Conservative whites who consider themselves respectable typically do not use the explicitly racist causal explanations behind higher rates of black poverty, violent crime, academic struggle, and so on. Ideas of blacks being naturally lazier, more aggressive or deviant, and less intelligent than white people are largely unspeakable today. Instead, these things are simply implied, wrapped in more palatable or comfortable language so one can go about the day guilt-free. This isn’t always conscious. It’s startling to realize that such whites, probably in most cases from what this writer has observed, do not realize their beliefs imply racist things. This is simply cognitive dissonance; it’s people believing with every fiber of their being that they are not racist, and therefore any explanation they believe cannot be racist, no matter how obviously it actually is to observers.

A few examples:

The problem is black culture. You don’t want to say there’s something wrong with black people. Instead, say there’s something wrong with black culture! This black culture is one of violence and revenge, of getting hooked on welfare instead of looking for work, of fathers abandoning mothers and children to create broken, single-parent homes, and so on. But obviously, to say there’s something wrong with black culture is to say there is something wrong with black people. Where, after all, did this “culture” come from? To respectable conservative whites, who should always be asked that very question immediately, it comes from black people themselves. Such whites won’t include an educated explanation of how history, environment/social conditions, and public policies produce “culture” — how recent American history birthed disproportionate poverty, how poverty breeds violence and necessitates welfare use, how a government’s racist War on Drugs and the crimes and violent deaths bred by that very poverty might mean more families without fathers. They surely won’t point out, as a nice comparison, that the white American culture of yesteryear that placed the age of sexual consent for girls at 10 years old, or a white European culture of executing those who questioned the Christian faith, obviously did not stem from whiteness itself, having nothing to do with caucasian ethnicity — so what does “black culture” have to do with blackness? Are these not human beings behaving in predictable ways to the poverty of the place or the theology of the time? People who think in such rational ways wouldn’t use the “problem is black culture” line in the first place. Nay, it is black folk themselves that create this culture, meaning something is terribly wrong with the race, with blacks as people, something linked to biology and genetics — as uncomfortable as that will be for some whites to hear, it is the corner they have readily backed themselves into. After all, white people do not have this “culture.” Why? Are whites superior?

It’s all about personal choice. Another popular one. The problem is black people are making the wrong choices. They have free will, why don’t they choose peace over violence, choose to look harder for a job or a higher-paying gig, study harder in school, just go to college? The response is again painfully obvious. If racial discrepancies all just boil down to personal choices, this is simply to say that blacks make worse personal choices than white people. This is so self-evident that the temptation to throw this article right in the garbage is overwhelming. To whites, blacks are making choices they wouldn’t personally make. There is no consideration of how environment can affect you. Take whether or not you flunk out of college. You hardly choose where or the family into which you are born, and growing up in a poor home affects your mental and physical development, typically resulting in worse academic performance than if you’d been born into a wealthy family; likewise, children don’t choose where they are educated: wealthy families can afford the best private schools and SAT tutoring, black public schools are more poorly funded than white public schools, and so on. Such things affect your ability to graduate college, or even gain admission. Nor is it considered how environment impacts your decisions themselves. For instance, witnessing violence as a child makes you more likely to engage in it, to choose to engage in it. Nor is there a thought to how social settings affect the choices you’ll even face in your life — if you live in a wealthy area without much crime, for instance, you are less likely to experience peer pressure from a friend to commit an illegal act (just as you’re less likely to see violence and thus engage in it later). One can be more successful in life with fewer opportunities to make bad choices in the first place! But none of that can be envisioned. For respectable conservative whites, there is something wrong with black people, something defective about their decision-making or moral character. White people, in contrast, make better choices, the right choices, and are thus wealthier, safer, better educated, families intact. Again, the implication of inferiority is front and center.

Good parenting is really the key. It all comes down to parenting. If black parents stuck together, emphasized to their kids the importance of education, a hard work ethic, the family unit, and turning the other cheek, all these racial disparities could come to an end. The disgusting implications are no doubt clear to the reader already, meaning we need not tarry here. To pin social problems on poor parenting, without any consideration of outside factors, is to simply say black humans are inherently worse parents than white humans. Whatever the problem with black moms and dads, white ones are happily immune.

