Moreover, I can’t understand why you characterize the administrative process as not arduous. I’d be curious to know what kinds of things are arduous, in the context of a university administrative setting. Granted, they did not not use tasers on him – is that what you mean?
Maybe Snowboarder Bo can explain the source of his knowledge, and the extent of what he understands happened to Jacobowitz. I am very interested in the $100 figure.
The problem is that it’s almost impossible to prove that a claim of racism is false, and it’s equally hard to prove whether any harm was done.
For example, George Zimmerman was repeatedly accused of racism, a claim for which there is no evidence AFAIK. But how do you prove that was a false accusation? A news service doctored 911 audio to make it appear that he was racist. Another news service claimed that he called Martin a “Stupid coon” based on distortion on cell phone. Those claims were provably false accusations of racism.
But was Zimmerman harmed by those accusations? How would you prove it? Certainly he was not going to be charged before the racism furore erupted. So you could make a strong argument that the accusations of racism hurt him very, very badly.
But how would you prove such a thing?
The question is asking for evidence that an event didn’t occur, which is notoriously difficult to do. But to compound it, its also asking for evidence oft he effect of the event which didn’t occur, which is effectively impossible.
We can certainly point to plenty of cases where accusations of racism that had no objective, factual basis fact hurt people. But because racism is a state of mind an not a physical object, it’s impossible to ever prove that those accusations were false accusations.
Anyone who wants to can always argue that Zimmerman really was racist despite having no evidence for the claim. So the OP is asking for evidence for something for which it is not possible to collect evidence.
Thanks for all the responses. As I suspected, the answer to my OP is probably “yes”. I think it’s likely, however, that the great worries on the right that false accusations of racism are rampant and intellectually stifling is just victimization fantasy, for the most part.
So I think false accusations can be harmful, but very rarely do they cause significant suffering, and they’re much less common (in my belief) then the complaints might indicate.
Can you perhaps tell us what examples you would accept? For example, do you accept the Zimmerman example? Would you accept the police officer is the Rodney King case as an example? Would you accept the anecdote of my co-worker who was forced to attend an arbitration meeting and then ordered to go to 12 hours of sensitivity training while being expected to maintain the same workload and who has been denied promotion several times since the incident despite never being denied before?
In short, can you explain what standard of evidence is acceptable, how “significant” the harm should be?
It seems obvious that even if this is a major problem the vast majority of cases are going to be based on unprovable anecdote, just as the vat majority of examples of harm done by actual racism are based on unprovable anecdote.
I guess the question then becomes how prevalent and harmful false accusations of racism are compared to the prevalence and harm of actual racism and how we could make such a comparison.
If you have enough evidence to conclude that the great worries on the right that false accusations of racism are rampant and intellectually stifling is just victimization fantasy, for the most part, then can we use that same standard of evidence to conclude that the great worries on the left that racism is rampant and intellectually stifling is just victimization fantasy, for the most part. If we can’t, then why can’t we?
Ignore the stuff about Gates - just look at the description of the environment the guy is in. Do you think those constant false accusations of racism he’s getting are harmless?
Thanks for the numbers there, Bricker. I’ll concede that Mr. Jacobowitz was harmed. Though I find the notion that he was significantly harmed unsupported I note that many seem to be elevating the possibility of significant harm to the same level as something that would actually be significantly harmful; I don’t share that view here.