June 8, 2023

When Sen. Tim Scott, the only black Republican US Senator, went on The View recently to respond to personal attacks on him, Joy Behar, who had made some of those attacks, did not manage to attend to defend her hateful views.  That was wise of her. 

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Scott’s offence is that he is a black person that does not believe that America is “systemically racist”.  That is not allowed by the new slave masters on the Left who believe themselves entitled to tell black people what they’re allowed to believe.  Of course, the ladies of The View (hereafter LOV’s), who will not be confused with Princeton logicians, did not bother to define what they meant by the expression “systemically racist”.  And, as is standard in such accusations, none of them gave any evidence whatsoever that the US is “systemically racist”. Instead, they did what the Left usually does, namely cite a few facts or statistics that, even if true, do not prove that systemic racism exists.

For example, Sunny Hostin congratulates Scott for being the first black senator elected in the South but claims that his life story is “the exception” and “not the rule.”  If that is supposed to be an argument that systemic racism exists in the US it certainly fails.  The point is not difficult.  The assertion that the US is systemically racist is a causal thesis (about what causes success or failure in the US), a concept with which Hostin and the other ladies on The View seem totally unfamiliar. 

The key question is:  What is the cause of the fact that blacks are underrepresented in key positions in US society?   Hostin and the LOV’s assume that it could be nothing else than systemic racism, the key presupposition of their politically useful victimization narrative.  How convenient!  Unfortunately, that is the fallacy of “begging the question” (assuming what one purports to prove).  Astonishingly, it never even occurs to Hostin and the LOV’s that part of that the causes of black failure are the failing schools or the high black on black crime rate in entirely Democrat run cities like Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia and Atlanta.  

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Sunny tries again:

[S]o when it comes to racial inequality, it persists.  Five core aspects of life in the US: economics, education, health care, criminal justice and housing. At nearly every turn, these achievements were fought, threatened and erased, most often by white violence.

First, Hostin does not appear to notice that she is speaking in the past tense, not about the present (“… were fought, threatened and erased …”).  Referring to what happened in the past does not prove that systemic racism exists now in America.  Second, she gives no evidence whatsoever that the racism that held black people back in the past was systemic.  For example, there is no doubt that the “Tulsa race massacre in 1921” was perpetrated by some evil people, but it does not appear to occur to the ladies of The View that referring to the behavior of individuals, even a lot of them, goes no way towards showing that there is systemic racism in the US.  That is, Hostin, reflecting the logic of the Left, readily jumps to a specific kind of fallacy of composition argument, an argument in which one fallaciously infers from the properties of the parts of a whole (those bad people in Tulsa) to the properties of the whole system itself.

The transparent lacuna in Hostin et al’s argument is made comically obvious when she asks Scot: “You have indicated that you don’t believe in systemic racism. What is your definition of systemic racism?”  However, since it is Hostin et al’s claim that there is systemic racism in the US it is for them to propose the definition (which does not mean that Scott is bound to accept it).  Hostin et al want Scott to provide the definition of the key term in their thesis?  Really?

Since the ladies of The View do not bother to define their key term in their thesis, one might help them along.  Since the expression “systemic racism” refers to the system, any proffered evidence for systemic racism would have to involve, not to properties of the individual persons in the system, but properties of the system per se.  For example, one might argue that there was systemic racism in the US, or at least in large parts of it, when Democrats passed the “Jim Crow” laws that enshrined blacks as second class citizens in the legal system.  One might also argue that there is systemic racism in certain entirely Democrat-run cities like Baltimore, Chicago, Atlanta and Philadelphia where the political and educational systems regularly turn out large percentages of black students who cannot read or write anywhere near grade level.  One might also argue that certain educational institutions like Harvard are systemically racist because their race-based admissions system is biased against Asian and white students in favour of black students who have lower levels of achievement (One might ask University of Chicago-trained black economist Thomas Sowell, as good a candidate for a genius in economics as there currently is, about that).  For reasons that are too obvious to mention, Hostin and the other ladies did not bring up those more plausible cases of systemic racism.

The point is that it would be possible to discuss the claim that the US is systemically racist in a serious and productive way. 

  • First, one would have to define the key terms properly. 
  • Second, one would have to avoid using the informal fallacies so common in television discussions of these issues. 
  • Third, one would need a basic understanding of the logic of science pertaining to the nature of evidence, the notions of confirmation and falsification and the basic ideas of probability and statistics.