A Guide for Debating Ben Shapiro on Institutional Racism

Shapiro's Stance:

1. Racists exists, but institutional racism does not exist. There are even advantages to being black in America today (scholarships, affirmative action, etc.).
2. Institutional racism existed as late as the 70s and 80s, but has since been resolved
3. Ben Shapiro: “point me to an example of an institution that is racist and we can fight that racism together.”
4. Ben Shapiro: “if someone has been the target of institutional racism they can find a good lawyer and sue that institution.”
5. For anyone to “make it” in America they need to: a) finish high school, b) wait for marriage to have children, c) get a job - this has nothing to do with race. Failure to “make it” in America, reflects a moral failing on the part of the person who failed to make it.
6. Claims of institutional racism reflects a failure to appreciate how wonderful and prosperous life in America is today.
7. Institutional racism is a tool of "the left" for invoking government action and curtailing freedoms.
8. People are only incarcerated in this country if they deserve it.

Opening Question:

Student: You minimize the significance of institutional racism in our society, but there’s a lot of academic literature on that topic. I want to understand what you think about that literature. Is it all BS?

Shapiro: Yes, most of it is BS.

Student: Okay, that's fair. But just to be clear, we're talking about conclusions in reputable academic journals and the conclusions of data scientists who are doing simple data-analysis on loan interest rate data and government sentencing data. You flatly reject the validity of all those results? Do you think our nation's academics are dishonest? Misled?

Shapiro: Firstly, I don't think it's really a consensus in the academic world. Secondly, yes I think the academic community has a very distorting liberal bias. But I'm not really sure what findings you're referring to so it's impossible for me to respond.

Student: Okay, so let's be very specific. I have here written a few specific examples of institutional racism that are frequently cited in the academic literature:

1. When controlling for credit score, Blacks and Latinos pay higher interest rates for home loans than Whites
2. Blacks and Latinos are more likely to be turned down for a bank loan than Whites
3. Black students get harsher punishments in school than White students for the exact same infractions from as early as preschool
4. Americans see Black boys as being older and less innocent than White boys of the same age and this discrepancy gets exaggerated when the person making that judgement is told that the boy under inspection was suspected of a crime
5. On average, Blacks receive sentences 20% longer than Whites for the exact same crimes
6. People with black sounding names and a strong resume are less likely to be called for a job interview than people with white sounding names and a weak resume
7. Blacks are far more likely to be incarcerated for drug crimes than Whites and the project of mass incarceration has resulted in America being the most highly incarcerated country in the world and has completely destroyed Black communities in this country
8. Defendants are much more likely to be sentenced to death for killing a white person than killing a black person
9. A report by the National Registry of Exonerations found innocent black people are about seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people and that black people convicted of murder are about 50% more likely to be innocent than other convicted murderers

Potential Exchanges:

Shapiro: Wrong, felonies are under-prosecuted in the Black community.

Okay, that's an interesting statistic, but not really relevant to what I'm talking about. More relevant statistics include: how does the severity of the sentence meted out change by race? How does prosecution depend on whether we're talking about Black-on-Black crime or Black-on-White crime?

Shapiro: That statistic may be correct, but it doesn't imply racism. There is no one you can point to and say ‘you’re a racist.’

Great! so you’re just saying that the whole issue here is one of terminology. You recognize that Blacks face barriers to success, but you're caught up on the question of whether or not we can identify a particular bigot. The whole point of term "institutional racism" as distinct from regular racism is that there is no individual racist. These are barriers to success that exist as part of an institutional biases and practice. If you want, we can pick a different term for it, but it's nice that we can agree that the phenomena exists and now maybe we can have a conversation about what to do about it.

Shapiro: There's nothing that can be done about that, that's just the way markets/systems/institutions work.

Okay, so maybe we agree that institutional racism exists, but we disagree about whether or not anything that can be done. That’s perfectly fair. What to do about systemic racism is a very different discussion than does systemic racism exist. 

