes.
Some credulous White teachers have brought into the APA theory. Many others have not. It’s one thing to propose an academic theory and then discuss it for years in journals and symposia. It’s quite another to accuse teachers of being such racists that they’re actually compromising the future of their students, if not their lives. Many teachers, who took the job at great financial sacrifice because they felt that teaching is a noble profession, reacted personally to the suggestion that, somehow, they were part of the problem of racial underachievement. You can hardly blame them. Even if they knew they had no racism in their hearts, the progressives told them they did: “Your racism is unconscious. We know you better than you know yourself.”
This theory of “unconscious racism” reached ridiculous extremes in the 2000s. One example was at UCSF’s Office of Diversity and Outreach, where administrators discovered “pro-White bias” throughout American institutions. White people were urged to “recognize” their own biases and “share” them with others, in order to promote “bias literacy.” The very fact that so many White people honestly didn’t believe they were racists was held to be evidence that they were. (Of course, the same imperatives were never demanded of Black activists, like Carroll Fife and Cat Brooks, whose anti-White biases speak for themselves.)
Ever since Pamela Price assumed office, in January, 2023, the evidence has accumulated that she isn’t serious about crime prevention and control. Instead, she viewed her election victory as a green light to pursue her decades-old, Black Panther-inspired dream of achieving “equity” for Black people caught up in the criminal justice system. She is, as has often been remarked, not a District Attorney but a Public Defender. When we recall her—and we will—it will be a national news story: California’s bluest, most progressive city fires its progressive D.A. That will truly be a shot heard around the world: the Death of Woke. Pamela Price entered office on a lie and a slander. She will leave office hoisted out by a posse of truth.
Steve Heimoff