ELEGY: We interrupt our discussion of Them...

WEDNESDAY, JULY 31, 2024

...to present this discussion of Us: How did it happen that Sandra Smith did such a ridiculous thing?

It isn't that she wouldn't call the Democratic Party by its actual name when speaking in her own voice. That long-standing prohibition is pathetic and childish enough.

Mugged by a simple twist of fate, Smith took the game one step further. She refused to say "Democratic Party" even when pretending to read a written statement by a major political figure!

Even then she refused to say its name! At some point, an anthropological question arises:

How did she ever get this way? What explains such childish (yet widespread) behavior?

We'll return to that question tomorrow. This question involves a discussion of Them. For today, we'll compose a discussion of Us.

With that as our goal, we direct you to a new post by Kevin Drum. The post concerns a recent tweet by  Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the progressive world's major academics.

Professor Crenshaw's post is related to the recent (horrific) shooting death of Sonya Massey. For reasons we'll try to explain below, the post in question says this:

CRENSHAW (7/30/24): Black women make up less than 10% of the population, yet when it comes to killings by police, we make up a 3rd of them, with the majority unarmed. And that’s exactly what happened with Sonya Massey. 

Say what? Everybody makes mistakes, but this one approaches (colloquial) insanity. Here's the bulk of Kevin's post, headline included:

In the past three years, one unarmed Black woman has been killed by police

[...]

It's Kimberlé Crenshaw, a longtime law professor at UCLA and Columbia who's influential and extremely well known as a pioneer of intersectionality.

And yet she wrote a post that isn't within light years of being right. She must know that by now, but she hasn't deleted the post or corrected it. According to the Washington Post's database, here are police killings over the past decade:

[Graphic]

Black women make up 0.85% of all police killings since 2015. Not one-third. Here's the armed/unarmed breakdown (not counting six undetermined cases):

[Graphic]

Sonya Massey is the only unarmed Black woman killed by police in the past three years. Overall, unarmed Black women made up about 11% of the total among Black women, not a majority. Not even close.

Kevin closes by saying this: "Kimberlé Crenshaw is way too famous and influential...to post recklessly incorrect stuff like this. Where does it come from?"

We'll answer that question below. First, we'll offer one (minor) word of caution about the statistics from the Washington Post's Fatal Force database, which Kevin uses as his source.

The Fatal Force site received a lot of attention after it appeared in 2015 / 2016. It was part of the progressive world's reaction to several high-profile shooting deaths, especially that of Michael Brown in August 2014.

In 2016, the Post was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the work of this site. But interest in this topic has waned, and so apparently have the resources the Post devotes to the site.

As we've noted in the past, the site has become much less user-friendly—and much less informative—in the past few years. Its format is harder to use than it once was, and it now includes a lot of incidents for which it hasn't identified the race of the victims.

At present, the site headlines this fact: 

"The Post has tracked 9,929 fatal police shootings since 2015." 

That's a lot of people! That said, the site now lists the race of 12 percent of those people as "unknown" (1,149 people). Fairly clearly, the Post has devoted less effort to compiling such information over the past several years.

We offer that as a possible warning about the perfect accuracy of data drawn from this site. When Kevin says that Sonya Massey is the only unarmed Black woman killed by police in the past three years, we can't say we're entirely sure that this claim is accurate (though it certainly could be).

That said, Kevin's basic point is groaningly accurate. The professor's post is over the border and into the realm that could be described as (colloquially) insane. 

That said, our major thought leaders in Blue America have behaved in such ways quite routinely. For a similar example, consider Karen Attiah's recent column for that self-same Washington Post.

Karen Attiah is a good, decent person. Her column appeared this Monday—and as with Crenshaw's post, it was directly connected to the shooting death of Sonya Massey.

Full disclosure! Attiah's column is nowhere near as divorced from basic statistical reality as is Professor Crenshaw's post. The column appears on the Post's web site beneath this dual headline:

The senseless police killing of Sonya Massey is a call to action
Harris should lead on the intolerable pattern of Black women being fatally shot by police.

In our view, Attiah includes some horrifically il-advised campaign advice for Candidate Kamala Harris. That's a matter of judgment, of course—but we were struck by this part of her column, and by what we saw when we followed the link she provided:

ATTIAH (7/29/24): Though Massey posed no apparent threat (a breakfast bar separated the kitchen from the family room where Grayson leveled his weapon), the deputy then shot the unarmed mother in the face. Seconds later, according to the video, Grayson refused to call for medical aid.

