https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD6aoUCQ21w&ab_channel=Bloggingheads.tv
My response to someone:
I thought this was an interesting exchange though at about, if I’m recalling right, the 46’ mark give or take, right up until the very end they veer off issues of systemic racism and problems with the administration and substance of American criminal justice. They spend the last 1/3 or so on purely personal issues to both of them, especially Loury, who comes across in much of his previous troubled life as a human train wreck such that one cringes, or at least I cringe, listening to it but can’t turn away.
Anyway, Bazelon’s case for the existence of systemic racism is weak and by and large, or at least often, she conflates it with her critique of the criminal justice system writ large, ie affecting all who come into contact with it regardless of race, white, red, yellow, black and brown. She doesn't seem to realize that her analysis is more class based than race based.
Her characterization of her essential issue with Loury is whether racism is now vestigial, a relic of the bygone past or whether it is, in her exact phrase, “baked into” laws that are now on the books. The line between the two is blurrier and less stark than she thinks. For vestigial racism means long past systemic racism’s effects continue and are an undeniable factor in present disparities. Loury, as well as McWhorter, would be the first to say that’s so.
The functional difference between the two is that “baked into” means that present laws and institutions have in them components of the past that were specifically rooted in institutional racist intention and racist practices. Loury, I infer, denies that that is an apt wholesale characterization of present laws and institutions and practices, while he might, but doesn’t in this conversation, allow that outlier examples of what Bazelon particularizes—namely, the PIG law in Louisiana and the practice of non unanimous juries—may exist.
She in virtually the same breath notes, by the way, that both the laws she cites have been repealed and that progressive criminal justice personnel were involved in her client’s exoneration.
Functionally for Loury, vestigial racism means the psychological, economic, family dynamic and sociological effects of undeniable past systemic racism, largely de jure undone by the 1964 civil rights legislation and the eventual erasing of persisting pockets of it like red lining.
For Loury, a problem with vestigial racism is it’s immeasurable as far as conduct and dysfunction go and that it informs a kind of victimhood pathology that blames it for all manner of disparate outcomes including without limitation public school performance, top tier university admission, a standard deviation less on test scores, all manner of indicia of success, staggering overrepresentation in crime and jail and massive out of wedlock births punctuated by absentee fathers.
He says whatever the immeasurable factor comes to, the rest by and large is community and family dysfunction, which is essentially from where improvement must come.
Bazelon agrees with some of this as she notes when clarifying what common ground they share. But then her case for “baked into” is weak since so much of it proceeds from just the one example of her unjustly convicted client, as though such travesties haven’t happened and don’t happen regularly to whites as well. Which then goes to my point that she mish-mashes a general critique of the criminal justice system, which is class based, with her notion of baked into systemic racism. That many of the lower classes are black is racial correlation and not racial causation
Interesting to note that when they discuss why her client had a gun, she defends his criminal conduct—he needs it to sling dope or he’ll get shot; he needs to sling dope to overcome his family’s poverty.
But she doesn’t deal with the point Heather Mac Donald makes in reviewing an ideologically similar book by University of Chicago sociologist Alice Goffman, a point that others have made as well: why isn’t this criminal acting out typical of most impoverished black youth; why is it that among her client’s cohort it’s only a minority of them, not the majority, that act this way? This disparity in who acts criminally and who doesn’t devastates the argument that systemic racism is more the cause than individual choice among those similarly situated.
She also weakens her case from the get go to the extent she agrees with Loury. She agrees to the extent that systemic racism is, in her words, “elasticized” and “overextended.” But isn’t that what systemic racism is, a pervasive, wholesale feature of a society? If it’s not that, then how is it systemic?
She gets particularly overly-ideological in downplaying the recent upticks in violent crime by saying they’re nowhere near what the numbers were in the nineties. Loury rightly takes exception to that saying that that doesn’t rebut a 30-50% increase in murders and other felonies in big U.S. cities nor that in NYC increasing crime is at the top of its citizens concerns nor that likely the next mayor will be the more law and order ex-cop Eric Adams. Bazelon blames it on media hype but for me in that she comes off as slightly blasé, which is to say, reality hasn’t yet mugged her.
This doesn’t go to systemic racism but she is weak on touting the virtual abrogation of the cash bail laws. Her reason is that the poor can’t come up with the money: poverty being criminalized is her point By the way, this is an example of her noted conflation.
But doesn’t she have this point backwards?
Even granting the presumption of innocence, when it comes to bail traditionally the strength of the case is a big factor. The likelihood of flight and recommission are big factors. So is the financial inducement to stick around by risking forfeiture of what’s put up as bail security. So are ties to the community. So is the seriousness of the offence.
Thus, if but for bail reform, an arrestee is denied bail, poverty isn’t being criminalized. Rather a preceding crime is being dealt with in the consequence of its perpetration. If rich people can make bail and poor people can’t, is that a reason to let violent felons out pending trial, including ones who’ve already committed a further crime? If everything income inequality touches is to be foregone, we’re on our way to dystopia. Some poor will always be with us.
As Loury notes, it’s sheer irrebuttable common sense that if charged felons including repeat offenders are out every time before trial, they’ll likely offend again. And in fact they do.
They get off substance when they began speaking about the politics of all this.
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