Here are the kinds of solutions people who talk about this issue want to see: fix our nation's highly discriminatory peremptory strike laws that allows lawyers to eliminate jurors based on skin color, rollback our country’s draconian mandatory minimum sentencing laws for non-violent drug offences, demand better oversight and training for law enforcement, invest in our nation’s public school system and fight any legislation which seeks to de-fund our nation’s public schools under the guise of school-choice and private-school voucherization, call for a moratorium on the death penalty until our society address the systemic racial bias in the way it currently gets applied, pass that laws that allow people who were those convicted of non-violent crimes access to government housing, the right to vote, and fair employment procedures, etc.

Shapiro: If a bank is discriminating against Blacks in their loan offerings, someone should just sue that bank.

I’m really glad you raised that point, because that is the crux of the issue and is exactly the reason that the concept of institutional racism is so important. In our country you cannot sue under the equal protection clause in unless you prove discriminatory intent, in other words, the only racism protected by our country’s laws is the racism of a bigot and not the institutional racism that we are talking about. The famous example is the Supreme Court case McClesky v. Kemp. In that case, the prosecutor showed that killers of Whites were significantly more likely to receive the death penalty than killers of Blacks and the court agreed with that finding but found that there was no discriminatory intent so the prosecution lost that case. This is exactly why the notion of institutional racism exists and is important - there are still grotesque forms of racism that cannot be addressed by our legal system.

Shapiro: It’s a myth that our justice system disproportionately targets Blacks, and the reason Blacks are more likely to receive the death penalty is because they are far more likely to commit violent crime.

The whole world of academia disagrees with you, and the supreme court of the United States disagrees with you. See McClesky v. Kemp (in that case the Supreme Court acknowledged major racial disparities in the application of the death penalty). Denying these racial disparities is such a joke because all this government data is publicly available and anyone who knows how to use Excel can do their own analysis and confirm these results for themselves. 

Shapiro: Universities are a bastion of liberal ideology and shouldn’t be trusted.

Okay, so you’re saying that if institutional racism of that kind existed, you agree that we should stand-up and fight against, but you just don't believe the people who say it exists. When data-scientists explore open government data about mortgage rate information or sentencing data - you will automatically assume those data-scientists are dishonest? What if I do that data analysis myself? If we sat down together and analyzed government sentencing/home mortgage data and found the discrepancies on our own, would you change your mind then?

Shapiro: You have it backward. This notion of institutional racism promotes a narrative of victimhood that causes people to be held back in our society.

If you read any book or news article about poverty in the inner-city, you would know that every teacher and counselor and parent trying to raise a kid in that environment hammers home a mantra of “no excuses” - if you don't succeed you have only yourself to blame. So the idea that poor people are reveling in their victimhood is patently false.

More to the point, these teachers and students do not know about or do not care about institutional racism. The message to these kids is that they shouldn’t be held back by the fact that: a) they don’t have enough calories in their stomach to focus in math class, or b) their father is in jail for drug possession, or c) their younger brother got shot by a stray bullet while walking home from school the other day. The idea that affluent people like me reading books about institutional racism written by other successful academics is the barrier to success preventing these kids from escaping a miserable and grinding poverty is just laughable.

Shapiro: The reason Black communities have so much drug abuse and violent crime is because of 'Black culture.'

I think that’s a very simplistic and self-serving theory, but I’m not going to debate that with you because it’s completely irrelevant to the question of institutional racism that I'm talking about. I'm arguing that Blacks and Whites should be treated equally in our society and I'm arguing that they're not treated equally in our society. You're welcome imagine the average Black person as a delinquent, but that is unrelated to my argument that Black people deserved to be sentenced the same way Whites are sentenced and get the same interest rate on a loan as a white person in the same socio-economic circumstance.

More Info:

See also: A Guide to Debating Ben Shapiro on Poverty in America

If you have any criticisms, additions, or suggestions, please leave a comment and I will update this document with any thoughts that I think are useful.