A person could just as easily say that “black criminality” is to be defined as the fact that the average (mean) conviction rate of black people is higher than the conviction rate of other “races”. A while back, I was annoyed by a link to that guy from the WSJ editorial board, the African-American, can’t remember his name… (looking…) Jason Riley is his name, and he was writing about the problem of “black criminality” in the US, and he was clearly using the term in exactly that way. Obviously he wasn’t saying that as a black man, he was personally a criminal. He was talking about group averages. If we were to define the term so, as he did, then it would be “true”. It’s true that the averages are different.
It’s still a hideous term.
If a poster on the boards started using this term – even if the term was carefully and explicitly defined before being used – I hope would there would still be objections to using it here. Even given the true fact of mean differences, the term can carry the disturbing potential connotation of causality, as if there is something in “blackness” that leads to criminality. The term does not engage with individuals as individuals, does not engage the systematic history of discrimination against the black community in American history, does not explore the differences between how certain crimes are punished (the crack-cocaine distinction, for instance), does not explore how sellers of drugs that are legal, such as alcohol and tobacco, are much less violent than sellers of illegal drugs. The violence from drugs comes from their criminality, as can be seen from alcohol prohibition, the gangsters and bootleggers. If the cultural conditions were improved, it’s easy to imagine “black criminality” disappearing entirely, the mean difference evaporating into nothingness.
The term doesn’t have any of that nuance. It’s an awful term. And the awfulness generalizes.
The attempt to define a dehumanizing term into something innocuous does not make it innocuous. It is awful precisely because of its inherent potential to ignore individual difference. Using a term that potentially treats an entire group the same way, despite the variance within that group, has the inherent power to be abused by the abusive. And even supposing that its use is innocent – naive rather than malicious – it still carries the potential to be inadvertently abrasive. Summary statistics are dehumanizing. Talking about group means, rather than individuals, is dehumanizing. Obviously, we need summary statistics, we can’t keep whole data sets inside our heads, but we can still talk with care about what we’re discussing when we’re discussing groups and group differences.
If a term is “very commonly misunderstood”, then it is a bad term.
There’s an asymmetry here. The potential harm in one direction is obviously much greater than the harm in the other. But that’s still an average. It’s generally true, but not always true, because there is still variance within groups. Averages don’t apply to the entire population. That’s the whole point. There are vulnerable people within privileged groups. People are still different. To allow dehumanizing terms in one direction, while making them verboten in the other direction, is not some random outcome. It’s a deliberate choice to allow open season in only one direction. And the very deliberateness of that choice makes it insulting.
This is not a hard idea.
I’m often astounded about the number of people writing on social issues who aren’t particularly sensitive to this. Dehumanization can work in any direction. That’s true even when it is, on average, worse in one direction than another.