Stephen Paddock shot more than 500 people from the windows of his Las Vegas hotel room Sunday night, killing 58 of them. In the days since, a familiar story has been passed around the internet about the blinkered way in which we talk about these sorts of massacres. We’re so quick to blame Islamic terrorists, this story goes, that we don’t address the stark, distressing truth about mass shootings. The killers aren’t angry immigrants, by and large. They’re white men.“These shooters are almost exclusively coming from a single socio-economic class and racial group,” wrote actor Cole Sprouse in a widely shared Twitter thread. We must now address “what part of whiteness influences this kind of Petri dish for gun violence and killing.”This wasn’t just a social media phenomenon. The Huffington Post published Sprouse’s tweets as a “Powerful Take on Whiteness and Mass Shootings.” An article in Elle called the link between white men and mass shootings “a general rule” and proposed that “our refusal to confront toxic white male violence is why this problem will metastasize.” The progressive news site ThinkProgress said that “when we talk about mass shootings, we are talking about white men.” Newsweek wondered if “white men commit mass shootings out of a sense of entitlement.” A CNN opinion piece bemoaned the fact that “America has silently accepted the rage of white men.”
The MSM argument, and reporting representation, is that empirical reality is consistent with Critical Race and Social Justice Theory - Whites are disproportionately responsible for mass killings.
An argument which was disproved some thirty years ago and continues to be untrue with ever more accumulating evidence of the untruth of the argument. Part of this false argument probably originates from simple innumeracy and statistical ignorance which is on constant display in media reporting on diverse topics. Journalists and editors don't speak maths and frequently get it badly wrong.
Take as a simple example. Regardless of category (race, religion, left-handedness, marital status, etc.) we would expect, absent any a priori knowledge to the contrary, that a group will be represented in the outcome to the extent that they are represented in the universe. If our focus is on mass killers and whites are 75% of the population, then we would expect them to be 75% of mass killers. We can change the category and the rule remains the same. If 10% of the population is left-handed, then we expect 10% of mass murders to be left-handed.
To drive it home, if 50% of the population is Protestant, then 50% of mass murders will be Protestant.
If the data bears out the assumption of equal proportionality between outcome and population, then it indicates there is no useful association between any of the categories and the outcomes.
It is only when there is a material disproportion that you can see some suggestive causal effect. If 40% of mass shooters are left-handed, then it raises the question: "What is distinctive about left-handedness which causes them to be over-represented among mass murderers?"
Journalists, however, frequently confuse majority and proportionality. Specifically, if 75% of the population is white and 75% of mass murderers are white, then journalists seems to interpret this as "whites are a majority of mass murderers and that is a problem" whereas statisticians draw the conclusion that whites commit mass murders in strict proportion to their representation in the population and there is no problem.
The prevailing myth among journalists that whites commit a disproportionate number of mass murders likely results from this statistical ignorance - majority does not carry the connotation of disproportionate.
Engbert understands this and refutes the common media narrative with the existing and easily available empirical data.
What those initial Mother Jones numbers showed, though, was that white people weren’t overrepresented among mass shooters. The media outlet had found that roughly 70 percent of the shooters in mass killings were white—certainly a majority. But according to Census Bureau estimates for 2012, whites accounted for 73.9 percent of all Americans. (Keep in mind that the definition of whiteness is both vague and forever changing. In the 2010 census, the “white” category includes those whose families originate in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Mother Jones, for its part, categorizes one Moroccan immigrant killer as “white”; leaves the race field blank for a Turkish immigrant; and describes several shooters of Pakistani, Palestinian, Afghan and Kuwaiti extraction as “other.”)
