36 minute read
Survival of the Bigots: The evolution of anti-black rhetoric and its use in conservative media
By Mark Weiss
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“How in the hell the parents gon' bury their own kids / Not the other way around? /
Reminds me of Emmett Till / Let's remind 'em why Kap kneels” - Nas[ 1 ]
1 Nas. Cops Shot the Kid (Feat. Kanye West). Song. Vol. NASIR. Jackson Hole, Wyoming: Mass Appeal, Def Jam, 2018.
1. Introduction Kathy Miller, then candidate Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign chair for Mahoning county, Ohio, remarked in a taped interview with The Guardian that, prior to Barack Obama’s presidency, there was “no racism.”[ 2 ] After downplaying segregation by claiming she “never saw that as anything,” Miller continued:
I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected. We never had problems like this…Now, with the people with the guns, and shooting up neighborhoods, and not being responsible citizens, that’s a big change, and I think that’s the philosophy that Obama has perpetuated on America [sic].”[ 3 ]
Miller’s comments are not just incorrect. They rely on a series of subtly-communicated messages – also known as dog whistles – which appeal to widely-believed, negative stereotypes about the black community. She claims that African-Americans are violent criminals wielding “guns” and “shooting up neighborhoods,” that they are lazy people, not “responsible citizens.” These ideas about African-Americans have existed for centuries, regardless of how subtly they are presented. Nevertheless, those who speak in dog whistles are often reticent to admit it. Claims that some phrases are subtly racist are invariably met with highbrowed skepticism and defensiveness from the ones who use them. Tucker Carlson, a Fox News host whose anti-immigration rhetoric has earned him praise from white supremacists like Richard Spencer and David Duke, shrugged at those accusing him of implicit prejudice, claiming “I don’t ever speak in dog whistles.”[ 4 , 5 ] One lesser-known blogger argued in 2016 that such terms are meaningless since “the narrative has gone so far that it’s become detached from any meaningful referent.”[ 6 ] And others, taking a softer stance, contend that dog whistles are entirely harmless and not racist at all. Unfortunately for Mr. Carlson and his allies, their arguments are vulnerable to facts. Several consultants for the Nixon and Reagan campaigns have documented in writing their intent to court racist white voters with subtle anti-black rhetoric. As Lee Atwater once said,
“You start out in 1954 by saying, “N***er, n***er, n***er.” By 1968 you can’t say “n***er - that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites… ‘We want to cut this’ is…a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘N***er, n***er.’”[ 7 ]
The evident intentionality of dog whistles helps explain why, after hundreds of years, racists employ the same basic tropes when arguing against racial progress. In the following pages, I will demonstrate that anti-black arguments have changed little over time. While their advocates present the claims in more sophisticated, less explicit ways, the underlying assumptions about African-Americans on which the arguments hinge remain the same. At their core, racist arguments presume the inhumanity and genetic inferiority of African-Americans, and many of their proponents co-opt faulty statistics to prove these assumptions true. I will also show through two case studies how coverage of black killings, particularly in conservative media, relies on these tropes. The strategy Fox News used to downplay the racial component of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner killings is virtually indistinguishable from that of the Mississippian press after Emmett Till’s lynching. Both instances feature an intentional effort to pettifog the details of the murders by impugning those who highlight the issue of race, portraying the killers in a positive light, and blaming the victims (however innocent they were).
2 Lewis, Paul, and Tom Silverstone. “Ohio Trump Campaign Chair Kathy Miller Says There Was ‘no Racism’ before Obama.” The Guardian, September 22, 2016, sec. US news. 3 Lewis and Silverstone. 4 Maza, Carlos. “Why White Supremacists Love Tucker Carlson.” Vox, July 21, 2017. 5 Hains, Tim. “Politicon: FNC’s Tucker Carlson Debates The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur.” RealClearPolitics, October 22, 2018. 6 Alexander, Scott. “Against Dog Whistle-Ism.” Slate Star Codex, June 17, 2016. 7 Perlstein, Rick. “Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy,” November 13, 2012.
