What Bill Bennett Said

It is amazing how ONE comment TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT can be so blown up. It is amazing to me that the media….KNOWING what the rest of the context is, would CHOOSE to be deceiving to everyone else. No conscience at all.

Thanks LaShawn again for a great post!
Rose

And what about just white males? God knows they commit a helluva lot of crimes..Oh yea I forgot we tend to turn our back on white crime, just boys being boys. Bennett should be ashamed of himself, I guess he wouldn’t being one of those good ole boys…..

hey, Lashawn! check this out…the difference between a white liberal and a white conservative: when a white conservative comes across an African-American male he thinks, ‘a Black guy…cool.’ when a white liberal comes across a Black male he thinks, ‘a Black guy…he probably needs my help.’ peace! md

“bennett’s comment was the equivalent of saying we could eliminate racism in this country by aborting every white child… That’s morally indefensible but going by pure statistics it’s correct…

Comment by Jim — 10.03.05 @ 2:06 pm ”

I totally agree, Jim, its the same.

As long as one was using that statement as an example of a dangerous way of viewing the world.

Which is what Bennett did.

I agree with LaShawn. He could have picked a non racial example.

Non-the-less, he was pointing out that its a lousy line of reasoning.

And you are arguing that he was wrong.

Cuckoo.

#68
Bennet said REDUCE crime…That would not be the equivalent of a statement using the word ELIMINATE. It throws the statistical justification for the statement off in that it would not be factually correct to state that one could eliminate all racism by aborting all whites. One could REDUCE racism by aborting all whites….That would be correct, statistically….

Bennett’s statement is sad. Yes crime is high in the black community. So to decrease crime in the black community, why not take a young man under your wing Mr Bennett like I have. Why not talk to them about going to college or helping them get a trade. Why not Mr Bennett explain to them like I have that there is no excuse not to make something of yourself in America even racism. Because you are black is NO excuse. People in the black community are making sacrifices every single day to get these kids on the right track. It will never be reported because it’s a secret that black conservatives will not tell you. All you will here about us is Jesse Jackson, AL Sharpton, the democrats and the liberal BS. Yes, Mr Bennett crime is sad in community but there are more effective ways to get crime down then killing babies.

Red Tory says La Shawn is hypocritical. I disagree.

“…snot-nosed, empty-headed goofs in left-leaning newsrooms…clownish…virulent…”

Sounds accurate to me, unlike the attacks on Bennett. Most writers of those attacks have no familiarity with accuracy whatever, but are quite talented at being snot-nosed, empty-headed goofs.

LaShawn:

I think you are missing why Bennett’s comments are objectionable to many. Let me try to explain.

First of all, you are absolutely right to point out that Bill Bennett, at the core, was 100% factually correct — i.e., aborting black babies will bring the crime rate down.

But the following is just as true: “If you abort all the [male/female/white/Latino/blue-eyed/brown-eyed/blond/etc] babies, there will be a reduction in the crime rate.” That’s just pure logic.

So the issue is why Bill Bennett chose to single out “black people” to demonstrate his “mathematical literacy”. It certainly does suggest some prejudice, although (I stress) it is merely a suggestion and requires extrapolation on the part of the listener. I tend to believe that the context of the conversation was the real reason.

I’m sure Bennett wasn’t advocating genocide, and I don’t know if he is a racist or not in his heart.

But he should realize that, however it came about, his remark was insensitive, especially in light of the Katrina tragedy. But since it was an excusable lapse, he should apologize (lightly) for it. And in return, we should excuse him and move on.

I have to wonder if you listened to the same wireless broadcast as I. The logical argument, and yes his hypothetical is logical, utilized a flawed example. He reached over his own race avoiding the conversations he would have had to have with the thousands of middle class white women who have abortions every year, to blacks. What would make William Bennett, an educated, powerful, wealthy white man ignore clear statistics? Those clear statistics point to the very fact that abortion was made legal by Roe v. Wade not so that black women would be freed from the bonds of unwanted pregnancy but so that young white women could go on with their plans to marry well or have a career after a sexual misstep.

