The Diversity Delusion

by Heather Mac Donald

  Finally, in phase three, the researchers turned their computers loose on all 36,738 officer utterances, using the twenty-two-category rating system. They found that officers’ utterances toward white drivers scored somewhat higher in respect than utterances toward black drivers, even after controlling for whether the stop resulted in a search, citation, arrest, or warning. (The sample size for white arrests and searches was quite small, however: one arrest and two searches; black drivers were fifteen times more likely to be arrested than whites.) Black officers scored the same as white officers in respect toward black and white drivers. White drivers were 57 percent more likely than black drivers to hear something from the top 10 percent of the respect categories, and black drivers were 61 percent more likely to hear something from the bottom 10 percent of the disrespect categories.

  There is plenty to criticize in the study’s methodology and assumptions. Doing so, however, risks implying that the substantive claims are significant. They are not. Nevertheless, if it were the case that we should worry about whether an officer says, “you can” (good) or “can I” (bad) to black drivers, the study leaves out critical components of officer-civilian interactions. The most disrespectful phrase in the disrespect scale is “hands on the wheel.” Black drivers are 29 percent more likely to hear those words than white drivers. Why might an officer ask a driver to put his hands on the wheel? Perhaps because the driver was not complying with an officer’s initial requests or was otherwise belligerent. Yet nothing about driver behavior is included in phase three’s regression analyses—not drivers’ words, demeanor, or actions.

  Moreover, given crime rates in Oakland, a black driver is far more likely than a white driver to be on parole or probation, a fact that will show up when an officer runs his plates or his license. In 2013, blacks committed 83 percent of homicides, attempted homicides, robberies, assaults with firearms, and assaults with weapons other than firearms in Oakland, according to Oakland PD data shared with former San Francisco Chronicle columnist Chip Johnson, even though blacks are only 28 percent of Oakland’s population. Whites were 1 percent of robbery suspects, 1 percent of firearm assault suspects, and an even lower percent of homicide suspects, even though they are about 34 percent of the city’s population. (The roadways draw on a population beyond Oakland, but Oakland’s crime disparities are repeated in neighboring towns.) Being on parole or probation could contribute to an officer’s hands-on-the-wheel request, but drivers’ criminal history is not included in the study’s models.

  The authors claim to have controlled for the severity of any underlying offense that may have triggered the stop, but they do not show whether offense severity differed between blacks and whites. The proportion of male drivers in the black sample was higher than in the white sample, which will also skew the results toward a more crime-prone population. Males were 67 percent of all black drivers, but only 59 percent of white drivers.

  The study’s much-cited statistic that black drivers are about 60 percent more likely to hear a phrase from the bottom 10 percent of the disrespect scale is entirely accounted for by the “hands on the wheel” phrase, since there are only eight items on the disrespect list. The next two items on the disrespect list are first names and informal titles. Whites were 4 percent more likely to have a first name used with them, and blacks were 65 percent more likely to have an informal title used with them, by far the greatest discrepancy on the eight-item disrespect scale. An officer who uses “my man” or “bro” with a black driver in Oakland is likely trying to establish rapport through the use of street vernacular, hardly an invidious impulse; black officers were as likely to use such informal titles as white officers. The white drivers stopped were, on average, three years older than the black drivers. Though age had a greater effect on respect and formality than race in the regression models, the study did not test the connection between age and race. Given the socioeconomic profile of the Bay Area’s white population, class differences, too, could explain why officers are less likely to use “man” and “bro” with white drivers.

  Whether a young black male in Oakland would feel affirmatively disrespected by “my man” is nowhere demonstrated. Eberhardt claimed in an email exchange that black and white DMV patrons in a replication effort also rated utterances from the study’s phase one as “more respectful” toward white drivers, from which she concluded that “the use of urban vernacular by officers is not seen as more respectful by black citizens.” The question is, however: Are such street terms affirmatively experienced as disrespectful?

  None of these methodological objections really matters, though, because the substantive results are so innocuous. Consider again the most disrespectful utterance provided by the researchers: “Steve, can I see that driver’s license again? It, it’s showing suspended. Is that—that’s you?” In no possible universe with any minimal connection to common sense should that utterance be deemed disrespectful. Why does it get that rating? A first name is used, which is the second most disrespectful item on the researchers’ disrespect scale. “Can I see” is “asking for agency,” the fifth most disrespectful thing an officer can say. Worse, “can I see” is part of a question, and questions are the eighth most disrespectful term on the list. If “Can I see that driver’s license?” is now deemed racially disrespectful, it’s hard to see how police officers can do their jobs.

