revel wrote:What makes his statement worse is the fact that it assumes blacks are causing the most crime rate and if they only aborted their babies crime would go down. Even if he really did not in truth mean blacks should really abort their babies the fact that he believes most crime is inherently caused by blacks is a racist point of view.
Not necessarily. One can point to any number of statistics that indicate that, on a per capita basis in the US, blacks commit more crimes than whites without thereby being a racist or indulging in a racist point of view. The statistics are what they are, and no amount of politically correct whitewashing (or blackwashing) can change them.
The backlash against Bennett is, I think, misguided. Everyone who says that his statement was morally reprehensible missed (or intentionally ignored) Bennett's caveat that aborting all black babies to prevent crime would itself be reprehensible. Bennett proposed a hypothetical, but it was quite clear that it was a hypothetical that he himself did not endorse. From the standpoint of morality, then, his statement was innocuous, and those who express moral outrage at his statement must find some reason for that outrage apart from Bennett's mere utterance of that hypothetical.
Rather than expressing their outrage at Bennett's purported immorality, people should be expressing their disagreement with Bennett's logic, which is completely faulty. Bennett, it would appear, argues thusly: blacks cause lots of crime, therefore fewer blacks would mean less crime. Among the problems with this argument are the following:
(1) This is, in its essentials, based on a
cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. "Crime and blacks go together," the argument runs, "therefore blacks cause crime." Although statistics may point in this direction, those statistics measure for only one variable: race. It may be true, then, that there is a correlation between race and crime, but correlation is not the same thing as causation. It may be that another variable (e.g. income or education) has a higher correlation with crime, in which case aborting black babies would do little to reduce the crime rate.
(2) As mentioned above, statistics indicate that blacks have higher
per capita rates for crimes. Since blacks only compose about 12 percent of the US population, however, it is necessary to determine the
absolute number of crimes they commit in order to determine if a policy of universal abortion would lower the overall crime rate by any significant degree. After all, if most crimes are committed by non-blacks (albeit at lower
rates than blacks), then a policy of universal abortion would do little good.
(3) Crime, in many respects, is like an ecological niche. If a city killed all of its pigeons, that would probably result in an increase in the rat population, because both occupy the same general niche. The same with criminals. When the feds cracked down on the Italian mafia, it just made more room for Hispanic, Chinese, and other ethnic gangs. Likewise, if a future black criminal is aborted, there's a good chance that his place will simply be taken by a non-black criminal. A policy of universal abortion for black babies, then, would merely open up opportunities for non-black criminals.
In sum, Bennett's statement wasn't immoral or even racist, it was just stupid. And for someone who was the secretary of education, that's just sad.
