Jeff Jacoby’s latest column, published at the right wing website Townhall as well as in the Boston Globe, is a bitter conservative twofer. In a column about the widely reported incident at Smith College wherein a student of color was mistaken for a suspicious and/or unauthorized visitor and subjected to police questioning, Jacoby managed to get in both victim shaming and the minimization of racism. In a nutshell, Jacoby tells his readers that this was not a racist incident and the reaction of the victim and the college were unreasonable and politically motivated.
The best response to Jacoby would be to calmly explain how his argument both misses the mark and constitutes an irresponsible use of his public podium. Sadly, he has rarely taken serious criticism seriously, and most of his readers will not be exposed to careful deconstruction of his shoddy work.
Nonetheless, here it is.
In his interpretation of the incident at Smith, Jacoby’s utilizes a very popular conservative approach to minimizing racism. He isolates selective facts from the incident in order to suggest that it is an example of a benign misunderstanding that is being cynically exploited by liberal partisans and activists to exaggerate the pervasiveness of racism in America today. By presenting decontextualized facts, Jacoby is suggesting that we shouldn’t allow the larger social contexts to impact our assessment of cases like this one, especially when trying to understand the perceptions and behavior of the people involved at the time. While this approach has merit in a court of law, it can be (and is here) quite insidious and irresponsible when employed dishonestly by someone in a position to impact public opinion about a complex social interaction with huge ramifications for society.
Here is how Jacoby described the scene at Smith to his readers: “A college employee saw her “laying on the couch” alone, mistook her for an unfamiliar male who “seem[ed] to be out of place,” and phoned the campus police. An unarmed officer was sent to check things out. He spoke politely to Kanoute, saw nothing was amiss, and left her in peace.” For Jacoby there is no hint of racial profiling or racism of any kind here. He called this incident “[a] minor misunderstanding by a cautious employee [that] was quickly resolved and never escalated into anything dangerous.” For Jacoby, the fact that the student was not “threatened, attacked, or restrained,” and “[n]o weapon was brandished” means this was not a racist incident. He goes on to substantiate his believe that this was a benign misunderstanding as follows, [n]o voices were raised. No racial slur was uttered — in fact, according to the transcript of the police call, there was no racial reference of any kind. No one picked a fight with Kanoute, accused her of wrongdoing, or denied her right to be where she was.” It’s frankly hard to imagine an assessment of a case such as this that would more clearly reveal its author’s ignorance and misunderstanding of the causes and consequences of racism in America. Jacoby’s absurd criteria for assessing the presence of racism is contradicted by mountains of scientific research and centuries of personal experience of racism in America.
With this false criteria in mind, Jacoby wants readers to decide if they would be upset to have a police officer question them while doing what the student was doing in this case. He wants readers to ask themselves if they might have called campus security upon seeing someone unfamiliar in a place they didn’t expect to see anyone at all. Is this really anyone’s idea of an intellectually honest way for newspaper readers to assess the causes and effects of what happened at Smith College in this case?
For anyone of any political persuasion who has not regularly experienced racial profiling or who has not been well educated about the causes and consequences of racism, this way of understanding and assessing what happened at Smith is a fool’s errand. It’s perfectly natural to initially assess a situation like this one by putting yourself in the shoes of the participants, but for most of Jacoby’s readers THAT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO ACCOMPLISH because they cannot imagine the experience of the participants in this case in a reasonable and appropriate context. Most of Jacoby’s readers are relying on him to bring an educated analytical perspective to bear here.
Jacoby knows this, which is why he frames the matter in libertarian terms. He wants to litigate this case on behalf of individuals in a socially decontextualized world where everyone is legally equal and where legal equality is the only relevant or even legitimate standard of judgment for those with the power to reward or punish behavior. He subtlety pushes his readers to adopt this litigious, anti-social, and defensive pose and then to proceed by putting themselves in the place of each of the actors involved in the incident at Smith. Having not been a constant victim of racism or a sophisticated consumer of social science research, most of Jacoby’s readers will not be able to appreciate the impact of this incident on the victim. And, having been conditioned to believe that social awareness is a choice that no one should be compelled to exhibit in a free society, most of Jacoby’s readers are also likely to excuse the staffer’s actions because he or she shouldn’t be required to consider (or be punished for not considering) matters beyond their technical job description.
The deceptive beauty of this approach to minimizing racism is that it asks its audience to be legalistic (read dispassionate) while subtly giving full sway to subconscious passions and prejudices in the final analysis. Jacoby wants his readers to dismiss the relevant social contexts because they would impose higher standards of personal conduct on the people involved in this incident. Instead, Jacoby needs readers to rely entirely on the interplay of the decontextualized facts of the case with their personal experience of the world in judging this case.
It is particularly important to focus on Jacoby’s effort to excuse the staffer’s actions here. He wants his readers to believe that individual freedom is a principle that forbids patriotic Americans from holding individuals accountable for systemic injustices. He wants his readers to believe that it would be unfair to expect the staffer in this case to approach a stranger lying on a couch in the work place to ascertain her situation, and that calling the police to do it for her was reasonable. For readers conditioned to believe that racism isn’t as bad as liberals claim, and that criminal behavior is so out of control in America that we should all live by the “stranger danger” standard conscientious parents employ with small children, I suppose it’s not that difficult to believe that the staffer in this case made justifiable choices. It is, however, not reasonable for a professional opinion journalist to perpetuate or advance this immature, anti-intellectual, and fear-based approach to social interactions or social justice.
A responsible analyst’s assessment of this case would avoid asking readers to put themselves in the place of the participants and would interpret the facts of the case in context using all available credible evidence, which includes mountains of scholarship about racial profiling from every perspective. Jeff Jacoby is a Boston Globe columnist whose regular readers, presumably, credit him with erudition and thoughtfulness on the matters he addresses in his column, but he writes as if he is just one of his readers and his job is to merely reflect his readers’ uncritical opinions. To me, this seems like a very bad approach to opinion journalism. I think opinion journalists have a professional responsibility to educate their readers, to provide a thoughtful and intellectually honest perspective on the issues of the day that adds value to readers’ understanding of events. In his latest column, Jacoby nurtures his readers’ prejudices and validates their ignorance.
Today, Jeff Jacoby gave aid and comfort to intentional racists and gave every white person who reads his column another fake excuse to believe that racism isn’t as bad or pervasive as liberals claim. The truth is that racism is as bad and pervasive as liberals claim and that trying to minimize the harmful impacts of racism in order to make white people feel justified in their choice to ignore it is cowardly and disgusting.