  More demerits follow from “It, it’s showing.” The repeated “it” counts as a “disfluency,” fourth on the disrespect scale. The chance that a driver is even aware of such verbal tics is almost zero. The chance that he would distinguish a disfluency from a so-called filled pause (“um” or “uh”) and experience the one as disrespectful and the other as respectful is less than zero. The word “suspended” generates another strike because it is “negative.” Again, it is hard to see how officers can conduct traffic stops if such “negative words” are off-limits. The final sentence also racks up two demerits: “Is that—that’s you?” is a disfluency and a question. The question may have been asked to soften the fact that the driver is operating with a suspended license.

  This is madness. In their franker moments, the researchers all but admit that their study makes a mountain of a molehill. “To be clear,” Dan Jurafsky, a linguistics and computer science professor told Science, “these were well-behaved officers.” The “differences are subtle,” Eberhardt said to Science. The language used with blacks was not “really disrespectful,” she added. No kidding. But the authors cannot resist pumping up their results to fit the conventional policing narrative. “We have found that police officers’ interactions with blacks tend to be more fraught,” they write at the end. They have found no such thing. Even if the professors had actually measured drivers’ reactions to the 36,738 officer utterances, rather than simply running those utterances through a computer algorithm, a de minimis difference on the respect scale is not tantamount to a finding of “fraughtness.” Nevertheless, Eberhardt repeated the “fraughtness” claim in numerous interviews. The study goes on to conclude that “we now have a method of quantifying these troubled interactions.” But the authors also did not measure whether the interactions were “troubled” from the driver’s perspective. Their method recalls campus-rape surveys that never ask alleged victims if they think they have been raped—a topic for another chapter.

  The authors titled their study “Language from police body camera footage shows racial disparities in officer respect.” A more accurate title would have been: “Language from police body camera footage shows that officers treat all drivers courteously but are more colloquial with young black drivers.”

  In 2015, the last year for which full data are available, Oakland’s violent-crime rate was nearly four times the national average: 1,442 violent crimes per 100,000 residents, compared with 372 violent crimes per 100,000 residents nationwide. Oakland’s violent crime rate was fourteen times higher than Palo Alto’s and twice as high as San Francisco’s. If police training starts insisting that officers refer
to everyone as “Mr.” and “Ms.” and scrupulously avoid street appellations, there would be no loss. But it is the disparity in criminal offending and victimization that should concern race researchers, not whether police officers are more likely to repeat words or use “my man” with black drivers.

  * * *

  PART II

  GENDER

  6

  THE CAMPUS RAPE MYTH

  It’s a lonely job, working the phones at a college rape crisis center. Day after day, you wait for the casualties to show up from the campus rape epidemic—but few victims call. Could this mean that the crisis is overblown? No: It means, according to the campus sexual-assault industry, that the abuse of coeds is worse than anyone had ever imagined. It means that consultants and counselors need more funding to persuade student rape victims to break the silence of their suffering.

  The campus rape movement highlights the current condition of radical feminism, from its self-indulgent bathos to its embrace of ever more vulnerable female victimhood. But the movement is an even more important barometer of academia itself. In a striking historical irony, the baby boomers who dismantled the university’s intellectual architecture in favor of unbridled sex and protest have now bureaucratized both. While social-justice administrators coordinate antirape rallies, in the dorm next door, freshman counselors organize games of Sex Jeopardy and pass out tips for condom and dental dam use. The academic bureaucracy is roomy enough to include both the dour antimale feminism of the college rape movement and the promiscuous hookup culture of student life. The only thing that doesn’t fit into the university’s new commitments is serious scholarly purpose.

  The campus rape industry’s central tenet is that one fifth to one quarter of all college girls will be raped or be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years (completed rapes outnumbering attempted rapes by a ratio of about three to two). The girls’ assailants are not terrifying strangers grabbing them in dark alleys but the guys sitting next to them in class or at the cafeteria.

  This claim, first published in Ms. magazine in 1985, took the universities by storm. By the early 1990s, campus rape centers and twenty-four-hour hotlines were opening across the country, aided by tens of millions of dollars of federal funding. Victimhood rituals sprang up: first the Take Back the Night rallies, in which alleged rape victims reveal their stories to gathered crowds of candle-holding supporters; then the Clothesline Project, in which T-shirts made by self-proclaimed rape survivors are strung on campus, while recorded sounds of gongs and drums mark minute-by-minute casualties of the “rape culture.” A special rhetoric emerged: Victims’ family and friends were “co-survivors”; “survivors” existed in a larger “community of survivors.”

  An army of salesmen took to the road, selling advice to administrators on how to structure sexual-assault procedures and lecturing freshmen on the “undetected rapists” in their midst. Rape bureaucrats exchanged notes at such gatherings as the Inter Ivy Sexual Assault Conferences and the New England College Sexual Assault Network. Organizations like One in Four and Men Can Stop Rape tried to persuade college boys to redefine their masculinity away from the “rape culture.” The college rape infrastructure ballooned. Harvard University, for example, recently created an Office for Sexual and Gender-Based Dispute Resolution, to go along with a heavily staffed Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response and over fifty Title IX coordinators.

