By Andrew C. McCarthy
Saturday, September 19, 2020
I worked in the criminal-justice system for a quarter
century. It is run, day-to-day, by the crème de la crème of graduates from
America’s top law schools. Those institutions wear their progressive bona fides
on their sleeves and proclaim it for all the world to hear.
In their offhand rhetoric — insouciant, because they know
their bien pensant allies in politics and media will never call them on it —
legal elites will tell you that the administration of justice in America is
systemically racist. But they are the system. The judges, the top
prosecutors, the defense bar, the experts who craft the sentencing guidelines
and the standards of confinement — overwhelmingly, they are political
progressives.
That’s fine. I’m a lawyer from New York City. I’ve not
only lived in and around this world for decades, I have affection for lots of
its denizens. Most of them are proud of being on the left. I don’t agree with
them politically, but the routine handling of criminal cases is not political.
It is clinical: professionals doing the best they can.
And that’s just the point: They do the best they can.
That is the antithesis of racism.
These professionals strive to do justice for individual defendants.
The concrete experience of routine cases in the justice system is fairness to a
fault. The enforcement authorities, defense counsel, and the court frequently
bend over backwards to plead cases out to softer versions of the criminal
conduct’s harsh reality. They do so precisely to rationalize the avoidance or
reduction of jail time.
They will tell you there is endemic racism in the system.
If pressed on the matter, though, they would not be able to describe for you
any racist things that they themselves have actually done, nor any racist
things done by colleagues. Nor can the earnest lawyers who represent the
purported victims of racism point you to stacks on stacks of motions they’ve
filed claiming the police arrested their felonious clients because of skin
color. The crimes, it turns out, are not only supported by abundant proof; they
have victims, who are disproportionately black and Latino. The lawyers are at a
loss to point to cases in which they’ve shown that prosecutors charged their
clients due to racial animus rather than evidence. They can’t cite cases where
clients were sabotaged by the racism of the presiding judge. In a system that
was pervasively racist, such cases would abound. Not in this one, though.
Still, the legal elites will insist there is systemic
racism. There must be, even though no one can put a finger on where it
happened, because the outcomes the system produces are not “equal” — equality
being a utopia in which the racial composition of those arrested, convicted and
sentenced aligns perfectly with the proportion of that race in the overall
population, as if all racial and ethnic groups committed crimes at exactly the
same rates.
Nor is the problem confined to the justice system. Racism
“happens in our residence halls and in our classrooms, at the tables of our
dining halls and in our locker rooms, on our sidewalks, within the offices
where we work, and in our town.” So maintains Middlebury College president
Laurie Patton. Among the doyens of higher education, Patton is the rule, not
the exception, in spreading this gospel across the campus. With characteristic
clarity, Heather
Mac Donald rolled off example after example in a recent City Journal
essay. It is not just the administrators, the battalions of diversity coordinators,
and the social scientists. According to academics, “structural racism” even
“pervades” mathematics, geology, astronomy, you name it — to the point, Mac
Donald observes, that the journal Nature claims “the mission of science
should be to ‘amplify marginalized voices’ in atonement for science’s
complicity in ‘systemic racism.’”
Okay, if they say so . . . but where are the concrete
examples?
Mac Donald discerns that the rote self-abasement of
academic institutions is detached from lived life. She pointedly asks the
questions we should all be asking: What are the specifics of the indictment:
“Which faculty members do not treat black students fairly? If that unjust
treatment is so obvious, why weren’t those professors already removed?” How
have we tolerated an admissions process that apparently lets in thousands of
student bigots? Of course, regardless of what they may say, college
administrators do not act as if they’re trapped in a racist dystopia. As
Mac Donald observes, there is no better proof of this than these same
administrators: when not preening about systemic racism, they are gushing about
the sensitivity, accomplishments, and integrity of their faculty, students, and
alumni.
That is to say: The “institutional racism” prattle would
melt if it were ever subjected to the enlightened rationalism that is supposed
to be the university’s reason for being. But that is Western culture, and out
leaders don’t do Western culture anymore.
What do they do? Marxism and voodoo, mainly. When you
cannot cite hard evidence for the cosmic propositions you swear by, it can only
be because we’re beset by “false consciousness” that prevents us from
perceiving how whiteness and West-ness have corrupted us. All we can say for
sure is what “disparate impact” theory tells us: We don’t have equality of
outcomes, so that must mean we don’t have equality of opportunity, right?
Because, you know, every one of us is a Mozart, an Einstein, a Jane Austen, a
Bobby Fischer, or a LeBron just waiting to happen, if only there were a level
playing field.
Right.
Being a human society, ours is inevitably an imperfect
society. It is a great society, however, because of its capacity for continual
improvement. America frees individuals to achieve, but it teaches them that,
individually and collectively, we all make mistakes. We need to check our
premises because even the best among us are, from time to time, wrong about
fundamental things. We strive for a more perfect union not only by learning
from past errors but by remembering we are just as human, just as prone to
error, as the forebears we presume to judge.
It is a lot to ask black Americans to concede redemption
in a society that abided race-based slavery for over 200 years, and then — even
after eliminating it in a bloody civil war — tolerated de jure racism for
another century, and de facto racism even after Jim Crow ended. The last
half-century has been marked by increasingly determined efforts — many of them
more well-meaning than beneficial — to stamp out the vestiges of racism. Yet in
light of our history, it is only natural for black people to be suspicious of
racism in law enforcement and our institutions.
We nevertheless need law enforcement and strong
institutions if everyone, including black Americans, is to enjoy the
opportunities for prosperity in a free country. The imperative is to improve
the pillars of our society. To condemn, defund, and banish them would not be “Change!”
It would be suicide.
The best we can do is what we are trying to do: Operate
our justice system, our educational institutions, our government, businesses,
and society in a manner sufficiently sensitive to racism that concrete examples
of it are few and far between. The regnant ideology never cites real-world
examples. Its disciples would have us believe our society and its institutions
— the very society and institutions that have promoted our elites to their
lofty heights — are irredeemable. They’re for perfect equality, in which they
remain perfect and everyone else is equally miserable.
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