I am certain that you would not argue that the American government in its benevolence to blacks made abortion legal for black women. However, I digress, for this is not about abortion it is about perception and privilege. It is about what people who have more than they have earned think of those that are less than them. This is about black people who think they have risen above and beyond the quiet racism that will always exist until we confront it.
Ms Barber you have the comfort of knowing that even if Bennett did mean that blacks cause more crime or if they are more violent he didn’t mean you. He just meant someone who looks like you.

Cavalor Epthith
Editor-in-Chief
The Dis Brimstone-Daily Pitchfork

The context of BB’s comments were in response to a caller. That caller suggested that abortion is reducing the amount of money paid into Social Security – therefore, abortion is wrong. This theory was not made up whole-cloth from the caller. It is a part of current abortion debate.

BB could have used another example in reply (abort all whites – and reduce racism. abort all males – and reduce crime rates.). However, those counter examples would have been too absurd to leave an impact. The desired impact was to demonstrate, to the caller, that his pragmatism could lead to immoral outcomes – in real life.

Unfortunately, the example BB did use has enough basis in historical and current thought (eugenics and freakonomics) to leave that desired impact.

Contrary to those who think BB should have used a different example. I think he used the perfect example. His point was not about black crime. His point was about pragmatism and its real life consequences.

When Freakonomics came out there was much ado about its assertion that legalized abortion had reduced the crime rate. Now I learn that Black women are three times more likely to abort their babies than white women. Was this the message between the lines of Freakonomics and, because the book has a liberal tilt to it, was it ignored?

Bill Bennett was using a “noxious hypothetical” in a reductio ad absurbum argument to demonstrate to a caller that the caller’s “pragmatic” rational for opposing abortion had problems with it. The specter of genocide in the noxious hypothetical made it all the more noxious. This went over the heads of some otherwise apparently intelligent bloggers.

I listened to a hysterical caller tell radio show host Michael Medved that, by Bennett’s logic, one could bring peace to the Middle East by bombing everyone there. Medved tried to point out to him that he was using the same method of reasoning that Bennett used. It was useless, the caller couldn’t comprehend it.

This demonstrates another reason to homeschool your children. Teach them logic. But first teach them that there are a lot of people in the general population that won’t be able to understand it.

By the way, I can’t count the times I’ve heard from civil rights activists that to require criminal background checks on people is “racist” because Blacks are more likely to have criminal records than whites. This was demonstrated in Texas where that very charge was used against a landlord that wanted criminal background checks before he would rent to people made homeless by Katrina. It seems as though there are people who want it both ways–or maybe that’s faulty logic on my part.

By Eugene Robinson

Tuesday, October 4, 2005; Page A23

There’s no need to pillory William Bennett for his “thought experiment” about how aborting all black children would affect the crime rate. I believe him when he says he wasn’t actually advocating genocide, just musing about it to make a point. Instead of going into high-dudgeon mode, let’s put him on the couch.

Bennett, the former education secretary and anti-drug czar who has found a new calling in talk radio, told his audience last week that “if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” He quickly added that doing so would be “impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible,” which is certainly true.

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So why would such a horrible idea even cross his mind? How could such an evil notion ever pass his lips?

Bennett was referring to research done by Steven D. Levitt, a University of Chicago economist and lead author of the best-selling book “Freakonomics.” The iconoclastic Levitt, something of an academic rock star, argues that the steep drop in crime in the United States over the past 15 years resulted in part from the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

In defending his words, Bennett has said he was citing “Freakonomics.” So why did his “thought experiment” refer only to black children?

Levitt’s thesis is essentially that unwanted children who grow up poor in single-parent households are more likely than other children to become criminals, and that Roe v. Wade resulted in fewer of these children being born. What he doesn’t do in the book is single out black children.

Perhaps the ostentatiously intellectual Bennett went back and read Levitt’s original 2001 paper on the subject, co-authored with John J. Donohue III. The authors do mention race briefly, in a discussion of the falling homicide rate, but attribute most of the decline to those race-neutral factors that Levitt later cited in “Freakonomics.” To bolster their argument, they cite research on abortion and lowered crime rates in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe — not places where you’re likely to find a lot of black people.

