“He must belong only to the validity of his ideas.”

I return to (longer) form after ghosting Twitter

May 19, 2023

Welcome to The Blanks Slate! Thank you so much for subscribing.

To get people up to date, this first issue is pretty lengthy, but I don’t expect most editions to be this verbose. -JPB

The headline quote is by Kenneth B. Clark, writing in The Negro Protest about James Baldwin, one of my favorite writers. I’ve grown rather tired of political and ideological labels and this sentiment resonated with me and thought it struck the right tone for this launch.

What I’m listening to:

While I’m several years behind the curve, I’ve finally started listening to podcasts pretty regularly. I am a very big fan of Empire, hosted by Anita Anand and William Dalrymple. It’s a relatively new show and the hosts are as entertaining as they are brilliant. So far they have covered the Raj–the United Kingdom’s plundering of and subsequent imperial hold on India–and its aftermath. Then they covered the Ottoman Empire. Their latest topic is the global history of slavery. The hosts strike the perfect balance between the competing ideological forces that shape so much of today’s history debates. They are not concerned with, for example, determining whether Churchill or Ghandi were good guys or bad guys, but looking at what they said and did and the context in which they said and did them. I cannot recommend this show enough.

If you like sports, and are interested in their role in American culture–particularly and how race and economics work in that world–you absolutely must listen to The Right Time with Bomani Jones.

For those more musically inclined, the Spotify algorithm rightly concluded I would like the band Love. Although I haven’t sat down to listen album by album, the band’s Spotify playlist is a good place to start/rediscover them.

What I’ve been writing:

Although I’ve been writing regularly since I published a newsletter or maintained a personal blog, I’m not going to include my CV in this post. Most of my writing during that time can be found either at my bio page that Cato has graciously maintained since I left in late 2019 or on the blog affiliated with the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), where I serve as a research fellow and do most of my policy commentary these days. You can also find my independent pieces on Medium.

I’ve done a couple book reviews recently. First, I reviewed Raf Mangual’s book Criminal Injustice. In this excerpt from my review, he tries to explain away how a massive drop-off in police stops-and-frisks—also called “stop, question, and frisk (SQF)”—didn’t lead to any spike in crime:

Mangual explicitly speculates there was widespread falsification of official documents that counted the four million individuals caught up in NYPD’s SQF program. He writes:
“In the two years that followed the [court-ordered reduction of SQF], the number of stops reported by NYPD officers declined sharply, going from more than 680,000 in 2011 down to about 12,000 in 2016, all while crime continued to decline.”
He then suggests that incentives made NYPD officers overreport contacts not only “erroneously if not purposefully” but also “fabricating” the required UF-250 stop forms because the difference in stops before and after the court decision has not been so large over that time.
Rather than acknowledge that officers probably over-applied SQF policy in line with departmental goals, Mangual uses rampant misconduct to defend police officers’ actions: a suggestion that raises far more questions than it answers about the trustworthiness and competence of the NYPD. I, for one, hope and believe NYPD officers were not falsifying and misidentifying 56 stops for every legitimate one they performed.

We need cops and we need them to be better. Mangual’s book, however, basically concedes the abolitionist invective that cops are racist lying bastards, but he insists that they are for good reasons. It’s appalling and decent police officers deserve better than factually unsupported allegations and ham-fisted rationalization of blatant illegality.

In the Spring issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, I reviewed Tommie Shelby’s book, The Idea of Prison Abolition. Shelby, a self-proclaimed Black radical, dissects the concept of prison abolition from an analytical philosophical perspective, and finds it wanting.

An excerpt:

Whereas prisons can [potentially] serve a constructive and just purpose as a response to violent crime, poor racial ghettos that tend to be feeders into them do not. It makes sense that Shelby, who is also the author of Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform, would circle back to this topic in his critique of prison abolition.
In The Idea of Prison Abolition, Shelby questions whether society can meaningfully reduce serious violent crime while ghettos still exist. This is a very serious question to answer when one considers that so many American cities have poor Black sections of de facto segregation. Residents of these areas usually have lower job prospects than people in other parts of the city, they—and particularly their young men—are policed differently than white cross-town neighbors, their children typically have fewer educational opportunities, and they tend to have less economic and political power to remedy any of these problems. Prisons draw disproportionally from these neighborhoods, and it is back to these enclaves of high unemployment that the formerly incarcerated return to look for work and rejoin society. The ghetto is where U.S. society’s continuing injustices against Black Americans are most acute, and these neighborhoods’ cyclical relationships with prisons and the “prison-industrial complex” exacerbate the problems endemic to ghetto life.