2. The Origins of Anti-Black Ideas Anti-black ideas have existed for centuries. As early as 1576, French Philosopher Jean Bodin theorized that “intimate relations between the man and beasts…gave birth to monsters in Africa.”[ 8 ] Bodin was not the first (nor would he be the last) to theorize that African-Americans, by virtue of looking different from whites, were intrinsically inferior beings. This trope – which I will call “the argument from inhumanity” – spread throughout Europe over the course of the next several hundred years, making its way to what would eventually become the United States of America. The idea that there is a natural hierarchy which separates the races is arguably the root of all modern racist thought. [ 9 ] And although it has evolved over time to take different forms, its advocates can adapt the argument from inhumanity to fit their particular area of expertise. Scientists, for example, have distorted their fields of study to demonstrate the existence of a racial hierarchy. Statisticians, practitioners of a budding field of study, misused their craft to paint a myopic picture of society in which African-Americans are ignorant criminals, on average. Other anti-black ideas – that blacks are hypersexual beings who relentlessly pursue white women, that they are less capable of intellectual achievement than whites – all stem naturally from the original assumption that they are not human. The negative attributes whites assigned to blacks, then, were not only logically connected, but in their view made rational sense. The arguments employed by white supremacists remained largely unchanged from the era of Colonial America through the Civil War. White supremacists were intent on maintaining the allegedly natural divisions be
tween man and “beast,” and used these basic points to do so until the advent of Emancipation and the 13th Amendment.[ 10 ] As the national mood began to shift and the federal government considered recognizing the humanity of black people, there emerged a need for white supremacists to invent more clever ways to mask their bigotry. They turned to the two most convincing tools they could find: science and statistics. They began by first trying to show that, although human, African-Americans are inherently less intelligent than are whites. A slight variation on the original claim of inhumanity, I call this “the argument from genetics.” It states that there are disparities in the mental capacity of whites and blacks, and that environmental and socioeconomic factors are irrelevant in attempting to explain them. In addition to being less intelligent than whites, according to the argument, African-Americans are lazy by nature and have a higher proclivity to engage in violent behavior— particularly, rape and murder. The argument from genetics dates to a time before abolition. Among the first to promote this view was Samuel George Morton, a scientist most remembered for his large collection of human skulls. In his 1839 book Crania Americana, he analyzes the size and shapes of skulls of various races and concludes without evidence that the differences he observes are indicative of varying levels of cognitive ability. Nowhere does Morton explain how skull shape is connected to intelligence, nor does he offer a rationale behind his selection criteria. Rather, he presumes at the outset that intelligence and skull shape are related, and then fabricates evidence to support that assumption. He begins his work by describing the alleged characteristics of African-Americans, who he claims are inherently “joyous, flexible, and indolent” and that “the many nations which compose this race present a singular diversity of intellectual character, of which the far extreme is the lowest grade of humanity.”[ 11 ] He argues that African-Americans are intellectually lesser than whites, the people “distinguished for the facility with which [the race] attains the highest intellectual endowments.”[ 12 ] Morton was not the only scientist of his day to dabble in phrenology. Indeed, the post-Civil War debate about the place of freed blacks in society presented pseudointellectuals with the perfect opportunity to make a renewed case for white supremacy. Building on the work of Morton, Hinton Rowan Helper’s The Negroes in Negroland uses comparative anatomy to demonstrate the innateness of “the crime-stained blackness of the negro.” He states very plainly that African Americans “belong to a lower and inferior order of being” than other races. He then asks the reader:
How can the negro be a fit person to occupy, in any capacity, our houses or our hotels, our theatres or our vehicles, or any other place or places of uncommon comfort and convenience, which owe their creation, their proper uses, and
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8 de Miramon, Charles. “Noble Dogs, Noble Blood: The Invention of the Concept of Race in the Late Middle Ages,” in The Origins of Racism in the West, edited by Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin H. Isaac, and Joseph Zeigler. (Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 2009). pp. 200-203. 9 Kendi, Imbram X. Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York, NY United States: Bold Type Books, 2016. 10 Kendi. 11 Morton, Samuel George. Crania Americana; or, a Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America: An Essay on the Varieties of the Human Species. Philadelphia: J. Dobson Chestnut Street, 1839. 12 Morton, p. 5.
their perpetuity, to the whites alone, places and environments about which the negro…has always been absolutely ignorant and indifferent?[ 13 ]
To white supremacists, though, biological evidence was a necessary but insufficient condition in establishing the inferiority of blacks. Others less adept in the natural sciences used statistics to corroborate the claims of the argument from genetics. In 1896, Frederick L. Hoffman published his infamous Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, a work he presents as “free from the taint of prejudice or sentimentality.”[ 14 ] He analyzes a plethora of statistics relating to various social phenomena: education, religion, and of course, crime, to show that African-Americans were indeed inferior to whites. On education, he notes that “the total amount expended on the education of the negro” was “a vast sum” since Emancipation, and that “it remains to be shown whether the educational process which the race has undergone…have materially raised the race from its low social and economic condition.”[ 15 ] More generally, the appeal of Hoffman’s book came from his pioneering use of social statistics to link blackness with criminality. Stating clearly the purpose of his book, he writes:
Crime, pauperism, and sexual immorality are without question the greatest hindrances to social and economic progress, and the tendencies of the colored person in respect to these phases of life will deserve a more careful investigation than has thus far He employs a rudimentary difference-in-differences estimator to conclude that there was no significant difference in criminality among the African-Americans in liberal, northern cities and conservative, southern ones. Therefore, he felt comfortable in his conclusion that “blacks’ social and economic conditions, still largely attributed to white control, had absolutely nothing to do with black criminality.”[ 17 ] Of course, statistics at the time lacked “complete counts of population,” leading prospective statisticians no choice but to “rely largely on conjectures and calculations” rather than facts.[ 18 ] But Hoffman nonetheless felt his conclusions sufficiently robust to be used in crafting public policy. This two-pronged approach allowed white supremacists to justify their oppression of blacks under the rubric of scholarship. They used science and statistics to lend much-needed credibility to the preexisting arguments from inhumanity and genetics. Whatever form of argumentation was most accessible to white supremacists was the one they opted to affirm when rationalizing their views. And it was the establishment and maintenance of these racist tropes that facilitated Jim Crow, resistance to the civil rights movement, and the systemic inequality still present in the United States.
