We need to talk about today’s critical mass of unimpressive “experts.”
Just a week or so back, at the end of July, Columbia and UCLA law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw — the founder of “intersectional” theory — took to Twitter/X to argue a point. As she passionately put it: “Black women make up less than 10% of the population, yet when it comes to killings by police, we make up a 3rd of them, with the majority unarmed. And that’s exactly what happened with Sonya Massey. #SayHerName.” This post, so far, has received 1,800 likes and has been shared 1,200 times.
The only problem here is that Crenshaw is wildly, almost bizarrely wrong.
This reminds me of a candidate for a Federal Judgeship, saying that her quoted comment that “there is a killing by police of an unarmed Black man, every day in the United States”, which is wildly inaccurate -- there are in fact about one per month. But she simply responded that she was representing a client, and this was a “rhetorical statement”. IOW, truth be blowed.
The idea that police are out to kill Black people, from the moment they get up in the morning has been debunked many times. Including by a Black Harvard professor, Roland Fryer. But is simply ignored. It’s the “my-side” bias. What doesn’t agree with my side, I discount.