“But I do know that it’s true,” said the author of The Book of Virtues, “that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.”
Not the smoothest thought experiment ever ad-libbed by a lapsed academic opposed to utilitarian ethics. The firestorm ensued. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, declared himself “appalled.” The Rev. Al Sharpton denounced Bennett’s comments as “blatantly racist.” The White House labeled them “not appropriate.” NAACP President Bruce Gordon felt “personally offended.” Rep. Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois Democrat, detected “a spirit of hate and division.” Bennett, while not apologizing, had to resign under pressure from the educational company he co-founded.
It’s hardly the first time a hypothetical upended a national political figure — mere proximity to one sometimes does the job. —Carlin Romano —The Trouble With Hypotheticals (Chronicle)
An excellent analysis of a moment that really frustrated me.
Regardless of what you think of Bennett, to willfully ignore the entire context in which the quotation ensued in the desire to score points against the speaker requires either industrial-strength blinders, or deliberate malice.
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Agreed re the complex racial histories, Dennis: Republicans have come a long way since, as the Radical Republicans, they were the first genuinely radical political party the United States had.
And I hear you agreeing with Romano that those in the "hypo-manic anti-hypo crowd [. . .] rely on a 'master narrative' hypothetical: If someone floats a thought in the antecedent of a conditional, the floater actually believes it or wishes it to happen" and that such a hypothetical is "hypocritical." I'm just saying: not necessarily. Bernard Shaw's question to Michael Dukakis in the 1988 debate about the hypothetical rape of his wife -- despite the fact that it was a hypothetical question about capital punishment in the context of a political debate -- had an ugly, leering quality, and many people were disgusted by it. I think they had every right to be.
I don't know whether race was part of the topic for that day's call-in show. If not, then perhaps his reference to "black babies" when he might more sensibly have said "poor babies" is a kind of Freudian slip.
Both parties have complex racial histories, since the GOP was the party of Lincoln, and the KKK's influence in the deep south affected the leadership of the Democratic party (cf former Klansman Robert Byrd).
In any case, Mike, within the broader context you describe, it's perfectly permissible to criticize Bennett's sensitivity and/or wisdom, but as Will noted, most of the people who only scanned the headlines and made snap decisions won't bother to place it in a broader context.
As I noted, Bennett didn't really need to refer to black babies in order to make his point, and as a public figure he must be aware of and bear the consequences of his speech.
Dennis, I'd like to hear you say more about questions of quotations being taken out of context, because -- as my initial comment indicated -- I think one rather obvious context is the relationship of the GOP to race. Bennett is certainly a prominent Republican, and the history of the GOP in relation to race issues is very different from the history of the Democrats in relation to race issues. You argue that there was an "entire context" from which the quotation was removed, and it's fairly clear what immediate context you're talking about. Might there be other contexts, as well?
Dennis, I have not personally read "Freakonomics", but I always thought the argument about why the possibility of having an abortion leads to a decrease in crime was a little different.
My impression of the argument was that a child of a woman who was in a bad situation was much more likely to grow up to be a criminal. For example, a women coming from an unsupportive family herself gets pregnant in high school. If she has the child, now she has to drop out of high school, get a low paying job, and has no time to raise her child. Instead, the child is often left alone, gets raised by the tv, and becomes a criminal because he/she is desperately poor, sees no better alternative, and hasn't been raised with any morals because it's mother is never around because she has no choice but to be constantly working to pay for the child. On the other hand, if the girl finds out she's pregnant right away and gets an abortion, she stays in high school, gets a better paying job, later in life meets a man, gets married, and has children. Now her child is raised in both a better economic situation, AND raised with two parents who can both contribute time and money to raising the child. This child is now much less likely to go out and commit crimes, having been raised both with more money and "in a better family".
I've also always been under the impression that the reason the crime topic is brought up is to show that there are real, moral benefits to the pro-choice position.
On a slightly different topic, Bennett was actually also using a different argument tactic in addition to the hypothetical. By using the phrase "abort every black baby", he's starting his argument with an assumption that is the crux of the issue - if you have an abortion, are you getting rid of some something your body gets rid of anyways, or are you doing away with what we would consider a "baby"? That's the real crux of the issue - when does a pregnancy stop being just something your body gives off (like hair, or fingernails) and become a living being?
Both extremes are repugnant to most people. Take the argument that as soon as their is anything in the reproductive process should be considered a "baby". Perhaps we should force girls to get pregnant as soon as they get their period so they don't "kill" the unused egg? (there's another one of those hypotheticals - good thing I'm not a public figure!) On the other hand, most people would find it equally rediculous to say that it's ok to "abort" a baby 5 minutes before it would be born, because the mother suddenly decided she didn't want it and it's not really a "baby" yet.
I wish I could remember the argument term for making an implicit assumption in your argument like that...