3. A Cultural Contagion Over time, though, the explicit nature of these arguments largely diminished. As the days of so-called “respectable racism” began to fade, white supremacists had to hide their beliefs through thinly-veiled, coded language.[ 19 ] During the Civil Rights Movement, white supremacists were able to be explicit about their disdain for blacks – they simply could not publicly state that African-Americans were inhuman as did their predecessors, for the United States’ political institutions had begun to recognize African-Americans’ humanity. In 1954, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that the previously-held doctrine of “separate but equal,” the vehicle for segregation, produced outcomes that were inherently unequal. Schools and other public facilities, therefore, had to accommodate people of all races. Unsurprisingly, desegregation was met with fierce opposition from white supremacists. Violence erupted in Southern schools which attempted to integrate. And although some African-Americans were able to attend formerly white schools, they were not treated like white students. Worse yet, as if opposition from private citizens was insufficient, the government partook as well. In 1956, 101 members of Congress signed The Southern Manifesto opposing the Court’s ruling, rebuking the “hatred and suspicion” it generated.[ 20 ] But not all forms of resistance consisted of proclamations from government officials. The most famous victim of reactionary white rage was undoubtedly Emmett Till, a fourteen year old boy who was kidnapped and lynched by two white men for allegedly wolf-whistling at a white woman. Till’s murderers “brutally beat him, shot him, weighted his body down with a 90-pound cotton gin tied around his neck with barbed wire,
13 Helper, Hinton Rowan. The Negroes In Negroland; The Negros in America; And Negroes Generally. Also, The Several Races of White Men, Considered As The Involuntary And Predestined Supplanters of the Black Races. New York: G. W. Carleton, 1868. 14 Hoffman, Frederick L., Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. New York: American Economics Association, 1896 15 Hoffman., pp. 217-234. 16 Hoffman 17 Hoffman, pp. 310-368. 18 Porter, Theodore M. “Probability and Statistics | History, Examples, & Facts.” In Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed December 14, 2019. https://www.britannica. com/science/probability. 19 Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. Bloomsbury USA, 2016, p.102 20 “National Affairs: The Southern Manifesto.” Time, March 26, 1956.
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and then threw his body into the Tallahatchie River.”[ 21 , 22 ] The attack, as is evident in photographs of Till’s body, left the boy’s face completely unrecognizable.[ 23 ] His body sustained damage so severe that his mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, felt compelled to hold an open-casket service in order to show the limitless cruelty of which segregationists were capable. “Let the people come to see what they did to my boy,” she said.[ 24 ] Till’s murder was sufficiently gruesome to force segregationists to contend with the harmful results of the system they had created, effectively putting them on the defensive. A child had done something completely excusable (or as we know now, had done nothing at all), and in retaliation, two white men killed him and brutally mutilated his body.[ 25 ] No longer could white supremacists excuse themselves with the argument from inhumanity – as previously mentioned, they had reluctantly conceded that black lives mattered as well. Therefore, to say that Till’s life was worthless would be morally objectionable. Worth less, though, they reasoned they could get away with. Not content to give up their way of life, white supremacistheir media apparatus condemned the events as trivial rather than the logical end of a culture which systematically oppressed African-Americans. Too horrific for the media to ignore, the Till case represented “the first time the daily – meaning white – media took an interest” in reporting atrocities against blacks.[ 26 ] But a newspaper does not have to draw attention to a story simply because they’re reporting it. Indeed, mainstream outlets minimized the seriousness of Till’s murder in order to avoid even a modicum of 21 “The Southern Manifesto.” 22 Oby, Michael Randolph. “Black Press Coverage of the Emmett Till Lynching as a Catalyst to the Civil Rights Movement,” 2007, p. 82. 23 Oby, 82. 24 “Killing of Boy in Mississippi Called ‘Atrocity.’” Jackson Daily News, September 2, 1955. 25 “Emmett Till Accuser Admits to Giving False Testimony at Murder Trial: Book,” Chicago Tribune. January 27, 2017. 26 Hampton, Henry, and Steve Fayer. Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s. 24th ed. New York, NY United States: Bantam Books, 1990, p. 7. 27 “Slain Youth’s Body Seen By Thousands,” The New York Times, September 4, 1955, sec. S-9. 28 “Negro, 14, Called Insulter, Is Pulled From River Dead,” The Atlanta Constitution, September 1, 1955. 29 Oby, p. 39. 30 Oby, p. 39. 