These implications must be exposed whenever one hears them, and the conversation turned away from race and biology and toward history and socio-economics. Toward the truth.

The racial wealth gap in the United States was birthed by the horrors done to blacks: slavery meant black people, apart from some freemen, started with nothing in 1865, whereas whites began wealth accumulation centuries before, a colossal wealth gap; Jim Crow oppression meant another century of being paid lower wages, denied even menial employment and certainly high-paying jobs, hired last and fired first, kept out of universities, denied home loans or offered worse terms, taught in poorly funded schools, kept out of high-value neighborhoods through violence and racial covenants, and more; studies show that even today racism still affects wealth accumulation in significant ways. By studying history in a serious manner, we begin to understand why the racial wealth gap exists and why it has not yet closed — not because there’s something defective about black people, but because, beyond today’s challenges with racism, there simply has not been enough time for it to close. People who lived through the Jim Crow era, some mere grandchildren of slaves, are still alive today. This is hardly ancient history; it’s two or three generations.

The poverty that persists does to blacks what it does to human beings of all races. It exacerbates crime (not only theft or the drug trade as ways of earning more income, but from the stress in puts on the brain, equivalent to sleep deprivation, causing people to act in ways they simply would not have had they been in more affluent settings), it hurts the performance of students, it leads to more men confined to the cell or the coffin and thus not at home, and other challenges. Bad public policies, from city underinvestment in the black parts of town to the War on Drugs, make things worse. It is right to be a good parent, to make wise choices, and to value a positive culture — but for whites to imagine that some abandonment of these things by our black neighbors is the root cause of racial disparities, with no discussion of history and social conditions and how they persist and affect human beings, is racist and rotten to the core. Respectable conservative whites (and some black conservatives who focus exclusively on parenting, choices, and culture) may not notice or be conscious of such implications, but this can be made temporary.

If we consider ourselves to be moral creatures, it is our responsibility to give these rosier modern framings of old racist ideas no quarter.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.

In the discussion of police brutality, generally speaking, one camp calls for sweeping, radical, even terminal changes to policing in order to end beatings and killings of civilians, while the other camp stresses that police officers have extremely dangerous, high-stress jobs and, while mistakes do occur at times, certain changes will only make things more dangerous for cops and for the public at large. There’s some talking past each other here, but perhaps one of the more significant things that is missed or simply isn’t much discussed is how these ideas are connected: of course people who go through trauma might be more likely to snap and murder someone for no reason at all.

A couple clarifications here. First, many on the Left will have little sympathy for the police no matter how traumatized someone might be by seeing dead bodies, blood and brains splattered about, raped children, and beaten wives, or by being shot at or otherwise attacked. After all, individuals who join police forces do so by choice, participate (whether aware of it or not) in an oppressive system that ensures the constant harassment and mistreatment of people of color, and so on. For some of my comrades, talking about how officer trauma might contribute to police brutality would be a major faux pas, offering excuses or a sympathetic ear to the other side in a rather uncomfortable way. Yet if police trauma does exist, and if it does contribute in some way to police brutality, it makes sense to think about it, discuss it, and figure out what to do about it. Sympathy isn’t required. Second, it should be clarified that acknowledging trauma as a possible cause of police violence doesn’t mean other causes, such as racism, machismo and power, poor training and use of force procedures, age, a dearth of education, complete lack of punishment, and so forth don’t exist and have devastating effects on society. (Another one is the human tendency to mistakenly see things you’re watching for. If you’re speeding and watching for cops, every other car begins to look like a cop. If you’re watching for guns or threatening movements from someone you’ve pulled over…) Finally, a discussion like this one isn’t meant to distract or deflect from the terrible trauma that victims of police violence live with for the rest of their lives. If there is a way we can stop one trauma from leading to another, we should pursue it.