While neither Shelby nor I are abolitionists, we both appreciate and understand that they really changed the conversation around criminal enforcement and adjudication. The related “defund” argument may sound radical, but it’s basically an argument for reallocating money from law enforcement to other ways to directly help people. In other contexts, we just call that “budgeting.” Abolitionists are, in many ways, more reasonable than people like Mangual who refuse to address police accountability in any meaningful fashion.

Finally, and most recently, I wrote about how commentators inappropriately treat all gun deaths as the same problem and the inherent limits of using cops and prisons to address them:

The vast majority of gun deaths in America are by suicide: lawful gun owners taking their own lives. This is a growing public policy problem—particularly considering the increase among middle-aged and older white men—but it is not primarily a criminal issue, statutory prohibitions on suicide notwithstanding. While the police may become involved in a given situation, ultimately self-harm is an issue of mental health and overall well-being, not criminal policy. Chronic or momentary desperation with access to firearms can be a tragic combination, but in a legal regime that permits and protects gun ownership, focusing solely on guns misses the forest for the trees.
Reducing the largest driver of gun deaths in the United States will require a more holistic public policy approach to deaths of desperation that must—for the foreseeable future, anyway—coexist in a policy world in which law-abiding American adults have access to firearms.
…
In part because young Black men in urban ghettos know they are at higher risk of being shot and killed, many carry illegal guns for self-defense. This is neither an excuse nor a justification, but it is something that policymakers and local officials need to reckon with….
If a young person believes a gun will reduce their higher chances of being killed–however dubious the evidence may be–is an increased jail or prison sentence really an effective deterrent? Alive in prison for an extra year will usually be viewed as preferable to dead forever, particularly in urban areas in which someone serving jail time is not a particularly unusual event. Moreover, the preference for being “judged by 12 [jurors]” rather than “carried by six [pallbearers]” is a sentiment on both sides of the thin blue line.

Share The Blanks Slate

One piece you should read this week:

In light of CNN’s Trump town hall, my friend Ned Resnikoff lets readers behind the curtain about the effect of marketing on television news:

Journalists are supposed to report the news, not make it, according to those who were appalled by the town hall.
And yes, sure, I agree. But I also think that it’s a little beside the point to accuse CNN of committing journalist malpractice. Because, as [CNN chair Chris] Licht has all but explicitly told us, CNN isn’t really in the news business. It’s in the content business, the attention-farming business.
This isn’t to say that CNN doesn’t employ journalists, many of whom are quite scrupulous in their commitment to the profession’s ethical precepts. But to the extent that those people are doing journalism, their work is basically incidental to the firm’s business model. At places like CNN, journalism isn’t what pays your salary; it’s something you get away with.

It’s disgusting and, as Ned admits, it may sound cynical. But his story about his meeting with the marketing guys at MSNBC absolutely justifies the cynicism. Read the whole thing at The Bristlecone.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE…

I’m not putting in any sports commentary this week, but for any sports fans, make sure you watch Jamelle Bouie recount a recent experience with a troll in his DMs. (TikTok) Watch til the end for the chef’s kiss sign off.

And for people who don’t like sports, here are some of my favorite short form reels I’ve watched recently:

Conceptual problems with the New Zealand Air Force by Javier Jarquin. (Instagram)
Distance measurement in Europe versus midwestern United States by ISMO. (Instagram)
And an oldie but goodie: remember when flash mobs were a thing? This was my favorite. (YouTube)

In honor of Martha Stewart’s cover of this year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, read Joan Didion’s paean to the homemaking icon back in 2000. (The New Yorker)

The Blanks Slate