But the woke war against liberalism is far from over.
A gang of anti-liberal cancel culturalists came for Harvard linguist Steven Pinker in the form of an open letter to the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) calling for his removal as one of the LSA’s distinguished fellows and as a listed linguistics media expert. Why should Pinker be “canceled” by the group? Because, the writers allege, Pinker “has a history of speaking over genuine grievances and downplaying injustices, frequently by misrepresenting facts, and at the exact moments when Black and Brown people are mobilizing against systemic racism and for crucial changes.” Interestingly, while the letter claims that Pinker’s nefarious behavior is taking place at the “exact moments” of anti-racist mobilization, most of the allegedly egregious instances it cites occurred years earlier.
The letter, which lists nearly 600 signatories, cites six instances of when Pinker purportedly engaged in “a pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence.” Let’s take a brief look at each assertion.
As mentioned above, though the letter claims Pinker’s nefarious behavior is taking place at the “exact moments” of anti-racist mobilization, the first censure cites a 2015 tweet in which Pinker declares that the “police don’t shoot blacks disproportionately.” In support of that claim, Pinker links to a 2015 New York Times op-ed by Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan in which he reports the findings of his research on racial discrimination and policing. Mullainathan forthrightly states, “Police killings are a race problem: African-Americans are being killed disproportionately and by a wide margin.” But his crucial point is that that is because black citizens have a disproportionate number of encounters with police. Given that any encounter with police could turn violent, Mullainathan’s data suggest that police are no more likely to shoot black citizens per encounter than they are to shoot white citizens. The causes for those extra encounters are rooted in structural social and economic problems, not least of which are poverty and the drug war. Pinker agrees that “the racial bias came into the formation of crime prone neighborhoods. Not in the behavior of the police once they’re actually in a confronting a suspect.”
The LSA member scolds’ second attempt at indicting Pinker of downplaying violence and injustice cites the fact that that the police had shot and killed nearly 1,000 people in 2017. Pinker is blamed for referencing a 2017 New York Times op-ed that suggested a way to reduce that terrible toll of killings by police: “Police kill too many people, black & white,” tweeted Pinker. “Focus on race distracts from solving problem, as we do w plane crashes.” Basically Pinker was endorsing the idea that to reduce police killings, each shooting episode should undergo in-depth independent forensic investigation the way that teams from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) examine airplane crashes. Just as NTSB investigations try to figure out how to prevent future crashes, the goal of independent investigations of police shootings should be to devise new policing procedures that aim to minimize the chances of violence occurring between citizens and cops.
Ronald Bailey – Reason – July 10, 2020.
