J. Douglas Allen-Taylor: Why Bill Bennett is Stupid, But Not Racist

Why Bill Bennett is Stupid, But Not Racist
By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Berkeley Daily Planet, AlterNet


Many of Mr. Bennett's supporters have made the argument that while Bennett never argued for eliminating African-Americans, his assertion that less blacks would mean less crime was essentially correct. "Some identifiable groups, considered as a group, commit crime at a rate that is higher than the national rate," former federal prosecutor and present columnist Andrew McCarthy wrote in the National Review online. "Blacks are such a group. That is simply a fact. ... The rate being high, it is an unavoidable mathematical reality that if the number of blacks, or of any group whose rate outstripped the national rate, were reduced or eliminated from the national computation, the national rate would go down."

But the truth of that conclusion is dependent on Mr. McCarthy's original premise that "some groups commit crime" at a higher rate, and that "blacks are such a group." That is not a necessarily provable fact. What we do know is that some groups are caught and prosecuted for crime at a higher rate, and that African-Americans are certainly such a group.

But to believe that the actual commission of crime in America would go down with the elimination of African-Americans is to believe, for example, that the drug cartels, seeing the elimination of their black b-boy dealers on America's inner city street corners, would turn in their six-guns to the bartender and start hoeing spuds, as the cattleman Rufus Ryker once facetiously suggested to the gunfighter Shane. More likely, they would simply find other methods of dealership.

But Mr. Bennett's statement was wrong in another sense; wrong in the sense that it should not have been said, because it allows the subject of black genocide as a way to solve America's problems to be raised as a topic of discussion. That Mr. Bennett does not believe in such a practice, or that he said immediately afterwards that such a program of black genocide would be "impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible" is not nearly enough. Some things have no business being said by people considered to be "responsible."

For African-Americans, this is not an issue of being offended; this is an issue of physical survival. In my lifetime, men representing significant and responsible sections of some American communities felt it acceptable to plant bombs in African-American houses of worship, and worse. In another context, African-Americans used to sing a song called "Gone Are The Days." Gone, yes, but not long enough to feel comfortable about that they might not quickly come back.

Thursday's New York Times, for example, reports the social aftermath of a fire set last December by young Ku Klux Klan members that destroyed 10 houses and heavily damaged 16 others, most of which were owned by black families in a largely white Charles County, Maryland, D.C. suburban community.

To these like these young Klansmen, the term "racist" properly applies. But for people like Mr. Bennett? As I said, we need to come up with another term.

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