So what was he thinking?
by Edwin Dorn
Op ed, Austin American-Statesman, October 5, 2005
I have known Bill Bennett since he was a graduate student in philosophy at
the University of Texas in the 1960s. At the time, he was a "liberal"
on matters of race, a strong supporter of desegregation and non-discrimination.
Years later, as an author and Reagan administration official, Bennett strongly opposed affirmative action and argued that strict color-blindness was the only morally acceptable way to bring about racial justice. I disagreed with him, but I believed that our differences were over policies, not basic values.
Thus, I was shocked and angered last week when, during his syndicated radio talk show, Bennett commented that the nation's crime rate would go down if all black babies were aborted. Where, I wondered, did that stupid, racist-sounding idea come from?
When questioned, Bennett said his comment was taken out of context. It is hard to imagine a context in which such a remark would be acceptable, but to give my old friend the benefit of the doubt, here is the full story. A caller to his show from Sarasota, Fla., claimed that the large number of abortions in the decades following Roe vs. Wade had reduced the size of the working-age, tax-paying population. As a result, he reasoned, pro-choice policies had contributed to a decline in government revenue.
Bennett's initial response was that, even if the caller's reasoning were valid, it would not be a strong argument for a pro-life policy. He then referred to a popular book, "Freakonomics," which traces the decline in crime to the decline in the size of the young adult population. From there, he went on to say, "I do know that if you wanted to reduce crime . . . if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." He quickly added that such a practice would be "impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible."
My first reaction was, "What? Where did that come from?" How did he make the long leap from a question about government revenue to a comment about aborting black babies?
In response to criticism, Bennett has said that he was simply doing what philosophers often do: offering an absurd position as a means of provoking his audience to think. That explanation was even more maddening than his "out-of-context" excuse, because it meant that his comment wasn't just a throw-away line. It was carefully considered and pronounced with purpose. Here was one of our country's arbiters of moral values, one of the Republican Party's intellectual leaders, and when he thought about crime, what came out was the kind of blather one might expect from a beer-besotted bigot during a mindless moment at a road-side tavern.
Other than that, though, what exactly is wrong with what Bennett said? After all, his comment is in a crude sense both logically and factually correct. Most crime is committed by young adults, so if you kill a lot of babies, then, other things being equal, the crime rate will go down 20 years later. If he had said, "One way to reduce crime is to kill all first-born male children," he also would have been correct. But that's not what came first to his mind. Nor were his first uttered thoughts about Colombian drug smugglers, or the white teens who committed mayhem at Columbine, or the white-collar criminals who have plundered their companies. Instead, he instantly connected crime to race.
That connection reveals an important point: Even those who sincerely believe in racial fairness can fall victim to racial stereotypes. One can play a word association game with such stereotypes: I say "crime", you say "black." I say "Arab," you say "terrorist." I say "dumb," you say "blonde."
So, in spite of his education and moral philosophy, Bennett is a man of his time and culture. It is hard to fault him for that. Few of us ever completely escape the fears and prejudices that were part of our upbringing. Our brains are wired so that we make certain connections instantaneously. Even when the connections are wrong, it is hard to undo the wiring.
If that is so, then we need to exercise special care whenever we consider matters related to race. When people claim to be color-blind, they probably are fooling themselves. Thus, in one momentary but revealing lapse, Bennett has reminded us of how easily any one of us can fall victim to our most primitive conditioning.