We know officers’ experiences contribute to PTSD and other serious psychological and physiological problems. “Research has indicated that by the time police officers put on their uniform and begin general patrol, their stress-related cardiovascular reactivity is already elevated,” and this is followed by, generally speaking, “at least 900 potentially traumatic incidents over the course of their career.” Some officers will have bigger problems, if they came from the military and were traumatized in the bloodbath of war. Extreme stress and PTSD can lead to aggression and exaggerated startle response and recklessness; in police officers it’s been shown to lead to less control in decision-making “due to heightened arousal to threats, inability to screen out interfering information, or the inability to keep attention.” Academics in The Huffington Post and Psychology Today have connected occupational trauma to brutality, as have former officers on fervent pro-cop sites (for example, could reforms addressing trauma “reduce the number of inappropriate decisions some officers make? If we are concerned about the dysfunctional actions of some cops, is it possible that some of the fault lies with the rest of us who ignore the trauma that officers go through?”). More research would be valuable, but it’s a safe bet police trauma contributes to police brutality. (A connection also exists, by the way, between officer stress and violence against their romantic partners.)

This writer doesn’t have too much more to say on the matter — it simply seems important to connect the two ideas mentioned in the first paragraph, especially for those of us who care about justice and about encouraging others of very different views to care as well. “True, the police have dangerous jobs, but do you see how the extreme stress that most officers experience might make police brutality a serious problem? Perhaps there are other factors, too. Perhaps there are societal changes we can make that would address both officer PTSD or safety and police brutality against ordinary people.” It could be a way to build a bridge or find a sliver of common ground.

How to actually address such trauma will range wildly, of course, from the reactionary, though valid, sentiments from police departments about the need for more mental healthcare to the radical (“Radical simply means grasping things at the root,” Angela Davis) idea that we “Abolish the Police.” After all, no police means no police trauma. And no police brutality. Convincing people that trauma contributes to brutality seems far easier than agreement on how to solve these things.

This is a bit of an aside, but I’m still determining where I personally fall when it comes to what to specifically do about the police. I firmly believe that broad changes are needed concerning: who responds to certain nonviolent calls (it need not be quasi-soldiers, at least not as first responders); the allocation of resources, with reform devoting huge sums into addressing the root causes of crime, namely poverty, instead of into policing and other initiatives that only address the symptoms; the qualifications, education, training, evaluation, use of force procedures, and weaponry of those who respond to violent calls; what an individual can be pulled over or confronted or arrested for, just serious changes to law and policy; who investigates police misconduct (not the departments) and how abusive officers are punished, beginning with termination and blacklisting and ending with prison sentences; and much more. These things, perhaps combined with better mental healthcare and therapy, reduced hours, increased leave, shorter careers, and so forth for those facing traumatic situations, can reduce both the trauma and violence. (Although I don’t recall the specific incident, in the news a few years ago there was a report about how the officer who killed an unarmed black man in the evening had witnessed a murder or suicide that morning; taking him off duty seems like it would have been an obvious thing to do.) But I do suspect that modern societies will always have some traumatic situations and need individuals to enter them, whether it’s the police or something resembling the police. Perhaps more personal study is needed. I recently asked of my acquaintances:

I haven’t studied #PoliceAbolition or #PrisonAbolition theory with any depth. Currently, it seems likely to me that future human societies — more decent ones, with prosperity for all, unarmed response teams, restorative justice, and more — would still require some persons or groups authorized to use force against others in circumstances where de-escalation fails, and require some persons to be separated against their will from the general population, for the sake of its safety, during rehabilitation. These scenarios seem likely to be far rarer when we radically transform social conditions and societal policies, but not disappear completely. Can anyone recommend abolitionist literature that either 1) specifically makes the case that such circumstances would never occur and thus such force requirements are void, or 2) that argues such circumstances would indeed occur but specifically lays out how such requirements could be handled (force could be used) by alternative people or institutions without, over time, devolving back into something close to today’s police and prisons.