31 Oby, p. 29. accountability. The New York Times did so by burying any mention of Till in the ninth section of their issue and by focusing not on the murder, but the funeral service: “The casket was opened to public view at the insistence of the boy’s mother, Mrs. Mamie Bradley…” write the authors, who continue to marvel at the “10,000 persons” who stood in line to view it. [ 27 ] Even in a sentence about Till’s body, the authors chose not to reference the boy, but instead, just his casket. Others reverted to framing motivated by the original argument from inhumanity, subtly declining to acknowledge Till’s personhood. On September 1st, 1955, The Atlanta Constitution published an article entitled “Negro, 14, Called Insulter, Is Pulled From River Dead.”[ 28 ] Such headlines, as historian Michael Oby has pointed out, “call more attention to Emmett Till as an ‘insulter’ before [pronouncing] his death...the fact that he is dead almost reads like an afterthought.”[ 29 ] The same Constitution article, which utilized dehumanizing language, contained factual inaccuracies as well. As if its authors could not be bothered to verify the information they reported, the article states that Till was buried in Mississippi while he was actually buried in Chicago, his body having been shipped home on the same train he had taken to Mississippi.[ 30 ] The media did not merely engage in linguistic tricks to downplay the severity of the Till lynching. Neither the Times nor the Constitution included a picture of Till’s body, a conscience-shocking image likely to elicit sympathy for the slain youth. Articles in black newspapers typically included a photograph, raising doubts as to whether these outlets omitted one by chance.[ 31 ] That the white media covered the Till lynching at all is noteworthy, but they did so with obvious disdain. MainWikimedia
stream outlets like those above were sympathetic enough to cover the boy’s murder, but did so in a manner which absolved themselves of any responsibility for creating an environment in which such things could happen. Some even went as far as to appeal to culturally-ingrained, anti-black tropes in order to do so. The local Mississippi press was no different. Initially, to their credit, coverage of the Till lynching was sympathetic. The Clarksdale Press Register, for example, published a shockingly humanizing account of Till, written by his then sixteen-year-old cousin Maurice Wright. The article, which stressed Till’s many disabilities and overall innocence, bore the blunt but accurate title “A Brutal Murder.”[ 32 ] Several local outlets, such as the Vicksburg Evening Post, featured images of Till’s desecrated body in order to highlight the cruelty of the attack.[ 33 ] And one issue of The Jackson Daily News ran their piece with an old photograph of Till and Mrs. Bradley at Christmastime, showing a young Emmett dressed in a white shirt and striped tie, and his mother with her arm proudly around him.[ 34 ] Positive framing notwithstanding, much like the national press, the local Mississippi newspapers refused to acknowledge that systematic oppression allowed for Till’s murder. They insisted that his death was an isolated incident – an “individual symptom” rather than a “cultural contagion,” as one newspaper put it.[ 35 ] But insofar as critics focused their attention on the individual murderers rather than the “cultural contagion” which permitted them, the press treated the late Emmett Till with the respect he deserved. However, once the narrative became an indictment of the entire state of Mississippi and the white supremacist culture it fostered, the press became defensive. Till’s mother, shortly after the death of her son, told reporters that “Someone is going to pay for this.”[ 36 ] The local Delta-Democrat Times, however, misquoted her, reporting instead that she had said “The State of Mississippi will have to pay for this.”[ 37 , 38 ] This seemingly small difference set the local press into a frenzy. Instead of merely attacking those who killed her son, Mamie Till was apparently condemning the culture which allowed them to feel justified in their wrongdoings. Almost immediately, several outlets denounced Mamie’s comments and attacked her personally. An issue of The Jackson State Times contained a particularly harsh editorial: “Mississippians are shocked at the abduction and brutal slaying of a Negro boy near Greenwood,” it reads.[ 39 ] Notice that, despite trying to appear sympathetic, the Times did not mention the name of that “Negro boy.” The article continues to decry the “unreasoning criticism” that Mamie leveled at the state of Mississippi, ensuring that justice could only be sought through “legal means.”[ 40 ] A jury, unsurprisingly, acquitted the two men in court, citing doubts “as to whether the body taken from the river had been Emmet’s [sic].”[ 41 ] The legal means, as if by design, failed. Smearing Mamie for statements she did not actually make was but one of many tactics the press used to avoid acknowledging systemic racism. Another was characterizing the murderers – Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam – as respectable, patriotic men. After their arrest, the Clarion-Ledger published two separate photographs of the men in military dress in place of their mugshots.[ 42 ] The West Point Daily Times Leader went further, lamenting the fact that the two were “being held without bail.”[ 43 ] The Leader further described the two not as the accused kidnapper-murderers that they were, but instead as an “ex-paratrooper” and an “Army lieutenant in World War II.”