Dumber by Design: Five Years Later, Reuters Is Determined to Learn Nothing from George Floyd Fallout
Groupthink's deadly toll
Sunday marked the fifth anniversary of the death of George Floyd.
The death led to Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, being convicted on two counts of murder. Of course, Floyd’s death led to so much more. The fallout took our COVID-rattled culture and transformed it into something much darker.
The monoculture used the five-year milestone to remind us of the “official” version of events. Consider, for instance, the coverage by Reuters, one of the world’s most influential news organizations.
According to Reuters, America was grinding through a time of great racial strife when Floyd’s tragic murder sparked a wave of progress for black people, progress that is now being rolled back:
[E]xactly five years after Floyd's murder, the nation has seen a drastic reversal of support for racial equity efforts. Commitments made by corporate America and the government have been dialed back or eliminated. Diversity, equity and inclusion policies and programs are in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump's administration. Some of these rollbacks predate his Oval Office return.
Readers know that’s the real story because that’s what the “experts” and “civil rights activists” cited in the article say is the real story. Consider who Reuters taps for comment:
George Floyd’s cousin Shareeduh McGee
NAACP President Derrick Johnson
Nadia Brown, a Georgetown professor of government and chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program
Rev. Al Sharpton
National Urban League President Marc Morial
BLM Grassroots founder Melina Abdullah
Movement for Black Lives co-executive Amara Enyia
The article highlights diversity, but it’s clear Reuters isn’t interested in intellectual diversity. The names above would likely generate high approval ratings at a Reuters company retreat, but they don’t represent the political diversity of black America, let alone America in general.
Readers do hear from one ostensibly neutral expert named Juliana Horowitz, but the authors tap the Pew Research senior associate director to reinforce their dark narrative.
Reuters did manage to squeeze in one heterodox voice:
Kevin McGary, a conservative and founder of Texas-based nonprofit Every Black Life Matters, said after Floyd's murder, some companies were under pressure to make pledges to advance equity in hiring practices.
While civil rights advocates say DEI ensures qualified minority candidates have equal opportunities, McGary and other critics have characterized the efforts as not being merit-based, "everybody should be pushed to have an excellent standard," he said.
In a thousand-word article, Reuters devotes nine words to a dissident voice. Moreover, the authors use McGary’s words to contrast him with what “correct-thinking” people believe. The reporters don’t describe the Rev. Al or any others as “progressive,” but they do slap scarlet letters on McGary. He’s a “conservative” and Reuters wants you to know that unbiased “civil rights advocates” disagree with him.
So on this most important historical matter, Reuters offers readers an 8-to-1 left-right ratio. More importantly, the highly-redacted version of history fails to tell anything close to the whole truth.
A Different Summary
Now how might we summarize the last five years?
Maybe something like this:
Race relations were chugging along quite well, but decades of indoctrination from Hollywood, academia, and the media primed Americans to be outraged about hot-button issues.
New developments, such as the rise of social media and especially the “like” and “retweet” buttons, turned that fuel into the fire of cancel culture. Race relations deteriorated, as did many other social indicators including Gen Z mental health and women’s view of how they were treated by society.
In 2020, the Floyd fallout mixed with the ham-fisted COVID response to turn the fire into an inferno. Paranoia, polarization, and the DEI worldview spread to nearly every corner of society. Eventually, our culture shed some of the most visible signs of madness, but our future trajectory remains unclear.
Like so many other legacy outlets, Reuters conflates black progress with the progress of the DEI industry. But DEI isn’t an end in itself. It’s a means to an end, one deeply-flawed means to an end.
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What’s Left Unsaid
Reuters’ scribes commit many sins of omission.
They don’t mention how companies and colleges quickly adopted DEI policies even in the absence of evidence for their effectiveness. They don’t mention that the policies and the worldview continued to spread after evidence mounted that DEI usually makes things worse.
They omit the fact that microaggression training, a central feature of DEI, contradicts ancient wisdom and modern psychology. They omit any mention of how the DEI worldview can fuel anxiety and depression among black people as well as other minorities. The Reuters reporters also omit the fact that Americans of every color reject at least two of the three pillars of DEI — they don’t like racial preferences and they prefer MLK’s equality (equal opportunity) to Ibram X. Kendi’s equity (equal results).