If he was citing Levitt’s work, Bennett could have said that to lower the crime rate “you could abort every white baby” or “you could abort every Hispanic baby” or “you could abort every Asian baby,” since every group has unwanted, poor children being raised by single mothers.

So now that we have Bennett on the couch, shouldn’t we conclude that he mentioned only black children because, perhaps on a subconscious level, he associates “black” with “criminal”?

That’s what it sounds like to me. I grew up in the South in the days when we had to drink at “colored” water fountains and gas stations had separate “colored” restrooms; I know what a real racist is like, and Bennett certainly doesn’t fit the description. But that’s what’s so troubling about his race-specific “thought experiment” — that such a smart, well-meaning opinion maker would so casually say something that translates, to African American ears, as “blacks are criminals.”

What makes it worse is that his words came in the context of abortion. That Bennett staunchly opposes abortion is beside the point. He should know enough history to understand why black Americans would react strongly when whites start imagining experiments to limit black reproduction. For hundreds of years, this country was obsessed with the supposed menace of black sexuality and fertility. Bennett’s remarks have to make you wonder whether that obsession has really vanished or just been deemed off-limits in polite discourse.

I’ve heard people argue — mostly in discussions of affirmative action — that the nation’s problem of racial discrimination has mostly been solved. The issue now is class, they say, not race. I’d like to believe that, but I don’t.

Bennett is too intelligent not to understand why many of us would take his mental experiment as a glimpse behind the curtain — an indication that old assumptions, now unspoken, still survive. He ought to understand how his words would be taken as validation by the rapper Kanye West, who told a television audience that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” or by the New Orleans survivors who keep calling me with theories of how “they” dynamited selected levees to flood the poor, black Lower Ninth Ward and save the wealthy French Quarter and Garden District.

I have a thought experiment of my own: If we put our racial baggage on the table and talk about it, we’ll begin to take care of a lot of unfinished business.

There you have it. BB told the truth and the vipers went into a fit of fury. Just as everytime Jesus stated a truth of human nature, the pharisees went nuts because it went against their liberal plantation agenda.

Using black babies was perfect because it was the most extreme example of genocide — A group that only makes up 12% of the population, kills 1/3 of all a nation’s babies!!!

I don’t have the resources to frame it properly, but simply put as a rough guess: 12% people killing 1/3 babies is significantly wicked-er than 88% killing 2/3s. To wit, for the 12% we’re talking a rate greater than 1 out of every 2 pregnancies vs 88% @ a rate of 1 in every 4 pregnancies.

One does not even have to think of race/racism in order to use this as the absolute worst example of self-centered evil. Using white babies would not have been as dramatic, nor emphatic.

The fact that we’re all blogging and talking about it is good!!! It sharpens the debate and is bound to slap some sense into those who were ambivalent until now. If even it only made one person thinking about killing her baby change her mind, BB did good.

As for bleeding hearts… bleed away in vain.

Ciao

Comment 92 is exactly right, Levitt’s arguement is not about race. This is not because he shies away from race, but b/c it is not statistically important for his arguement. Blacks do commit a disporportionate number of certain crimes (not more, dissproportionate) but if you control for income and family structure than the immpact of race falls out. In other words, children of poor single mothers disproportionately commit crimes at the same rate be they black or white. A higher percentage of black children grow up in these circumstances than white children, hence the crime rate we see. The problem I have with the way this discussion has gone forward is that many defenders of Bennett’s statement say it is true based on simple statistics. Statistics are not, however, so simple and to come to the conclusion he did several underlying assumptions must be made and it these assumptions that I think some people find offensive. I presume when people say that BB’s statement is true based on statistics they mean that we can correctly infer how future generations of blacks will act based on what we know about current and past generations. What is important is that this formulation requires making some very strong statistical assumptions about the similarity of black behavior over time – or more specifically, that we assume consistency. There are two arguements I can think of as to why we could assume that future black behavior will be the same as current behavior. The first arguement is that blacks are somehow genetically predisposed to crime. I’ll take BB at his word that he doesn’t believe this. The other reason to assume consistency in behavior is to assume that the environmental conditions that face blacks won’t change – either way, though, the underlying (statistical) assumption Bennett makes is that bad behavior today means bad behavior tomorrow (and this is nothing like what Levitt argued). If, however, we change the assumption and argue instead that the drop in crime committed by blacks over the past decade or so will continue indefinitely (which doesn’t seem to me to be too unreasonable) than by the time babies born today are of age we won’t see racial differences in crime. This was all a very long winded way of saying the problem with BB’s arguement is that he makes the statistical assumption that crime rates today will be like crime rates tomorrow (which is never the case for any group) and that we can safely assume that rates of black criminality will remain consistent. It is precisely this fatalism about blacks and crime (which is *not* arrived at by simple statistics) which people rightly find offensive.