[ 44 ] Such positive framing serves only to predispose readers to sympathize with the killers. Perhaps worst of all, some newspapers blamed Emmett Till for whistling at a white woman. The New York Times reported that Emmett’s father Louis, while serving in World War II, “was hanged for the murder of one woman and the rape of two others.” One issue of Confidential Magazine advertised the news of Till’s father as alluring gossip: “Why the army hanged Emmett Till’s Dad!” it reads.[ 45 ] Many Southern papers used this information to imply that Emmett was, as a consequence of his genetics, predisposed to engage in behavior similar to his father.[ 46 , 47 ] None of the negative coverage of Till’s murder, which was designed to defend the white supremacist system of the day, explicitly used any of the original arguments established above. Nevertheless, each relied on culturally-ingrained beliefs which have their
32 “A Brutal Murder,” Clarksdale Press Register, September 1, 1955. 33 Houck, Davis W., and Matthew A. Grindy. Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2010, p. 20. 34 Houck and Grindy. 35 “Designed to Inflame,” Jackson Daily News, September 2, 1955. 36 Houck and Grindy, p. 24. 37 Houck and Grindy. 38 “‘A Den of Snakes’ Youth’s Mother Calls Mississippi,” The Delta Democrat Times, September 1, 1955. 39 Houck and Grindy, p. 24. 40 Houck and Grindy, p. 24. 41 “Grand Jury in Till Case Fails to Indict Two White Men Accused in Kidnapping,” The New York Times, November 10, 1955. 42 “Clergyman Speaks ‘Mind’ on NAACP,” Clarion-Ledger, September 3, 1955. 43 “White Says No Lynching,” West Point Daily Times Leader, September 2, 1955. 44 “White Says No Lynching.” 45 Confidential Magazine Cover March 1956. March 1956. Wikimedia Commons. 46 “Kidnapped Boy’s Body Found,” The New York Times, September 1, 1955. 47 Oby, p. 33.
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roots in faux science and statistics. Dehumanizing Till, smearing his mother, and sympathetically portraying the killers all reinforce the narrative that black lives are of less value than whites.’ And the implications by some newspapers that Till was more likely to commit crimes because of his father (and ostensibly his race) are clear examples of the argument from genetics. 4. The Rebirth of Scientific Racism As methodological and scientific tools evolved over time, so too did the means by which racists defended their positions. In 1996, over forty years after Till’s death, political scientist Charles Murray and psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein published The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. In this 900- page pseudo-tome, the two misuse advanced statistical methods in an attempt to demonstrate two claims: first, that there are differences in IQ among races, and second, that those differences are a consequence of genetic, rather than environmental, factors. There exists, the two argue, a substantial difference in the IQ levels of blacks and whites – a difference that cannot be attributed to socioeconomic or cultural differences alone. Having established that a “black/white gap” exists, Murray and Herrnstein spend the remainder of the chapter on race discussing the implications of blacks’ inferior “cognitive ability,” such as their underperforming in higher education. It is a futile effort, they argue, to try to educate those who lack the mental ability to benefit from it.[ 48 ] Even a student of basic undergraduate statistics could spot the flaws in The Bell Curve’s methodology. Most nota48 Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles A. Murray. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Free Press, 1994. 49 Lemann, Nicholas. “The Bell Curve Flattened.” Slate Magazine, January 18, 1997. 50 Gould, Stephen Jay. 2014. “Critique of The Bell Curve.” In Just Methods: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Reader, edited by Alison M. Jaggar, 118-129. New York, New York, USA: Taylor & Francis. 51 Goodnow, Natalie. “‘The Bell Curve’ 20 Years Later: A Q&A with Charles Murray.” AEI, October 16, 2014. 52 Murray, Charles A., “The Bell Curve Explained,” AEI, May 18, 2017. 53 Hernstein and Murray. 54 Klein, Ezra, and Sam Harris. “The Sam Harris-Ezra Klein Debate.” Vox, April 9, 2018. 55 Belluz, Julia. “DNA Scientist James Watson Has a Remarkably Long History of Sexist, Racist Public Comments,” Vox, January 15, 2019. 56 Sam Harris. “Ezra Klein: Editor-at-Large,” March 27, 2018. 57 Klein and Harris. bly, the mechanism at the heart of the book – multiple regression analysis – attempts to demonstrate the influence of several “predictor”(independent) variables on a particular “response” (dependent) variable by calculating the relative, weighted impact of the former on the latter. But Murray and Herrnstein use this type of model to assert causation, a great leap that the evidence from their analysis does not support. Second, and perhaps even worse, the data they use for measuring IQ alone come from a longitudinal study of students who took the Armed Forces Qualifying Test. As many critics have pointed out, that exam contains questions about academic subjects like trigonometry. Consequently, scholars “have objected to its use as a measure of only IQ and not at all of academic achievement.”[ 49 ] The basis of their work is fundamentally flawed. While Murray and Herrnstein present their claims as novel, some critics were not fooled by the new makeup smeared on this ugly pig. Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould offered sharp criticisms of the authors’ methods and motivations, stating in a review that their book, “contains no new arguments and presents no compelling data to support its anachronistic social Darwinism.”[ 50 ] In light of massive criticism from credible scientists, Murray, the only surviving author, has resorted to using an array of dishonest tactics in an attempt to maintain what credibility (if any) he has left. Twenty years after the publication of The Bell Curve, Murray asserted without evidence that his opponent’s position—that African Americans are not genetically inferior—would be untenable in “about another 20 years…but probably less than a decade.”[ 51 ] Much like the racial arsonists who preceded him, Murray insists that his opponents are fueled not by a search for truth but by a fear that “ethnic and race differences have any genetic component at all.”[ 52 ] His work, by contrast, is strictly “scholarly,” as he notes in the early pages of The Bell Curve.[ 53 ] While it may be tempting to dismiss Murray as merely naïve, his ultimate goal is the same as that of the press following Emmett Till’s murder: to maintain a systematically oppressive system, justifying it through so-called “forbidden knowledge” of racial disparities.[ 54 ] Despite the book’s largely negative reception, Murray now finds himself with an array of allies who defend him and his work under the rubric of protecting free speech. These are not just a collection of unorganized fanatics but rather public intellectuals with considerable political and social influence. Biologist James Watson echoed Murray’s central argument in a remark he made during a documentary appearance: “There’s a difference on the average between blacks and whites on IQ tests…I would say the difference is genetic.”[ 55 ] In 2018, neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris invited Murray onto his podcast, Waking Up, which boasts one million downloads per episode, to discuss The Bell Curve. Harris wrote later that he did so because he “felt a moral imperative to provide [Murray] some cover” out of love for free speech.[ 56 ] This controversial move prompted a highly-publicized debate with Vox editor-at-large Ezra Klein. Several weeks of email chains and passive-aggressive op-eds culminated in Klein inviting Harris to appear on The Ezra Klein Show to further debate the issue. [ 57 ] An obvious
yet overlooked externality of Klein’s decision was to broaden the reach of Murray’s unscientific arguments. 58
5. Shades of Mississippi Murray’s attempt to legitimize racism through statistics only emboldened those determined to uphold the racial caste system of the modern era. And conservative media outlets, much like those in the 1950s, shamelessly play on these renewed but tired arguments in their coverage of atrocities against African Americans today. In fact, some media coverage from the past decade is almost indistinguishable from the coverage of the Till murder, which occurred more than a decade before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In July of 2014, police killed Eric Garner by putting him in a chokehold while placing him under arrest. Garner had done nothing more than attempt to sell cigarettes without government permission. The office of the medical examiner, after the slaying, concluded that Garner died from, “compression of neck (choke hold), compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by
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police.”[ 59 ] Roughly one month later, police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black man accused of robbing a convenience store. Civil rights advocates argued that both Garner and Brown would not have been killed were they not people of color. Conservative media, though, categorically deny the existence of systemic racism. Any evidence of that which suggests its influence, then, must be discredited. And that is just what Fox News did in their coverage of both of these killings—and they did so using the exact same strategies as the Mississippi press. First, they impugned those who tried to highlight the importance of race in these killings. For example, Laura Ingraham chastised President Obama for “stok[ing] racial discord in America” and facilitating “distrust between minorities and some law enforcement.”[ 60 ] On Fox and Friends, Peter Johnson Jr. claimed that civil rights groups were “reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan” in their efforts to generate national conversations about race.[ 61 ] One member of the House, while appearing on Fox, claimed that race was not a factor in the killing of Eric Garner since the police did not say the n-word while placing him in the chokehold which ultimately killed him.[ 62 ] And Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky placed the blame not on the police but on the “high cigarette tax” in New York which allegedly drove the market for cigarettes underground.[ 63 ]
