By Selwyn Duke
It’s called “the narrative” — which is usually just a polite name for a fashionable lie. A black Ivy League academic has learned the price of contradicting cherished narratives, too: threat to life and limb.
In fact, after releasing a credible study finding “no evidence of racial bias” in police shootings, Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer said that not only did he become a pariah in many circles, but he actually needed police protection.
As striking as this is, however, there’s another big story within this story: Fryer’s study possibly did find a racial bias — against whites. Yet this is so accepted today that media don’t even notice.
BizPac Review reports on the story:
Recently, journalist Bari Weiss sat down for a live Q&A with Harvard Economics professor Roland Fryer at the fledgling University of Austin where she is a founding trustee. As they engaged in a discussion before prospective students, the award-winning academic addressed a 2016 controversy that involved his findings that determined no “racial bias in police shooting.”
Explaining that he himself “expected to see it [the bias],” Fryer’s analysis showed that while non-fatal physical force from police officers was twice as likely to be used against blacks and Hispanics, the same could not be said for shootings. His research found officers were 23.8% less likely to shoot at blacks and 8.5% less likely to shoot at Hispanics than white perpetrators.
“When I found this surprising result, I hired 8 fresh [resident advisor[s]] and redid it to make sure they came up with the same exact answer and I thought it was robust,” he explained to Weiss. “And I went to go give it and … all hell broke loose.”
“It was in this moment, 2016, that I realized people lose their minds if they don’t like the result,” detailed Fryer[,] who said peers who liked the first half of his findings were encouraging him not to publish the second half.
In point of fact, Fryer got reamed before his study even got read. As Fox News adds:
Fryer received the first of many complaints and threats four minutes after publication.
“You’re full of s—t,” the sender said.
Fryer said people quickly “lost their minds” and some of his colleagues refused to believe the results after months of asking him not to print the data.
“I had colleagues take me to the side and say, ‘Don’t publish this. You’ll ruin your career,'” Fryer revealed.
It turned out, however, that his career would be the least of his worries. For after “the report was published, Fryer lived under police protection for over a month,” Fox also informs. “He had a seven-day-old daughter at the time and went shopping for diapers.”
“‘I was going to the grocery store to get diapers with the armed guard. It was crazy. It was really, truly crazy,’ he said.”
But Fryer’s torments weren’t over. In 2019, he “was suspended from Harvard for alleged misconduct related to ‘unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,’” relates Red Voice Media (RVM), in what appears to have been a witch hunt. “Fryer has continuously denied these allegations, asserting his innocence,” RVM continues.
Ironically, during that time, it was the disgraced Claudine Gay, then-Harvard dean, who “claimed that Fryer’s research and conduct exhibited a pattern that violated institutional norms and betrayed the trust within the community,” RVM further informs. Of course, since those norms appear to involve promoting incompetents to the institution’s upper echelons and encouraging obscurantism, Gay’s accusation may in part be true.
“Interestingly enough, Gay herself stepped down as Harvard president in January amid allegations of widespread plagiarism and criticisms of her flawed testimony to Congress,” RVM reminds us.
As for Fryer’s woes, they’re just another lamentable example of how, “The further a society drifts from Truth, the more it will hate those who speak it,” as my now-famous saying goes. Apropos to this, there’s a truth here that no media, as far as I’ve seen, has even mentioned while reporting on Fryer’s story. To wit:
How could police being more likely to shoot whites be a complete lack of “evidence of racial bias”? Are whites no longer a race?
I asked Professor Fryer about this via email, and he was kind enough to respond promptly. He replied that while in “some specifications” the data showed racial bias against whites, “in others it didn’t” — “so the anti-white bias was not robust.” I absolutely take him at his word.
Yet robust or not, this accords with other research I’ve cited over the years, which found that police are actually more likely to shoot whites relative to the races’ different homicide rates and the rates at which they feloniously shoot police. Moreover, a 2014 study showed that cops are, in reality, more willing to shoot white suspects than black ones.
Is this surprising? As with ex-officer Darren Wilson of Ferguson, Missouri, shooting a black criminal can mean media demonization, pariah status, career destruction, and perhaps threats to personal safety. Yet as with 46-year-old white man John Geer (who? Exactly), who was posing no threat but was nonetheless murdered in 2013 by a Hispanic cop with “anger issues,” the shooting of a white person will almost certainly get memory-holed.
In other words, police would have to not be human but RoboCop to be unaffected by the extreme societal pressure militating against firing upon black suspects. As University of Missouri-St. Louis criminology professor David Klinger put it after interviewing more than 300 cops:
“When it comes to the issue of race, I’ve never had a single officer tell me, ‘I didn’t shoot a guy because he was white.’ I’ve had multiple officers tell me, ‘I didn’t shoot a guy because he was black.’”
Now, I don’t know if that’s what they call “white privilege,” but it’s certainly a “narrative” we won’t be hearing anytime soon.
For those interested, the interview segment in which Fryer made his comments is below.
“We didn’t find any racial bias in police shootings.”
— The Free Press (@TheFP) February 15, 2024
Economist Roland Fryer tells @bariweiss at @uaustinorg about the 2016 paper on policing bias that led to his need for an “armed guard” for over a month and the academics who told him not to publish. https://t.co/dklaGtiMxT pic.twitter.com/95FbOe3jhJ
This article was originally published at The New American.
TRUTH has been outlawed in the pursuit of absolute power. denying truth allows all manner of untruth to be elevated with abominable, anti human actions as a consequence.
the good thing? denying truth has been tried throughout human history and ultimately falls in the face of reality.
Posted by: beau | February 18, 2024 at 10:26 AM