My mind may change as I go through some of the recommended readings, but as it stands I wonder if the number of individuals authorized to use force, their trauma, and their brutality can only be greatly reduced, rather than eradicated completely. While a better human society is possible and will be won, a perfect one may be out of reach.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.

The events of 10:00pm to midnight on May 30, 2020 on Kansas City’s Plaza — protests and unrest following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis — included the following. 

The police, in riot gear and gas masks, blockaded the intersections along Ward Parkway, refusing to allow newcomers, additional protesters, to move deeper into the Plaza, angering a small but growing crowd. “Let us through!” Journalists likewise were not allowed to enter. From the vantage point at the blockade, it was clear a gathering of protesters was locked in a standoff with police up around 47th and Wyandotte Street. The sound of helicopters, sirens, police radios and bullhorns, and protesters’ shouts clashed in the air. Sharp pops. The protesters inside fled west as one, as police dispersed tear gas. Much concern was voiced from the crowd at the barrier.

After a time, an explosion rocked the Plaza. “Shit!” exclaimed members of the crowd, among variations — and even the police could not help but turn their heads away from the masses and look. It appeared a parked car, near where the standoff occurred, had been firebombed. The press later indicated it was a police car. “It’s going down, boy,” someone said. Flames and smoke rose high, and shortly thereafter fire fighters arrived. Meanwhile, a man, tall and skinny, yelled at the police at the barrier, saying he was a veteran who fought for the rights the police trample upon — “You’re a fucking disgrace.” Two women likewise unleashed their anger.

Walking west along Ward Parkway, in an attempt to follow the group of runners from afar, revealed a bridal shop window smashed. Some jokes from observers about black people wanting to get married tonight — though there did not appear to be anything looted. A young woman and man huddled together nearby, the woman distraught over the scene. Soon the pair entered the store through the front door, quickly followed by a shouting cop. “She owns the place, man, it’s all right,” the observers said. The pair echoed this, and the cop recommended finding someone to board up the window. Various other storefronts were boarded up, in advance, along the street.

“I’m just trying to get to my fucking car,” a passerby said to an acquaintance, realizing he could not enter the parking garage due to the blockades. In the street, gas canisters, COVID-19 masks, abandoned signs, water bottles, graffiti. Another broken storefront window, more graffiti. A fire department vehicle with a smashed windshield. A black woman thanking a cop for being out tonight doing his job.

Reaching Broadway, where one could finally turn north, showed a few people arrested and sitting on the pavement outside the Capital Grille at the feet of the police. They did not seem a part of the fleeing protesters, and may have been taken out of their cars, which were along the street, doors open. Moving north, one met the protesters, now all scattered and disjointed, many moving south but some further west and some simply hanging out here and there. The faint sting of tear gas infected the eyes. Strangers made sure one was all right.

“H&M!” a man hollered triumphantly, a valuable bundle in his hands, before three cops on bikes appeared from nowhere, sirens blasting. The man and several other looters sprinted south down Broadway, pursued.

The central Plaza secured, the main confrontation point became the blockade where the crowd witnessed the car explosion, Ward Parkway and Wyandotte. The group grew considerably, to a few hundred, swelled by the protesters that had fled the tear gas a block north. It was young, diverse. The ranks of police were reinforced as well.

Protesters gathered in Ward Parkway, signs held high: “I Can’t Breathe,” “Black Lives Matter.” A few cars zipped around wildly in circles, as if to emphasize the protesters’ control of the street. A white car with four or five people in it pulled up and distributed water, while also providing the tunes. A dance circle formed for a time, while both sides held their ground. Skateboards, scooters shot by. A more festive atmosphere. A chant began — no justice, no peace. But mostly individuals had their say — calls for an end to police killings and abuse.

Eventually the police ordered the protesters to clear the streets and return to the sidewalks or face arrest. The street was full of people, but most were already there. The police seemed to select one individual to make an example of, and surged toward a white man with a sign, arresting him. Their orders ignored, the police pressed forward. Someone threw a water bottle at them. The police shook their gas cans ominously. “Scary ass motherfuckers,” a young woman said. Another woman was arrested. A man hollered, “The police started as slave-catchers! Not much has changed.” “You don’t have to do what your superiors say,” someone called out. Some taunted the black officers, the so-labeled “Uncle Toms.”