  If the one-in-five to one-in-four statistic is correct, campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. No crime, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20 percent or 25 percent, even over many years. In 2016, the violent crime rate in Detroit, the most violent city in America, was 2,000 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants—a rate of 2 percent.1 The one-in-five to one-in-four statistic would mean that every year, hundreds of thousands of young women graduate who have suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience. Such a crime wave would require nothing less than a state of emergency—Take Back the Night rallies and twenty-four-hour hotlines would hardly be adequate to counter this tsunami of sexual violence. Admissions policies letting in thousands of vicious criminals would require a complete revision, perhaps banning boys entirely. The nation’s 11.5 million female undergrads would need to take the most stringent safety precautions.

  None of this crisis response occurs, of course. To the contrary, every year the stampede of girls trying to get into the most selective colleges grows more frenzied, driving admissions rates to historic lows. Girls now constitute a large majority of students on college campuses. Harvard received a record number of applications for the Class of 2021, for an acceptance rate of 5.2 percent. Highly educated mothers in New York City pay $200 an hour to prep their female tots for nursery school admissions tests, all in the hope of winning a spot for their little darlings in the Ivy League thirteen years later. Yet we are to believe that these ambitious mothers are deliberately packing off their daughters to a hellhole of sexual predation.

  Are they that callous? No, some part of them understands that the rape epidemic doesn’t exist. During the 1980s, feminist researchers committed to the rape-culture theory had discovered that asking women directly if they had been raped yielded disappointing results—very few women said that they had been. So Ms. commissioned University of Arizona public health professor Mary Koss to develop a different way of measuring the prevalence of rape. Rather than asking female students about rape per se, Koss asked them if they had experienced actions that she then classified as rape. Koss’s method produced the 25 percent rate, which Ms. then published.

  Koss’s study had serious flaws. Her survey instrument was highly ambiguous, as University of California at Berkeley social-welfare professor Neil Gilbert has pointed out. But the most powerful refutation of Koss’s research came from her own subjects: 73 percent of the women whom she characterized as rape victims said that they hadn’t been raped. Further—though it is inconceivable that a raped woman would voluntarily have sex again with the fiend who attacked her—42 percent of Koss’s supposed victims had intercourse again with their alleged assailants.

  All subsequent feminist rape studies have resulted in this discrepancy between the researchers’ conclusions and the subjects’ own views. A 2006 survey of sorority girls at the University of Virginia found that only 23 percent of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims felt that they had been raped—a result that the university’s director of Sexual and Domestic Violence Services deemed “discouraging.”2 Equally unhelpful was a 2000 campus rape study conducted under the aegis of the Department of Justice. Sixty-five percent of what the feminist researchers called “completed rape” victims and three-quarters of “attempted rape” victims said that they did not think that their experiences were “serious enough to report.” The “victims” in the study, moreover, “generally did not state that their victimization resulted in physical or emotional injuries,” report the researchers.3

  A 2015 sexual-assault survey conducted at Harvard and twenty-six other colleges, and led by the Association of American Universities (AAU), declared that 16 percent of Harvard female seniors had experienced nonconsensual sexual penetration during their time at college, and nearly 40 percent had experienced nonconsensual sexual contact.4 Yet the vast majority of survey respondents on all campuses whom the AAU researchers classified as sexual-assault victims never reported their alleged assaults to their colleges’ rape hotlines, sexual-assault resource centers, or Title IX offices, much less to campus or city police. And the overwhelming reason that the alleged victims did not report is that they did not think that what happened to them was that serious. At Harvard, over 69 percent of female respondents who checked the box for penetration by use of force did not report the incident to any authority. Most of those nonreporters—65 percent—did not think that their experience was serious enough to report. This outcome is inconceivable i
n the case of real rape. No woman who has actually been raped would think that the rape was not serious enough to report.

  The rate of nonreporting climbs as the sexual-assault categories ginned up by the AAU grow ever more distant from the common understanding of rape. Over 78 percent of Harvard female respondents who checked the box for penetration due to “incapacitation” did not report. Three-quarters of them said that what happened to them was not serious enough to report. Over 92 percent of Harvard female respondents who said that they were the victim of sexual touching by force did not report; over 81 percent said that what happened to them was not serious enough to report. Over 93 percent of respondents who had been sexually touched due to incapacitation did not report. Over 80 percent of them did not think it serious enough to report. The picture is identical at every other college in the survey.

  And college administrators overwhelmingly think that the alleged sex crimes on their campus are not serious enough to warrant an arrest. Stanford University reports 33 rapes in 2016, a catastrophic level of violence, if true.5 Yet in none of those cases was there an arrest, even though the alleged rapist was almost certainly known to the accuser. Indeed, if parents actually acted on administrators’ rape rhetoric and started home-schooling their college-aged daughters as a protective measure, those administrators would turn on a dime and affirm the obvious: that their colleges are blessedly violence-free zones.