Fox News also went to great lengths to paint the police in both cases as patriotic, sympathetic figures undeserving of punishment. Linda Chavez, appearing on Fox and Friends after the Brown killing, said the following: “this mantra of the unarmed black teenager shot by a white cop. You know, that description in and of itself actually colors the way in which we look at this story.” As she continued to describe Brown’s physical stature, the network showed, “footage of Brown…pushing the store clerk, alongside a picture of Officer Darren Wilson, smiling in uniform.”[ 64 ] This is a stark and intentional contrast meant to elicit sympathy for Wilson. During an appearance on a later daytime program, Fox and Friends co-host Andrea Tantaros reveled in the lack of charges brought against Wilson, gleeful that “the physical evidence and Darren Wilson’s testimony corroborated and matched up.”[ 65 ] Some attempts at positively portraying the police were, admittedly, more credible than others. Sean Hannity desperately appealed to his expertise as a “martial artist student” to demonstrate that Eric Garner was not placed in a chokehold, an assertion which directly clashes with the report of the medical examiner’s office. [ 66 ] When all else failed, Fox followed in the footsteps of their earlier, Mississippian counterparts and blamed the victims. Former New York City Mayor and central figure in the Trump ad
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58 Murray declined my request for an interview regarding his work. 59 Goldstein, Joseph, and Marc Santora. “Staten Island Man Died From Chokehold During Arrest, Autopsy Finds - The New York Times.” The New York Times, August 1, 2014. 60 Mills, Colleen E. “Framing Ferguson: Fox News and the Construction of US Racism.” Race & Class no. 4 (April 2017), pp. 39–56. 61 Henderson, Nia-Malika. “Peter King Blames Asthma and Obesity for Eric Garner’s Death. That’s a Problem for the GOP.” Washington Post, December 4, 2014. 62 Levine, Sam. “Peter King Says Eric Garner Would Not Have Died From Chokehold Were He Not Obese,” Huffington Post, December 3, 2014. 63 Levine. 64 “Fox and Friends,” Fox and Friends. Fox News Channel, August 25, 2014. 65 “Outnumbered” Fox and Friends. Fox News Channel, March 12, 2015. 66 Scarry, Eddie. “Sean Hannity Veers Opposite of Fox News Colleagues on Eric Garner.” Washington Examiner, December 4, 2014.
ministration’s Ukraine Scandal, Rudy Giuliani, argued in an interview with Megyn Kelly that the case of Michael Brown should be viewed as an issue of a police officer who “shot a man who had just committed a robbery.”[ 67 , 68 ] This is an explicit call to frame the killing in a way that blames Brown for his death – a veritable ‘if he had not robbed the store, he would not have been shot.’ Others were more direct in their indictment of Brown. Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson tossed away the proverbial veil of ignorance a la John Rawls, stating in a chilling rant:
Michael Brown is dead because of Michael Brown. Michael Brown is dead because he had failing parents, who were not together, and raised him in the right way. When he decided that he was gonna rob a convenience store, attack the clerk, go out into the street, and attack a police officer, Michael Brown decided that day that he was ready to die.[ 69 ]
Perhaps the most gut-wrenching detail to emerge in the Michael Brown case was not the vitriolic rhetoric used to defend his killer, but the lack of due process granted to Mr. Brown, something to which he was Constitutionally entitled. Ta-Nihisi Coates, writing for The Atlantic, said the following in 2015 following the Department of Justice’s investigation into Wilson: “Darren Wilson is not the first gang member to be publicly accused of a crime he did not commit. But Darren Wilson was given the kind of due process that those of us who are often presumed to be gang members rarely enjoy.”[ 70 ] Imagine his shock when, two years later, the public learned that (much like Emmett Till) Brown was innocent of the initial crime of which he was accused.[ 71 ] What about Mr. Garner? Video evidence showed, in a rare instance of clarity, that Garner was indeed placed in a chokehold while under arrest. And further, he tried to communicate to the police that “I can’t breathe.”[ 72 ] But even this obvious abuse by Daniel Pantaleo, the officer whose chokehold killed Mr. Garner, elicited sympathy from conservative media. Bob McManus, a conservative blogger, famously proclaimed that Eric Garner would not have died from the chokehold had he not “tragically decided to resist.”[ 73 ] And Fox News hosts echoed this sentiment ad nauseum, repeating time and time again that Garner was overweight, at risk for cardiac arrest and, ostensibly, ready to die at any moment. Representative Peter King, in the same CNN interview in which he praised Pantaleo for refraining from using “epithets,” flatly rejected the evidence from the medical examiners, claiming:
You had a 350-pound person who was resisting arrest. The police were trying to bring him down as quickly as possible. If he had not had asthma and a heart condition and was so obese, almost definitely he would not have died.[ 74 ]
Just as Emmett Till ‘decided to die’ when he (didn’t) whistle at a white woman, Michael Brown and Eric Garner ‘decided to die’ when they existed in the world as black men. Guilty as either may have been (although exculpatory evidence has shown they were not), there are “legal means” of sorting such matters out, to borrow the phrase employed by the Mississippi press after Till’s death. But once one accepts that black lives are worth less than whites’, it becomes exponentially easier to justify the unjustifiable.