The police surged forward, pepper spray raised. A protester threw a brick or rock at them as everyone scrambled in retreat, by foot, scooter, or vehicle. The white car that had delivered water was in trouble, needing to back up toward the police in order to get out of its space and flee. Several officers walked up to the vehicle menacingly. “They’re going, they’re going!” shouted protesters. “Leave them alone!” An officer sprayed into the face of someone in the back seat as the vehicle backed up and lurched forward, the driver clearly panicked.

After pushing their line forward, the police then retreated back to their original position. The crowd then began moving forward, back to theirs.

The police announced that gas would be used if the crowd did not disperse, which the crowd had no interest in doing. The hiss of gas pierced the night air as cans were thrown, grey smoke billowing and streaking behind them. Pandemonium. Screams and shouts as all turned and ran, except for one brave soul who threw a can back. The tear gas burned, blinded. The police, marching forward, were quickly obscured, swallowed by smoke and distance, as the protesters splintered into three masses and fled east, south, and west.

The tear gas appeared to end the Plaza protest — by midnight the crowd had not reformed. However, a woman, leaning out the passenger window of a car moving down Ward Parkway, called out, “We’re going to Westport!”

The time is 3:40am on Sunday, May 31, 2020. Three of the four officers involved in George Floyd’s death have yet to be arrested.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.

Imagine, if you will, six scenarios:

• A Nazi punches a man walking down the street because he is a Jew; a Jew punches a man walking down the street because he is a Nazi.
• A woman says to another “You’re the problem with America. Get out of this country, fucking bitch” because she is Hispanic; a woman says to another “You’re the problem with America. Get out of this country, fucking bitch” because she is unabashedly racist.
• A restaurant owner refuses to serve a man because he is gay; a restaurant owner refuses to serve a man because he despises gay people.

The mind’s first temptation may be to construct creative contexts, but there are no ambiguities here. The Nazi is not just an ultraconservative; he believes in Nazism and wears the swastika. The Hispanic woman is a citizen born in Idaho and the racist woman knows it; the racist woman is not merely concerned with how unfair illegal entry is to those waiting their turn or that illegal immigrants are “stealing jobs,” but rather she does not like Hispanics — living in the same neighborhood as they, working with them, hearing Spanish, and so forth. The first restaurant owner and the second man denied service both go way beyond trust in biblical teachings about how homosexuality is an abominable sin — it disgusts them beyond words, they believe it should be a crime as it once was, they don’t value the life of a gay person equal to that of “normal” straight person. These being hypothetical scenarios of my own creation, there are no excuses nor saving grace available.

The question explored here isn’t which of these things are wrong and which are right. People have different ideas concerning when violence, extreme disrespect, or denial of service is acceptable, if ever. Sorting through all that, making a case one way or another, is not the point. Let’s proceed from the standpoint that all of these things are morally wrong. That is, after all, the typical premise of someone presenting a moral equivalence relevant to this discussion. The premise is: a racist attack is morally wrong and an attack against a racist is morally wrong. The moral equivalence is: an attack against a racist is as morally wrong as a racist attack.

Is it?

Are the scenarios above and their inverses truly equal in their “wrongness”? Or can two things be wrong, but one slightly less wrong?

Today, this debate arises constantly. We have open Nazis walking around the mall and white supremacists attacking or murdering people of color, unhinged riders unleashing racist rants on the bus, with medical institutions refusing to treat LGBT Americans and pastors wishing more gay people had died in the Orlando massacre. We also have Antifa and others sucker-punching Nazis and advocating we “Kill Nazis,” a gunman killing Republicans, business owners kicking out Trump supporters — and people attacking them physically or verbally. Opposing protesters brawl in the streets.

