Lying with Axioms and Numbers, an American Tradition

I am reminded of the response of former Chinese leader, Jiang Zemin, when asked what “communism” meant in an era of Chinese business barons and seemingly wanton capitalism: “Communism is what we say it is.” This seems to be a lesson well-learned by Republican Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis, who fired a state public health statistician (now running for Congress) for maintaining accurate records of the state’s COVID deaths. Upon her departure, Florida pulled back on releasing those numbers and insisted that secondary consequences of a serious COVID infection, like pneumonia, be thereafter listed as the sole cause of a COVID death.

Mortality statistics are often the red flags of social disassociation. By misreporting and miscategorizing the real cause of why people die (or, less euphemistically, are killed), we sweep deep social problems under the rug, only to watch anger and frustration rise with a concomitant wink-wink de facto social approval of the horrible that such statistical manipulation masks.

Like this little anomaly that began to be outed in a world of police body cams and ubiquitous cell phone cameras, such as those amazing visuals in the murder of George Floyd: “Researchers from the University of Washington found that from 1980 to 2019, more than 55 percent of 31,000 deaths attributed to police violence were assigned other causes in official federal death data. Black men are killed by police at disproportionately high rates, and their deaths are mislabeled at higher rates than for any other race, according to the study, which was published Thursday [9/30] in the Lancet, a peer-reviewed medical journal.

“The study underscores a grim reality: Despite years of scrutiny, criticism, protests and calls for reform, no government agency tracks how often law enforcement officers in America kill people. Since 2015, The Washington Post has been counting how often on-duty police shoot and kill people. But there is no comprehensive federal attempt to keep track of these deaths or other uses of force by law enforcement, including chokeholds and nonfatal shootings. One of the study’s authors called the deaths poorly catalogued and preventable, and an expert said the lack of meaningful tracking of these deaths underscores the deep-rootedness of systemic racism.” The Washington Post, September 30th. I call it “whitewashing.”

Having been alive during the seminal civil rights rulings and statutes of the 1950s and 60s that ended the Jim Crow “separate but equal” era, I know for a fact that these legal landmarks highlighted and began to address systematic racism in the United States, but they were hardly the sweep of a magic “end of racial injustice and inequality” wand that those trying to impose a ban on teaching “critical race theory” are trying to tell you ended American racism for all time. Every single piece of civil rights legislation, every judicial ruling in support of racial injustice, have been countered, sooner or later, by a major social backlash that has effectively undone, in actual practice, what those cases and laws mandated. Banning teaching facts about racism to our “old enough” children is supposed to make it all OK. But it isn’t. 2 steps forward, 3 steps back.

Redlining (limiting where people of color are allowed to buy or rent, once a legal practice, illustrated by the above map), restrictive CC&Rs combined with dwindling budgets for inner city schools, the focused targeting of minorities by police resulting in stunning arrest statistics, and the assumptions of mainstream society that fault rests with the individuals who fail to pull themselves “up by the bootstraps” and not the society that set the stage for a system of inescapable failure, generation after generation. 

Writing for the October 1st FastCompany.com, Talib Visram tells us that American society has long since subsidized white America in oh-so-many ways to the exclusion of black Americans, relying heavily of what turns out to be a long-since faded myth of generally available upward mobility for all. Fewer and fewer Americans, of all races, will ever elevate their social station these days, but for African Americans, it is so much more difficult.

“It may seem like a harmlessly earnest expression that inspires a national work ethic, propelling all who participate toward the American Dream. But, that kind of upward mobility is simply unattainable for the majority—and a new report says the narrative is a key driver of the racial wealth gap.  The bootstraps trope, glamorized historically in the pursuits of heroic robber barons and the rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger, has become the basis for a belief in a meritocratic system—even though self-made stories are extremely rare.

“‘It has become something that really dominates our psyche,’ says Anne Price, president of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, which published the report. Coupled with another age-old narrative of anti-Black racism that the report says ‘undergirds policies that marginalize and disproportionately punish [Black people],’ the myth serves to keep government from providing a route to wealth for Black Americans…

“The report argues that while white people have benefitted from government help in the past, Black people have not, and are shut out of wealth-building due to the continuation of the culturally ingrained narrative. It points to such landmark policies as the Homestead Act of 1862, helping white Americans settle the West—not through trailblazing and individualist spirit, but through the U.S. government distributing 270 million acres of (Native American) land to 1.5 million white families. Studies have found that at least 45 million white Americans today still benefit from that act. Similarly, the GI Bill, key to building the white middle class, provided $190 billion in federal loans for nearly 2.4 million veterans returning from World War II; Black vets were largely excluded.” Evidence of how often US society imposes a vision of inferiority on people of color, as this observation from professional football illustrates:

“It has been more than a year since Black former players seeking payments from the landmark NFL concussion settlement first drew attention to the use of race-norming, a controversial practice in neuropsychology in which Black patients’ cognitive test scores are curved differently than White patients’ scores. Though a judge rejected the former players’ civil rights lawsuit, she sent attorneys for the players and the league into confidential, ongoing mediation to address concerns about race-norming.

“The NFL publicly pledged in June to remove race-norming from the settlement. But the league and its lawyers have continued to defend the practice in public statements and court filings. Race-norming did not make it harder for Black players to qualify for payouts, the NFL has asserted. If any dementia claims were affected by race-norming, the NFL has said, they were only ‘a fraction’ of the hundreds alleged by former players’ lawyers. Race-norming is not required under the settlement, the league has said, and any doctors who believe otherwise are wrong.

“But a Washington Post review of hundreds of pages of confidential medical and legal records, provided by the families of these three former players, underscores how race-norming put Black players seeking settlement payouts at a disadvantage and illustrates how the practice could have easily affected the potential dementia claims of hundreds of former players, saving the NFL millions of dollars.” The Washington Post, September 29th. If we hide the truth, pretend that “the kids are alright,” problems have a way of getting worse, of becoming generational patterns that are increasingly difficult to reverse. And we pay for those missteps, in hard dollars and people dying. And with our souls.

I’m Peter Dekom, and ostrich-head-burying has never worked and will never work; reality does not care if you do not like it.