I believe this whole thing started when some took his hypothetical statement, didn't include his next statement (which showed he was opposed to the first statement), and used that to blast him, leading to all these politician's knee jerk reaction to call his statement "bad". Politicians do it because it's better for them to be seen as overeacting by some than it is to be seen as insensitive by others (the majority of people who read the headline about what this guy said, and don't think any further than that).
I don't even agree with his stance, but I think his statement should have been fine - as you said, he was saying that abortion was reprehensible. We live in a very politically correct society (not that's anything new - weren't there times in history where you could be hanged just for critisizing the king?), where there's often consequences for saying anything that could possibly be misinterpreted whatsoever, even when what you're saying it correct. Just look at what happened to Bill Mauer. After 9/11, on his tv show, he said that the terrorists were certainly bad and evil, but they weren't "cowards". People who got on a plane and hijacked it, knowing they themselves were going to die as part of their plan, were evil, but they weren't cowards. And what happened - advertisers pulled their ads from his show out of fear, and his show was cancelled (he later got a new show on HBO).
It's kind of sickening that a person gets similar consequences whether they actually said something "bad", or they just said something that if you weren't thinking when you heard it might be considered "bad".
Bennett is a public figure, who knows that what he says will affect a large number of people, so I'll agree with Catana on that point.
When a white aide in the mayor's office of Washington D.C. used the word "niggardly," there was outrage and he was pressured to resign. A month or so later the mayor change his mind and admit he asked rashly by firing the man for using a word that many "average" people mistakenly took for a racial term. (The aide was ">rehired.) I'm also reminded of a similar instance when a teacher used the word "pedagogy" and was treated as if the word meant the same thing as "pedophile" (though Google is failing me as I try to turn up that reference).
If professionals can only use discourse that can be grasped by the average reader (or, more likely, the average TV viewer) that risks infantilizing our whole public discourse.
Calling Bennett unwise in this case is defensible, I'd agree on that. I've said stupid things in front of my class or on my blog, and so have we all. Yes, he could have been more sensitive. But to return to the main issue of my blog, acting as if Bennett was actually promoting the abortion of black babies is something else entirely.
Swift was perfectly aware of the social context of the times when he made his "Modest Proposal," which is of course why it was so effective.
I thought Bennett's comment was the height of stupidity because he failed to take into account that race is a hot button for most people, and that irony and analogy aren't exactly something the average reader will "get." And how sick is someone who suggests that the Irish should kill and eat their children in order to solve their problems? Taking an extreme position is sometimes necessary to get a point across, but ignoring the social context of the times isn't usually a great idea.
Bennett was giving an ad-libbed response to a caller who was objecting to the idea that abortion could reduce crime. It wasn't necessary for him to say "black" when he could have said "poor" or "all." I don't know why he chose the specific example he did.
I don't have my copy of Freakonomics anymore (I rented it from the library) so I can't check to see whether or how race played into that chapter to which he was referring. But Amazon.com says that the abortion chapter runs from pages 117 to 146, and the index lists "African Americans" on pages 122 and 135.
I don't recall the exact context in which that chapter used race, but I know from my own research that the history of abortion in America is closely tied to Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, who was a member of an eugenics oganization with the motto "breed a race of thoroughbreds."
Here's a quotation from Maragaret Sanger, which, if you look at it with the same suspicion that people have greeted Bennett, *seems* to put very damning statements in Sanger's mouth.
Here's a hypothetical response to that quotation: "Gasp! What's this? 'We don't want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.' Gasp! Does that mean Sanger wants to exterminate the black race? Why else would she bring up this example?"
I think I've made my point. If you look through transcripts and archives, it's possible to find quotations that look damning when taken out of context. By manufacturing a new context of outrage and misinformation, those quotations can take on new meaning. Consider Al Gore's supposed claim that he invented the internet, for instance.
I'm picking another extreme example, but only to show how easy it is to make someone a monster by taking a quotation out of context. Whatever you think of Sanger as a feminist advocate, some of her eugenic beliefs are reprehensible when considered by today's standards of dencency when treating the poor and the physically disabled, but she was not the only one who felt that way in mainstream society, which is why the Nazi variety of eugenics was able to gain a foothold (that is, because Sanger was one of many who held mainstream beliefs that were useful to the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazis, *not* because Sanger was willfully or subconsciously supporting a war against the Jewish race).
Dennis: by your argument from Freakonomics that "if you abort white children, or all children of all races, then you'll also see a drop in crime," why couldn't Bennett have instead suggested aborting white babies? Why, in fact, did race come up at all for Bennett? In other words: why was it necessary for Bennett to single out black children? Could that be where the racism lies, particularly for the GOP -- which (as Colin Powell has publicly noted) has a historically vexed relation to race issues?