Here's the Problem With the George Floyd Protests...

After George Floyd was killed by Derrick Chauvin, the police officer in Minneapolis, protests broke out in cities around the world, especially cities around the United States. Some of those protests turned violent, and there was riotous behavior, assaults on police officers, arson, and looting. There was general disorder, and it's a big political football. People are on all sides of it; there are defenders of it and so forth.

It occurred to me that I did not even know that the incident that happened with a white police officer and the black gentleman who died, who was killed, was a racial incident. I say I did not know that it was a racial incident. All I knew was that the police officer was white and that the man who was killed was black. It didn't follow from that that it was a racial incident. We were making it into a racial incident instead— we being all of us here in the United States. We were making it into a reenactment of old American dramas of lynching and the murder of black people by rogue police, and so forth. We took that thing and we said yes, see here we have proof of the knee on the neck of Black America. That's what Al Sharpton, the activist, said at the funeral of George Floyd. He said, "America has its knee on our neck.”

I thought, this great country of 330 million people, with 40 million black people— here we are, 150 years after slavery and a half-century since Martin Luther King was killed. Really? That's going to be the narrative for our country's politics for the next decade or for the next 15 years? This is what we're going to teach to our children. This is how we're going to arrange our media coverage of these events. That's a disaster for this country.

Okay, so how can you say that when you also have spoken so eloquently on topics such as the differential incarceration rate? This is not an assault on your statement, by the way. I'm very curious because, obviously, you've spoken profoundly about the danger of that differential incarceration rate. You can see that it's not that easy to conceptually disentangle, especially if you're politically motivated. But even if you're not, an event like that from that broader narrative— that something, you know, something's not right structurally, and perhaps this is a reflection of it.

Well, so I don't know how to reconcile those two viewpoints. I don't know how you reconcile them. With difficulty, I suppose I could say, because they do point in slightly different— maybe even more than slightly different— directions. But I'm trying to keep my perspective right. I do think that the advent of what they call mass incarceration— two and a quarter million people under lock and key on a given day, half of them being black people when we're 12% of the population— is a way of doing business going forward. Without any sense of urgency for reform, without any revisiting of our drug laws or our sentencing or whatever, without any attention to what is supposed to happen when someone is in prison— rehabilitation and whatnot— without any exploration of alternatives to incarceration as ways of responding to criminal offending is bad for our country. I do believe that, and I believe the racial aspect of that echoes with our history in ways that are dangerous and that we dare not neglect.

I’m the same guy. On the other hand, I think if you racialize the discussion of crime and punishment, there was the woman who was murdered at Columbia University a few years ago. She was killed by these kids who were just trying to rob her, and they ended up stabbing her to death. She was white, and I’m sorry, I don't remember her name offhand, but you know, she was a lovely young woman and innocent is how she's going to appear in the photograph. She certainly did nothing to deserve what befell her, and she was white.

The other side of it— yeah, right. Tessa— Tessa something is her last name; I can't recall. The kids who killed her were black kids from around Harlem. They were in the park. Yeah, they were looking for a quick score. They had a knife. The woman is lying; she bleeds out. Now, they've convicted one of them— has been convicted, and I'm looking at the photo in the newspaper, and here's this black kid. He looks like a black kid who's 16 or 18 years old— he's a kid from this impoverished neighborhood; he's black. And the woman is white. I don't want that incident processed in terms of black kid murders white woman.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so maybe it's an issue— maybe it's an issue of conflation, careless conflation of levels of analysis, eh? Because you're talking about a high-resolution analysis of structural problems in the penal system. To put that George Floyd event— to cram that into the same narrative— it sort of bespeaks of undifferentiated thought. And then you point out that the danger of that is, well, if you're going to racialize the white cop against the black victim of the homicide, well then why can't the same thing be done exactly the same way when the reverse happens? Maybe we shouldn't do any, or we should do as little of that as we possibly can.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't take a look at these bigger structural issues, but we shouldn't cram it all together in one thing because it's not.

That's very well put, Jordan. That's exactly what I'm trying to say; you said it better than I did. Well, I listened to you, so that was a big help. By the way, if we do cram it all into one thing, God help us because there are people— and they're not going to speak out— there are people who will see it process it just as I hope they would not do: black thug murders innocent white girl, and harbor a resentment and nurse that resentment. That's a tinder box; that's a powder keg waiting to be lit. We can dismiss it if we want to, but those people are not entirely wrong in their sentiment. They need to be disabused of that instinct— that instinct to conflate those levels of analysis.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's part of the problem I have with ideology; ideology is so low resolution. It does that conflation; it doesn't notice. When you get educated, you start differentiating. That's kind of what you said happened to you when you became more conservative. Once you got more educated, it's like, "Oh, this is… when I take this apart and see all the moving pieces, this is way more complex than my low-resolution representation guided me to believe to begin with." I mean, I've experienced that many times in my life when I tried to take problems apart so they could be solved instead of just discussed.

Let's say you have to make a high-resolution model before you can get anywhere. That's true in clinical practice, and I think it's true in public policy. Partly what we're doing when we're educating people— if we're doing it right— is saying, "Hey, you know, you've got a map of the world, but it's not very detailed." When you really look at it, well, you know, here's the complexity, and that's what we're actually contending with. People don't like that because, well, it's complex, right? You have the simple solution at hand to begin with. But the problem is it isn't the right tool for the job. You got to make it high resolution. Now, it takes a lot of work.