Race-based double standards exist in media, but not always how you think

Opinion

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

We wanted to wait until the data settled down, but the obvious is now clear: a predictable pattern has developed around coverage of the Will Smith and Chris Rock “slap heard round the world.” Much or most of the laptop class is stoutly defending Smith while simultaneously complaining that few are defending Smith, and that he is being treated far more harshly than an equivalent white man would be.

To get a glimpse of the “Will Smith did nothing wrong” genre, simply Google or Bing-search “Will Smith did nothing wrong,” and hundreds of thousands of videos and articles return. Several authors of prominent pieces treat Smith’s physical assault on Chris Rock as arguably justified because he was defending a black woman, while others note that Jada Pinkett Smith’s alopecia adds an additional sympathetic dimension to the confrontation. The New York Times ran an article titled “One Last Takeaway from The Slap: Leave Black Women’s Hair Alone,” while the Toronto Star went with “Talk about Will Smith’s Slap…But Not Misogynoir?” Several pieces, like this one from the UK’s Guardian newspaper, straight-facedly claimed that any anger at Smith’s boorish behavior is itself rooted in racism or “anti-Blackness.”

This reaction is a microcosm of a broader pattern that has become common in recent years: high-profile defenses of “POC” and/or attacks on “white” people, combined with claims that no one ever defends minorities or criticizes whites. Examples abound. Barely one month before the Smith slap, University of Michigan men’s basketball coach Juwan Howard was involved in an almost identical incident—striking a Wisconsin assistant coach in the face on television, just after the conclusion of a hotly contested game.

An admittedly partisan, but widely read, sports website reacted to that situation with a piece titled “Juwan Howard Is the Epitome of What True Leadership Is.” The article opened, “Juwan Howard owes absolutely nobody an apology for what happened yesterday. I don’t care what anybody says.” Another, more mainstream, piece described Howard as the victim of racism and abuse following punishment for the near-brawl he started by asking, “If race wasn’t a factor, why did [the coach struck by Howard] get off scott-free?”

Entire books are based around essentially this same dualistic argument. Ijeoma Oluo’s 2020 book Mediocre might fairly be described as a 318-page critique of white people—and to a lesser extent males generally—but her thesis is that white men are rarely subjected to harsh criticism, enjoy racial privilege, and are thus able to acquire better jobs than, say, black women at the same level of performance and competence. Even the best-selling Mediocre is not the queen bee of this genre. Robin D’Angelo’s world-famous White Fragility is devoted almost entirely to criticizing white Americans, while simultaneously arguing that these privileged pale-faces are so rarely criticized that they become uniquely “fragile” when subjected to straight talk about past history and contemporary racism.

Let’s be blunt: this whole argument is pretty damned silly. While lower-end white racism, of the kind measured by audit studies, clearly still exists, it is also a facially obvious truth that formalized advantages for people of color are a feature of modern middle class life. It is generally just not true that black or Hispanic applicants have to “work far harder” than equally qualified whites to secure executive jobs or student slots in solid universities.

In the representative year I use for analysis in my 2017 book Taboo, average SAT scores were 941 for Blacks, 963 for Native Americans, and 987 for Hispanics—versus 1118 for whites and a remarkable 1181 for Asian Americans. The implication is obvious: affirmative action advantages for non-Asian minorities (NAMs) at selective universities which want racially representative student bodies logically have to be very large. At one selective university for which we know the data, Harvard, the chance of admission for a student in the highest decline of academic performance will be just over 10% for an Asian-American, a bit under 20% for a white applicant, roughly 35% for a Hispanic applicant, and nearly 60% for a Black applicant.

The idea of “white fragility” is also almost certainly wrong. It seems wildly implausible, to me as an often-entertained observer of contemporary racial discourse, that U.S. whites are more likely than anyone else to react with anger when challenged about historical failures or propensity for certain crimes. All people get mad about being stereotyped, and there is zero doubt that contemporary black leftists would appear “fragile” if unexpectedly confronted with the test score data just given (or evidence of high rates of black fatherlessness, etc.) by aggressive white people. So far as I can tell, no one has ever even attempted to test the claim that white people are more prone to racialized anger than members of any other group—but I may, and I recommend the idea to other scholars!

Moving from the general to the specific, it is obviously not true that Will Smith would have been treated in a better and more kindly fashion were he a Privileged White Man™. In all likelihood, in that scenario, he would have been banned from the Academy for life and had all of his trophies stripped away. This—again—is no wild hypothetical. The past five to seven years have seen a surfeit of mostly-white taxpayers canceled for far less—in one case, in my first professional field, for not allowing black UCLA law students to skip all end-of-semester exams to honor the death of George Floyd. In the era of J.K. Rowling, there is literally no doubt that a big white rich guy slapping a beloved black comic would have been persona non grata for the rest of his life.

Not to drone on, but it also does not seem to be true that journalists—representatives of a profession which leans only 7% conservative—and other media figures go out of their way to make black people look bad. If anything, the reverse is the case: people of color, and specifically black folks, are dramatically “over-represented” across much modern media. A widely circulated letter to a major newspaper recently contended that about 50% of all individuals appearing in television advertisements—presumably almost all in positive roles like “new car buyer”—were black. A 2022 quantitative analysis confirmed that something close to this level of representation did in fact exist during the latest Super Bowl, when more than 35% of commercial actors were black. Black Americans make up 12-13% of the national population.

The actual “racial double standard” which exists today is an odd one, mentioned in public only very occasionally, and then only by very bold heterodox thinkers like David Azzerad. Many Americans, especially on the political left, seem to hold black Americans to a much lower standard in practice, while simultaneously constantly telling us we are unfairly held to a higher one. This behavior has real, sometimes remarkable effects. In their 2012 book Mismatch, the social scientists Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr. point out that, when a group of black respondents was asked whether a black applicant to a selective U.S. university would have an advantage over an equally qualified white applicant, 65% of them said that the white guy would have an advantage. Only 5% stated that the black kid would. In reality, of course, the advantage for the black applicant would be on the order of 100 to 300 SAT points.

As that data indicates, today’s near-total dichotomy between public and private white opinion has—must have—genuinely negative effects on race relations. Very often, black Americans feel intense anger about the perception that we are unfairly held to a higher standard of performance, while in fact being unfairly held to a lower one—with both that fact and the visible rage of many blacks angering our white countrymen. This is, frankly, a difficult problem to resolve. However, the old FAIR suggestion to “start telling the truth, judge each person as an individual, and be pro-human” provides as good a starting point as any.

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