Violating the progressive line on race can have less easily definable social and professional costs than a Twitter ban or the FBI knocking on your door. As John McWhorter points out in the following excerpt from our recent live event at the Comedy Store, simply stating the facts about crime and racial disparities can lead people to look askance at you or cut you off entirely, to regard you as politically untrustworthy or disreputable. To insist, as I do below, that the out-of-wedlock birthrate among black Americans is a scandal can invite the same response.
There is every reason in the world to ignore an unpopular argument. After all, if you evaluate it and find it convincing, you’re faced with a difficult choice: Adopt it and become unpopular yourself or repress it and live with the dishonesty. Unfortunately, there are far more incentives for the latter than the former. No one wants to lose a friend or alienate a relative over politics. But when the unpopular argument proves to be the correct one, the social benefits to the individual may come at the expense of those—black single mothers and their children, for example—who simply cannot afford to fall any further behind.
The irony is that if everybody agreed to evaluate these arguments on their merits rather than seeking to avoid social opprobrium, we wouldn’t have this particular problem in the first place. It wouldn’t solve every problem, but at the very least it would free some people from living in bad faith.
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