6. Conclusion: Beyond Media It is not debatable the media have contributed significantly to the perpetuation of racist arguments. But unfortunately, there are other culprits who bear substantial blame. President Donald J. Trump has made race one of the central issues of his presidency, moving past the dog whistling of his predecessors into full blown screeches as a means of courting far-right extremists and earning their votes. His political rise began in 2011 when he led the “birtherism” movement, which was comprised of a gang of unapologetically racist thugs who maintained that President Obama was born in Kenya and not the United States – a charge his aides later admitted was completely fabricated.[ 75 ] Since becoming President, Trump has labeled predominately African American cities “infest
67 Cheney, Kyle. “The Mystery of Rudy Giuliani and the Stalled Ukraine Aid.” POLITICO, November 19, 2019. 68 Mills. 69 Mills. 70 Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Residents of Ferguson Do Not Have a Police Problem. They Have a Gang Problem.” The Atlantic, March 5, 2015. 71 Smith, Mitch. “New Ferguson Video Adds Wrinkle to Michael Brown Case.” The New York Times, March 11, 2017, sec. U.S. 72 Gross, Terry, “‘I Can’t Breathe’ Examines Modern Policing And The Life And Death Of Eric Garner,” NPR, October 23, 2018. 73 McManus, Bob. “Blame Only the Man Who Tragically Decided to Resist.” New York Post (blog), December 4, 2014. 74 Henderson. 75 Richardson, Davis. “Former Trump Advisor Admits to ‘Peddling Birtherism’ About Obama.” Observer (blog), August 3, 2018.
ed”[ 76 ] and countries as “shithole[s].”[ 77 ] He refused to denounce the neo-Nazis who killed an antiracist protestor in Charlottesville, arguing that there were “very fine people” on both sides.[ 78 ] And when the House of Representatives announced that, under the umbrella of an impeachment inquiry, they would be investigating Trump’s conduct with regard to The Ukraine, he accused the Democrats of carrying out a “lynching” against him.[ 79 , 80 ] Trump’s reprehensible comments very obviously play to the same stereotypes described above. A black president is, to Trump, an absurdity, and therefore Obama must have been illegitimate. Blacks are not human, he argues, so naturally countries governed by them must be “shitholes.” And when the other branches of government carry out their Constitutionally-mandated duty to check his power as the executive, that is no different to him than brutally killing an innocent black person. The President has decried the lack of due process afforded to him on matters of impeachment but has never, as some have pointed out, lamented the unfair process afforded to African American victims of white brutality. Anti-black rhetoric, particularly the way it is parroted by white supremacists in the media, has changed little over time. Hoffman is to Murray what the Mississippian press is to Fox News,
and all four interact in ways that reinforce the idea that African Americans are inferior to whites. It is this culturally-ingrained view of white superiority which allows the President of the United States to liken impeachment proceedings to the senseless killing of innocent blacks. Alarming as this may be, those who hope to overcome the ever-present racism in the United States must recognize and call attention to the repetition of thoroughly debunked and bigoted ideas. And that starts with confronting the uncomfortable truth that socially conservative extremists borrow arguments from people who did not yet know that the Earth is not flat.
76 Rentz, Catherine. “Trump Called Baltimore ‘Rat and Rodent Infested’ 4 Months after He Tried Ending the Funding for Its Rodent Control.” Baltimore Sun, August 26, 2019. 77 Dawsey, Josh. “Trump Derides Protections for Immigrants from ‘Shithole’ Countries.” Washington Post, January 12, 2018. 78 Phelps, Jordyn. “Trump Defends 2017 ‘very Fine People’ Comments, Calls Robert E. Lee ‘a Great General.’” ABC News, April 26, 2019. 79 Fandos, Nicholas. “Nancy Pelosi Announces Formal Impeachment Inquiry of Trump.” The New York Times, September 24, 2019, sec. U.S. 80 Itkowitz, Colby, and Toluse Olorunnipa. “Trump Compares Impeachment Probe to ‘Lynching,’ Again Prompting Political Firestorm around Race.” Washington Post, October 22, 2019.
Mark Weiss is a third-year student studying political science and mathematics. Currently, he is researching the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, constructing a mathematical model to predict the spread of the policy among the US states. He is an intern at the Georgia Health Policy Center and a monthly contributor at the Carter Center's website US-China Perception Monitor. After graduating from Emory, he plans to pursue a Ph.D. in political science.