Good read. I’ve got a few points.

1. While I appreciate you encouraging readers to think before they comment and refrain from twisting Dr. Bennett’s words, I do have one question. “Violent” crime isn’t mentioned once in the Bennett quote, yet, in your 2nd update, you highlight a commenter’s statement with several references to violent crime, and, in your 3rd update, you mention violent crime yourself when asking: “If black men commit over half the violent crimes, can you not comprehend that fewer or no black men would mean fewer violent crimes?”

2. There are criminals in every race. Having listened to the entire exchange on Bennett’s radio show, I realize that race was never mentioned by the caller. Why did Bennett bring race into the conversation?

3. Because there are criminals among every race and gender, wouldn’t it be true that you could abort every Jewish baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. Or you could abort every Asian baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. Or you could abort every female baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. I suspect the conversation would be much different had Bennett used Jewish people to make his point.

4. La Shawn, I think the reason there is such anger among some about Bennett’s comments is because they reflect a disregard for Black lives. I firmly believe that Black people — individuals and families — need to get our acts together and work to stop, or at least lessen, crime, abortion, and incarceration among our people. That said, I don’t think it is fair to change the subject from Bennett to Black people. Dr. Bennett should be held accountable for his statements and actions. Furthermore, I think we set a dangerous precedent when we suggest that it is acceptable for respected leaders like Dr. Bennett to engage in public discussions pondering the positive effect to be realized by aborting every black baby in America and committing genocide against our race.

Can’t wait to see you in October!

Well, if someone said that if you wanted to reduce organized crime, you could abort every Italian baby, I think Italians would have a right to feel insulted. The fact that statistics may confirm the truth of a statement is not enough.

The point was phrased in an unnecessarily incendiary manner, in a country with a legacy of racism.

It’s a bit like introducing holocaust denial into a conversation as “just a theory – not that I believe it.” You’re still managing to introduce the modest proposal.

Why Bennetts hypothisis is flawed?

Here is where Bill Bennett’s hypothetical will go wrong. He states his hypothetical as if black parents will simply go along with such a plan. I submit to you crime would actually skyrocket among all black age groups and classes. People who normally would not commit a crime would probably be charged with assault and in most cases of murder against anyone who performed the abortion or supported it in anyway. I asked some of my middleclass black male friends who are married and college educated how they would repond to this proposal. These are men who have never committed a crime in their life. They all stated that if their wife pregnancy were harmed in anyway they would do whatever they had to do to protect the life of that child even if it meant getting revenge. I also see black soldiers who are defending our Nation as we speak force to respond in a dishonorable way. Not only would these men respond in that manner, I dare you to see how that mother responds. Also let me throw in the grandparents, uncles, aunts and etc. People who normally would not commit a crime will act accordingly to what they perceived to be a hostile policy towards them. So if blacks would not simply go along with this plan, that means in a free country BIG GOVERNMENT would impose it’ self against the founding principles of our Nation which is something I am sure Mr. Bennett himself is against. My bet is that crime would actually increase in Mr. Bennett’s hypnothetical context.

Correction- I should have said high crime rates are *associated with” not “caused by” above…

LaShawn
I think conservatives are being intellectually dishonest when they castigate Bennett’s detractors on the narrow grounds that his “hypothetical is based on fact”.