To reiterate, all of these things could be called morally wrong. After all, they do harm to others. But here we need to add an important point: to say a scenario is more morally wrong than its inverse is not to advocate for either. To conclude, for instance, that denying service to a bigot is less morally egregious than denying service to a gay person isn’t to automatically or necessarily advocate for denying service to bigots. One can still oppose both because he or she has determined they are both on the spectrum of immorality, even if at different points. Likewise, to say that some things are worse than other things, to believe a scenario worse than its inverse, is not to say this is always true for any other scenario and its inverse. As we will see, where motives are more equal the immorality of actions are more equal.

Turning back to our hypothetical situations and whether they involve false equivalences, we first have to agree upon the principle that some actions can indeed be morally worse than others — that a spectrum of morality makes sense. This shouldn’t even have to be argued, but there may be some religious fundamentalists or others who posit all “sin” is equally wrong. So lying about your age is just as wrong as rape. This sort of black-and-white thinking isn’t something most people, including people of faith, take seriously, so we won’t spend much time on it. (And we’ve already seen how morality is opinion-based even if God exists; see Where Does Morality Come From?; The Philosophy of Morality; Yes, Liberals and Atheists Believe in Absolute Truth; Is Relative Morality More Dangerous Than Objective Morality?) Most people would conclude stealing money from a man’s wallet is not as wrong as killing him, and so forth. So some wrongs are more wrong than other wrongs.

Then we need to recognize that the same action, doing the same harm, can be less wrong — even morally right — if done for certain reasons. Ethics are situational. Motives matter. Again, most everyone accepts this. Take an action like killing. Killing a man because you want his wife or because he looked at you the wrong way is a bit different than killing in self-defense or in war. Those last two situations are often regarded as morally right, though there’s plenty of debate about it. That doesn’t matter — what matters is that the underlying principle is agreed upon: the same act will have a different moral status depending on why someone does it. A spectrum is easy enough to envision. Perhaps killing someone in self-defense is less wrong than killing someone in war, which is perhaps less wrong than killing someone because he or she used the “white” restroom, etc. Use your imagination.

If motives matter regarding the morality of some actions, might they for others?

The actions of our scenarios are the same, but the motives are not — which may alter the morality of the action.

Think of the possible motives, the driving forces, of the Nazi, the racist woman, the bigoted owner. What comes to mind? Conspiracy theories about the inferior Jews ruling and ruining the nation, discomfort with a country growing less white, preferring gays scared back into the closet — out of sight, out of mind. Whatever you envision, it likely isn’t good. It isn’t something you find morally right. And what of the possible motives of the Jew, the Hispanic woman, the gay man? Opposition to Nazi ideology, racism, and discrimination come to mind. These are likely stances you agree with and find morally right, even if you don’t approve of the action that followed.

How is it, then, that anyone can say these scenarios and their inverses are equally immoral? How are two identical actions equally wrong despite one having more moral motives and the other more immoral motives? This is like saying that killing in self-defense is just as bad as killing someone for looking at you the wrong way. It is saying that motives do not matter.

But most people believe they do. Why the double standard? Does it involve the severity of the action? Why do motives affect the morality of a more serious action like killing but not a less serious one like a punch, name-call, or refusal to serve? There is no logical reason that I can see. Lying is a less serious action, but we all understand that lying about someone raping you would be worse than lying about how late you were past curfew.

Again, there may be situations where X is as equally wrong as Y, but it seems like that would require motives that are more equally wrong. Lying to your spouse about losing the dog is roughly as wrong as lying to your spouse about spending vacation money on a new television. Killing over jealousy is about as wrong as killing over insults. But the motives of our situational pairs are much farther apart, polar opposites in fact. (One may insist they are the same because each attacker wants to exert power over the other, put him in his place, seize control, do what’s best for herself, express hate, intimidate, hurt, and so on, but that only takes one temporary step backward. Why are they doing those things? What are the motives behind those motives? Can all hatred be equally wrong — say, racist hatred versus hatred of a racist — if the motives are ethical polar opposites? Aren’t the motives morally different, even if you frown upon where they lead? Of course they are, as we saw above.)