There is something particularly odious about the mixture of murder and the mundane. Black women are killed in their homes by police officers while doing the most banal of domestic activities. Massey, dressed in a robe and pajamas, was shot while taking a pot off the stove. Atatiana Jefferson was killed in Fort Worth in 2019 while playing video games with her nephew. In 2020, Breonna Taylor was killed by Louisville officers executing a no-knock warrant. She had been asleep next to her boyfriend.

A study published by The Post in 2020 found that nearly 250 women had been killed by police in the United States since 2015—89 of them in their home or the home of someone they knew.

[...]

The harsh reality is that police brutality and racism against Black women never take holidays.

Nothing in those statistical claims can be said to be false. Also, it's certainly true that the fatal shooting of Sonya Massey, fully captured on videotape, takes us well past anything a person would expect a sensible police officer to do.

Still and all, we were struck by Attiah's statistics. She writes that, as of 2020, "nearly 250 women had been killed by police in the United States since 2015," and that 89 of those women had been killed "in their home or the home of someone they knew."

We start with this obvious note: Attiah is suddenly talking about all women when she offers those statistics—not about black women. 

We'll also note this obvious fact:

Whatever their race or gender may be, people can be endangering the life of a police officer even when they're in their own home, and even if they're in the home of someone they know.

In that sense, we're already dealing with a possible dollop of misdirection. But how about that pair of numbers—250 and 89? Within the context of American carnage, just exactly how large are those numbers?

How large are those numbers? When we clicked Attiah's link to that study from 2020, this is what we found:

Nearly 250 women have been fatally shot by police since 2015

[...]

Since The Washington Post began tracking fatal shootings by police in 2015, officers have fatally shot 247 women out of the more than 5,600 people killed overall. 

[...]

Of the 247 women fatally shot, 48 were Black and seven of those were unarmed.

At least 89 of the women were at their homes or residences where they sometimes stayed. And 12 of those women killed at home were shot by officers who were there to conduct a search or make an arrest.

Since 2015, Black women have accounted for less than 1 percent of the overall fatal shootings in cases where race was known. But within this small subset, Black women, who are 13 percent of the female population, account for 20 percent of the women shot and killed and 28 percent of the unarmed deaths.

According to the 2020 report, more than 5,600 people had been shot and killed by police since the Fatal Force site got its start. Of that number, 247 were women and 48 were black women.

According to the report in question, only seven of those black women had been unarmed. Presumably, that's (at least) seven shooting victims too many, bit it's hard to know how data like those are being cited as the backstop to the column Attiah composed.

Karen Attiah's a good, decent person. Presumably, so is the editor who waved her column into print.

The world is full of good, decent people! Professor Crenshaw's a good, decent person, but she authored a post which is crazily inaccurate—and, as Kevin noted, she didn't seem to be rushing to correct it or take it down.

Within our violence-saturated society, a lot of people get shot and killed by police officers. Many of them were presenting direct danger to police officers or to someone else.

Some others, like Massey, were not.

Attah's column seemed to suggest that black women somehow get singled out for such treatment. Do other types of unarmed people get shot and killed in their homes?

Attiah didn't ask. One day later, Professor Crenshaw's post took us into the land of the (colloquially) insane.

Over here in Blue America, our thought leaders have been doing such things a fair amount of the time—and over there in Red America, they frequently notice such things. That helps explain why we've sometimes told you that, as matters currently stand, it's almost impossible for people on the Fox News Channel to be totally wrong.

(In fairness, they frequently try.)

Kevin wanted to know where (colloquially) crazy posts come from. Anthropologically speaking, we have your answer right here:

They come from our wiring as humans. As human beings, we're people people, and this is the way we tend to react to matters of high emotion.

With respect to endlessly tragic matters of "race," we'll close by noting this:

Long ago but not far away, our benighted ancestors brought forth upon this continent a culture in which the concept of "race" would play a central and brutal role. 

Also this, as can be seen all over the world:

Once a disordered culture has been put into place, it's very, very, very hard to undo what has been done.

This brings us back to Sandra Smith. In fairness, her recent conduct seems mundane when compared to the professor's post.

That said, what she did was very strange—and it's part of a defiantly childish political culture. Who in the world is Sandra Smith?

Tomorrow, we'll let the analysts ask.

Tomorrow: Why in the world would Sandra Smith refuse to read that text?