Lets consider some other hypotheticals, based on fact, that have brought public figure widespread condemnation and ultimately cost them their jobs:

Suregeon General Jocelyn Elder: “Masturbation is something that is part of human sexuality and its part of something that perhaps should be taught.”

Ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young: for having met with a representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO, then considered a terrorist organization, and stating that such a meeting was critical to achieving lasting peace in the Middle East.

Perhaps blacks are not the only “People [who] have nothing better to do than blow the most mundane things out of proportion.”

So you’re using “Henry” now? Well, play nice, and I’ll let you stay this time. You know, it always amazes me how much people want to comment on this blog. They personally insult me, get the boot, and for reasons I’ll never understand, they always come back, usually under different names. Why are you people compelled? – Admin

#86 – Ma’at

Yes, aborting males would reduce the crime rate…and if BB had said so, people would have laughed and thought ‘what’s for dinner’.

By referring to ‘black children and crime’ BB was touching upon a hypothetical that would make a lasting point to his listeners. He could have said ‘aborting every native American child will reduce child abuse’ and his listeners would have thought him ridiculous (not because the demographics are wrong – but because most of his listeners are not aware of/concerned about native American child abuse.).

Yes, the caller suggested that abortions (in total) were reducing money paid into Social Security. If you listen to an audio file of the conversation – you will understand that Bill noted this argument was not good – even accepting pragmatism. He hestitaed…said something about mostly poor children being aborted and economics (the listener was left to connect the dots)….and then made the counter ‘pragmatic’ argument about blacks, crime, and abortion. His conclusion was…pragmatism has no place in the abortion debate.

You ask, “So the question is why did he feel the need to go there? hmm” (referring to ‘blacks’)… Well, if somebody told me that abortion could be debated upon a purely socio-economic basis, absent morals, then I would reach for the most obvious socio-economic demographic I could find -to demonstrate the amorality of pure pragmatism.

The obvious socio-economic demographic that came to BB’s mind was….black crime. Nobody, within this blog, has suggested a better, more obvious example, of a purely pragmatic argument for abortion. Maybe ‘welfare abortion’ fits the bill – but it’s a fine line.

You said, “His comments have the funk of racism. And Maatkare, being a negro, has been offended.”

Try contemplating his argument. Forget about your race…just for a moment…and consider his words as he meant them. Abortion is immoral – every child is equal – no other fact is needed to argue the point.

The problem with what Bill Bennett said was not the actual hypothetical, but the assumption behind his choice. I read Freakonomics a few weeks ago, am black and anti-abortion, and was not offended at all by Levitt’s arguments about abortion and the drop in the crime rate during the 90’s. Bill Bennett’s comments were racist because they implied the assumption that blacks have inherent higher rates of criminality. This is a eugenics-style argument that formed the basis of many “intellectual” and not so intellectual racist theories.

No one argues the correlation with blacks in the U.S. and crime. But correlation isn’t causality. Saying that certain groups are the cause of society’s problems, so that the society’s problems would be reduced if they were gone (hypothetically of course – Bennett) is making that correlation a causality. No one argues that crime rates are higher in children that grow up under the poverty line. Crime is higher in the poor. But the argument that getting rid of the poor people would reduce the crime rate is invalid unless you honestly believe that if all the ‘non-poor’ people formed a society (without, for the sake of argument, every household that makes under $15,000), they would form a stable society of only middle class and rich people. It makes no sense. There would still be poor people in the society and those people would still end up with higher crime rates. You would just be moving the line where the crime rate sharply rose from lets say people in households under $15,000 to under $50,000. But overall, you can’t say that the rate of crime definitively will drop, only that the number will drop.

Just like you can’t say that the hypothetical abortion of blacks would drop the crime rate just because the crime rate is high in blacks. There is always an underclass in society, and 18 years after a hypothetical stoppage of new black people would still contain an underclass, it just would be filled with with a less proportion of black people. But whatever that new underclass was composed of (in 2001 of the nation’s 3.5 million children living in extreme poverty (