(Now, folks will disagree over what motives are moral, but for each person there will always be an array of motives that include some more moral and some less. If you’re a Nazi sympathizer, you’ll think racist motives more right and opposition motives more wrong, and apply the same to the actions — but no one in his or her right mind can hold both racism and anti-racism as equally moral or immoral! Therefore the logical argument in this piece, finalized below, applies to everyone who accepts the premises with which we began, that not all sins are equally wrong and that the same action can have a different moral flavor dependent upon motives.)

Is the double standard topic-based? If our near-universal way of thinking about ethics involves an action having a changed moral character following a changed motive, there has to be some kind of justification for not applying this to matters of bigotry. I cannot think of any such justification. What possible reason could there be to exclude this topic, to create a new, special standard that doesn’t apply to anything else? None exists. (Imagine excluding matters of war — what could possibly justify doing that?) A racist attack therefore must be morally worse than an attack against a racist. (Or, if you’re a racist or one of their sympathizers with different views on the motives, as discussed above, it must be morally better! They cannot be equal.) Some may say it’s radically worse, others just slightly, but based on our premise of ethics it must be worse (or better, for you Nazis) to some degree — it’s a logical necessity. If they were equally wrong, we’d have to throw motives out the window, and there would be no reason to stop at matters of bigotry (just as there’s no reason to exclude it). Self-defense would be just as wrong as cold-blooded murder based on that new premise. Lying to save an innocent life would be just as wrong as lying to end one. And so on. With no justification existing to exclude actions related to a certain topic, one must hold all actions to the same standard — either motives matter or they do not. (Same for hatred and so forth.) Again, that’s what’s logically sound for each person regardless of his or her unique views on what’s ethical: you can’t logically think two identical actions equally wrong if you also think one motive is more moral than the other (which you will if in your right mind). If you think motives matter for other moral questions, that’s simply what makes logical sense.

If it’s still difficult to see our scenarios as false equivalences, it may help to consider others, perhaps from other time periods, where gaps between “wrongness” seem bigger, more obvious. The way humans observe history is always less morally confused than the way we observe the present. Hindsight and all. Note these also could unwisely be labeled identical attempts to exert power over someone, hurt someone, lash out in hate, and so on:

• Would a slave killing his master be as wrong as a master killing his slave? Isn’t one about liberation, the other subjugation?
• Would a rich woman stealing from a poor woman be just as wrong as the reverse? Might one motive be greed, the other need?
• Were the Allies just as wrong to invade France in 1944 as Germany was a few years earlier? Is there any side in any war less wrong than another?

Motives matter, always. That is why some things are worse than other things.

As a last word, while I don’t believe this fact affects the logic, it’s important to note that in our scenarios, and real-world ones that spark the equivalence debate (one truly wonders why it’s difficult to see that the alt-right, full of people who advocate a “White Ethno-State,” is generally evil, whereas Antifa, full of people who advocate standing against “racist and fascist bigots” is generally not), attacks against bigotry are a reaction to bigotry. Bigotry comes first; the only “reaction” it entails is one against who people are: their ethnicity, sexuality, gender, etc. Reduce bigotry and there will be fewer reactions; but reduce reactions and bigotry will crush people per usual. Again, this isn’t to necessarily advocate for violent or hurtful reactions. It’s simply to recognize the worse problem, the root problem — and focus our energies on obliterating it in ways ethically acceptable to each of us personally.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.

One early morning at Salem State University in Massachusetts, students stumbled upon vandalism of benches and a fence at the baseball fields. Spray paint had been used to write “DIE NIGGERS,” “Whites Only USA,” and “Whites #1.”

What are your first thoughts concerning who did this? You’re a reasonable person, so you know this might be a hoax. That happens from time to time. But if this was done in earnest — by someone who sincerely wanted to degrade and threaten black people and extoll the white race — who seems most likely? It seems likely the culprit was white. Gun to your head, it was probably a man, or more than one, just a couple buddies out having some “fun.” Perhaps someone younger, a student; this is a school, after all. Now, was this person more likely liberal or conservative? Who would be more likely to write “Whites Only” or “DIE NIGGERS”? Left or Right, quick.