[snip]
Since 2012, Mother Jones has added 29 more mass-shooting events to its database (and tweaked its definition of the crime to fit with new federal guidelines that placed the threshold at three victims instead of four). In this bigger data set, the proportion of white mass shooters drops down to 56 percent, by my count. Judging by those newer numbers, and the most current census estimate that 76.9 percent of Americans are white, the whites-are-overrepresented-among-mass-shooters meme appears even less accurate. Perpetrators that Mother Jones classifies as Asian make up 7.4 percent of the data set, versus an estimated 5.7 percent of the population, while those MoJo identifies as black represent 17.0 percent of the mass shooters in the database versus an estimated 13.3 percent of the population. According to this data set, then, Asians and black Americans are overrepresented among mass shooters by about the same proportion (a bit more than one-fourth) that whites are underrepresented. This means the population rate of mass shootings by whites (at least according to the tiny sample measured in the MoJo database) is 0.021 per 100,000 people, while the corresponding rate of mass shootings by blacks is 1.7 times higher, at 0.037.
The MSM habit of perpetrating a demonstrable untruth is a longstanding habit. It may or may not be due to ideological conviction (Critical Race Theory/Social Justice Theory) and it may or may not be due to innumeracy and statistical ignorance. Regardless of cause, they are spreading an obvious and empirical untruth.
Engbert gets caught in the weeds, propagating an odd notion. It almost comes across as a jesuitical apology for critiquing the MSM narrative.
Overall murder rates among black Americans are 6.3 times higher than they are for whites, according to a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Another report suggests white offenders made up just 45.3 percent of everyone who committed homicides between 1980 and 2008. In other words, white Americans may be somewhat underrepresented among mass shooters, but they’re even more underrepresented among all killers. In that limited sense, it would be fair to say that whites are responsible for more public massacres than you might expect. Does that mean their whiteness is a factor in these crimes?
White Americans are somewhat underrepresented among mass murders (whites being 77% of the population but only 74% of mass murderers) but are very underrepresented among murderers (whites being 77% of the population but only 45% of murderers). Engbert tries to create the impression that this difference in underrepresentation has some negative significance. That is a desperate hail-Mary to try and sustain the notion that whites are major problem in the issue of mass murders.
Why is any of this a problem? Well the obvious racism and effort to cultivate division by Critical Race Theory/Social Justice Theorists is certainly one part of the problem. The main problem, though, is that if you do not correctly define the problem, the odds of you successfully "solving" or at least ameliorating the problem decline catastrophically.
Which Engbert then demonstrates.
It’s possible—but given all the numbers above, I think it makes more sense to ask why those classified as non-white might be disproportionately represented among killers, from mass shooters down the line. The answer there would seem to have everything to do with privilege. Structural inequalities related to education, employment, housing, and health care, along with de facto segregation and a history of discrimination and bias, create conditions under which black Americans in particular are more likely to be both the perpetrators and the victims of this violence. More than half of those committing homicides in the BJS data set are black, and close to half of the victims of those homicides are black. These statistics show us that in a global sense, a lack of privilege contributes to killing and that white privilege kills, at least in part, through the reciprocal cost it imposes on to other groups.
For the Critical Race Theory/Social Justice Theorists, it always comes back to race and privilege and inequalities. For rationalist empiricists out Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberalism, that is all nonsense. It could be theoretically true but the data does not support that. Nigerians do fantastically well in the US. Haitian refugees do surprisingly well given the barriers they have faced (poverty, language difference, cultural difference, education disparities, etc.). Somalis quite a bit worse. As with native born African Americans.
It is not a race issue or inequality or privilege. It is an issue of class and culture.
If you want to address disparities, you have to address class and culture. Notoriously difficult issues. Diagnosing everything as race, inequality and privilege allows Marxists to advance theoretical solutions under a seemingly moral flag. But they never work because they are applying failed solutions to incorrectly defined problems.
So much nonsense.
Kudos to both Engbert and Slate for daring to introduce the truth into the lion's den of Woke self-delusion. It will be intellectually refreshing if our MSM ever emerges into the uplands of clear thinking and logic based on empirical realities. Most of them are still mired in the fog of self-delusion and fanatical adherence to bad ideologies.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment