War Handwavium

Racism exists in America today. Racial profiling by police has been documented numerous times and numerous cities. Looking at who the police in a stop in an area, the percentages of who was stopped, when broken down by race, should roughly follow the racial makeup of that area. If you’re in an area that is 80% white and 20% black, but the police records show their stops break down into 70% black and 30% white, you can assert that racial profiling is taking place.

But just because you’ve proven that racial profiling is occurring in a department or a city or a state or even a country, that does not mean you can pull out a specific incident of a police stop, and assert it was racially motivated without looking at the individual merits of that specific case.

To take one incident and demand that it follow your chosen general principle is a logical fallacy called “A Dicto Simpliciter”.

To commit the dicto simpliciter fallacy with racism is to argue that a particular incident must be racially motivated because racism exists in this country.

This recently happened with a case involving Sgt. James Crowley (white) responding to a 911 call about a breakin at the Cambridge, Mass. home of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. (black)

Gates had come home from a trip overseas to find his door jammed shut. He asked his cab driver (also a black man) to help him force open the door. A neighbor saw two black men forcing the front door open and called 911 to report a possible breakin. Crowley was first on the scene and found Gates in the home. Crowley asked to see Gates’s identification. What exactly happened after that depends on whose version of the story you read. Crowley says Gates would not show an ID. Gates says he did show his id but then Crowley refused to identify himself or give his badge number. What exactly happened, no one may ever know. But it ended with Gates being arrested for disorderly conduct. The charges were dropped several days later.

When the story first hit the news, some folks immediately reported it as obvious and blatant racism by a white cop arresting a black man for no reason. Even though they had little or no information about what actually happened or the character of the two people involved.

These people committed a dicto simpliciter, demanding that this particular white cop arrested Gates out of racism, because racism exists in the US.

It appears now that more information has come out about Crowley that this particular incident was likely not motivated by racism. Crowley was hand picked by former Cambridge Police Commissioner Ronny Watson (black) to teach sensitivity training to keep cops from racial profiling. A Boston cop, Lawrence Hickman, (also black) who teaches at the same academy and has worked alongside Crowley for years has nothing but the highest respect for Crowley.

What must be separated in the discussion of racism is the general principle versus a specific incident which may or may not be racially motivated.

Some people demand that this particular (or any particular) incident be labeled as “racism!” out of a conflated idea that since there is racism in general, this must be racism. And they may be motivated out of fear of the converse: If this particular (any particular) incident is NOT racism, then there is NO RACISM IN GENERAL in the country.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Racism in America exists today even if this particular case involving Gates and Crowley was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to have nothing to do with racism.

But jumping to the conclusion about a particular incident being racially motivated only to have it turn out to not be the case can only result in losing support from people against the very real fight against very real racism in America. The story goes that the little boy cried “Wolf!” three times when there was no wolf. The forth time, there was a wolf, but no one would listen to him.

So don’t commit the dicto simpliciter fallacy. Just because there is racism in America in general, doesn’t mean that a particular incident must be racist.

As for why Crowley charged Gates with disorderly conduct, it seems more a clash of egos than racism. How much ego Gates brought to the incident is not yet exactly known, though he has admitted to bringing some ego by getting angry at Crowley. We know for a fact that Crowley brought enough ego to arrest Gates for trivial reasons. (The fact that the charges were dropped so quickly would seem to indicate they lacked merit.)