Heather Mac Donald’s new essay “Is the Criminal Justice System Racist?” is finally available online at City Journal, and is a must-read. Another must-read: this instructive peek at the psychology of a cops-are-racist true believer, courtesy of good ol’ Mother Jones.
If you believe that the criminal justice system is racially biased, you need to know Heather Mac Donald.
She’ll mess with your mind and make you either up your politico-cultural game or admit you were wrong. . . .
And how will she “mess with your mind,” exactly?
Just about every one of her pieces is a statistical and analytical tour-de-force, while we liberals tend too often to mouth liberal pieties like inside jokes. Just yesterday, I was listening to Angela Davis . . . on my car radio. I agreed with nearly everything she said, but they were dissatisfying lefty bromides, one and all. Racist criminal justice system. Slavery was bad. War in Iraq. The crowd whooped and hollered, but where was the beef, the analysis, the facts? Forgive me Angela, patron saint of the streets, but Mac Donald would have had you for lunch. . . .
[Mac Donald is] among America’s harshest critic of blacks. Harshest and most devastating; unlike most of the right-wing blovio-sphere, home girl does her homework. . . . I read her religiously—even have a Google alert set up in her honor—much the same way one looks for dismembered limbs and blood stains at an accident scene while knowing one shouldn’t. One will only get upset if successful and MacDonald upsets me every time because with every piece, she sets out to prove that the only problems blacks face are of their own making.
She doesn’t mess around. Her City Journal latest is a devastating response to the liberal shibboleth that the criminal justice system is racist and designed to criminalize and incarcerate blacks en masse.
The author, Debra Dickerson, goes on to praise Mac Donald for her “thoroughly documented” claims (what a novelty!) and for “the attention she pays to internal dissent from the conventional wisdom within the black community itself, a voice which liberals tend to muffle so as to continue the war against the criminal justice system.” You could be forgiven for thinking this was a piece in favor of Heather Mac Donald. It’s really a call to ignore or trivialize evidence that contradicts your prejudices:
However much crime blacks commit, Mac Donald refuses to consider for even a moment that racism itself is the (yeah, I’ll go there) root cause of black crime. Either blacks commit more crimes because they’re inherently violent and criminal or there’s another reason—a bedrock racism that segregates, undereducates, and marginalizes them in every way come to mind. Is it so hard to imagine that a hated group responds with disfunction [sic]? For Mac Donald—yes, it is.
Yet this question has nothing to do with Mac Donald’s thesis, which is simply that “the continuing search for the chimera of criminal-justice bigotry is a useless distraction that diverts energy and attention from the crucial imperative of helping more inner-city boys stay in school—and out of trouble.” Nevertheless, Dickerson doesn’t think twice about a smear: If Mac Donald illuminates “the complexities of life in the inner city,” she does so “for all the wrong reasons.” The title of this post is “Know Your Enemy”—the enemy, one supposes, being the unpleasant truth.
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