Reuters references BLM as if it were a force for progress, but fails to mention that most Americans, including most black Americans, never supported the movement’s signature policy — defunding the police. Reuters omits many other uncomfortable realities including BLM’s shady financial dealings and the uptick in violent crime that many attribute to diminished and demoralized police departments.
Reuters wants America to hear from an infamous grifter like Al Sharpton, but its reporters have no time for an expert like Roland Fryer. The wunderkind Harvard economist suffered through plenty of racism growing up in Texas. Some of his white friends' parents wouldn’t allow black people in their living rooms—and this was the 80s!
And when Fryer directed his powers of statistical analysis to policing, he was sure his findings would support BLM claims of systemic racism. Instead he found something else. Although blacks and Latinos were more likely than whites to experience some level of police force, they were slightly less likely to be shot. Fryer was so surprised by the findings that he and his research team crunched the numbers again. Yet the results remained the same.
Fryer explains how friends and colleagues feared for his career and safety. They urged him to keep his findings quiet, but Fryer didn’t cower before the mob. He released his findings and endured tremendous blowback. Harvard even suspended him based on dubious sexual harassment allegations.
Enter Zac Kriegman.
The Reuters director of data science explains how, in 2020, his colleagues fell into the grip of a new ideology. On Hub, the company’s internal collaboration platform, they’d post about “the self-indulgent tears of white women” and the danger of “White Privilege glasses.” In the meantime, Kriegman began to develop misgivings about the official narrative about police violence:
I had been following the academic research on BLM for years (for example, here, here, here and here), and I had come to the conclusion that the claim upon which the whole movement rested—that police more readily shoot black people—was false.
Then he came across the only study “that has looked at the rate at which police use lethal force in similar circumstances across racial groups.” It was Fryer’s study.
Kriegman grew frustrated as his colleagues became increasingly convinced by a narrative he now regarded as dangerously false:
A pattern was starting to emerge: Reporters and editors would omit key details that undermined the BLM narrative. More important than reporting accurately was upholding—nurturing—that storyline. At some point, the organization went from ignoring key facts to just reporting lies.
Eventually, Kriegman couldn’t take it any more.
He wrote a detailed post that included links to many academic papers. He listed respected criminologists who now believed the false rhetoric around police bias played an important role in the recent spike in violent crime. It suggests, he wrote, “that the BLM lie led to the murder of thousands of black people.”
To drive home my point, I included this striking statistic: On an average year, 18 unarmed black people and 26 unarmed white people are shot by police. By contrast, roughly 10,000 black people are murdered annually by criminals in their own neighborhoods.
After a great deal of hemming and hawing, Kriegman shared his post on Hub.
Of course, a backlash erupted.
Of course, he was accused of racism.
Of course, he was fired.
Dumber by Design
Over the past decade or so, we’ve seen countless mobs attack truth tellers like Fryer and Kriegman. And for every person who stands up, many more cower in silence. But what may be even more maddening than the cancellations and self censorship is what happens when fear stymies open inquiry.
Kriedman explains how groupthink undermined his colleagues’ goal of racial progress:
Here I was trying to bring the company's attention to how we were spreading lies that were contributing to the murders of thousands of black people, and I was compared to a Klansman sympathizer, and forbidden by the company to discuss any of it.
I agree with Kriegman and Fryer’s analysis, but I’m also well aware that I’m not an expert on policing. It’s possible their take might be flawed, but if we’re too afraid to engage in the clash of ideas, we won’t get smarter. As Jonathan Haidt puts it in The Coddling movie, punishing dissidents is like shooting ourselves in the brain.
Today the monoculture is hard at work telling us half truths and lies about the past.
They will repeat these “official” summaries over and over, and the groupthink will ensure that America remains dumber and deadlier than it should be.
Liberal arts college is where you go to have any sense of introspection or rationality drummed out of your mind. I can say that; I have a master's degree in educational administration.
Great video link! Regarding Fryer's goal - Unfortunately, no one wants true talent optimization - b/c the results will not appease all the races or the wealthy.