If this was no hoax, and if we were all to be honest with ourselves, the probabilities might increase as we move along the political spectrum. In other words, the far Left seems least likely (recall we’re focused on content here, not the act of vandalism itself, which some on the far Left do happily partake in), the mainstream Left still unlikely, the center perhaps somewhat likely, the mainstream Right more likely, and the far Right most likely. At no spot on the spectrum is the act impossible, but such a probability scale shouldn’t be all that controversial for anyone with a handle on reality.

In this particular case, we needn’t wonder long, as the vandals included “Trump #1” in their graffiti. This was part of the hate crimes that swept the U.S. after Trump’s election, as Trump supporters gleefully attacked, verbally and physically, Hispanics, Muslims, blacks, Jews, gays, and women — weeks of terror.

But, one protests, the answer to the theoretical was biased and the anecdotal is weak argument. True enough. Conservatives and liberals always dig up examples, point at each other, and insist the other ideology is more prone to racism. (Here we mean against people of color; conservative whites who think anti-white hate from liberals is a bigger problem will have to educate themselves elsewhere). How can we know who is right?

One way is to simply ask people their views.

In 2014, Nate Silver and Allison McCann looked at Americans’ answers regarding race in the General Social Survey, which has been issued for decades. Self-described Republicans were, from 1990-2012, 5-10% more likely to object to a close relative marrying a black person, 5-20% more likely to believe blacks “lacked the motivation” to get out of poverty, and 2-10% more likely to say blacks are more lazy than hardworking. 2-5% more Republicans thought blacks were more unintelligent than intelligent, until things evened out between liberals and conservatives in 2009.

Things have been about even regarding comfort with living in a diverse neighborhood, with only occasional spikes in conservative opposition, and even concerning voting for a black president, except between 1994 and 2007, when in fact white Democrats expressed stronger opposition.

The good news is that for both groups racist views are in general declining. Majorities today do not have (admit) explicitly racist views; this article is not intended to posit all conservatives are racist. The bad news is that for both groups today over 20% dislike the idea of living in a neighborhood that isn’t majority-white, over 20% oppose interracial marriage in their family, over 30% think blacks are lazy, over 40% that they lack motivation, and 15% that they are unintelligent. And that’s just the Americans that will admit to extreme (conscious) racism, as this is a survey. So while this article is indeed intended to settle a recurring debate, it is also a condemnation of (and call for reflection from) us whites on the Left. Our scores, while better, are hardly anything to celebrate.

The aggregate of all responses looked like this:

The 2012 American National Election Studies survey revealed similar answers. 18% more white Republicans saw black people as lazy than white Democrats, with an 8% lead concerning belief in lack of intelligence and an 18% lead in thinking blacks had too much influence in politics (at the time, there was a black president, one black Supreme Court justice, and no black senators; the country had seen a single black president, six black senators, and two Supreme Court justices since 1776). Nearly 35% more white Republicans thought blacks would be just as well off as whites if they’d try harder — a belief requiring a racist premise about black laziness.

But the data from these two surveys, and others, can be a bit misleading — and not in a way that will comfort the Right. By lumping together Democrats of all sorts (centrist, Left, far Left), and doing the same with Republicans, the data reflects more timid differences in ideological views of race. As we move further to the right, views grow increasingly racist; as we move further to the left, views become decidedly less racist:

Among strong Democrats and strong Republicans, the numbers [concerning who thinks blacks are lazy] become even more stark, 20 percent compared with 46 percent. Furthermore, 41 percent of whites who say they are extremely conservative believe black people are lazy, compared with 14 percent of whites who say they are extremely liberal. On the question of whether black people are unintelligent, it’s 30 percent for extremely conservative whites versus 11 percent for extremely liberal whites. This clearly suggests that racial animus is more prevalent among conservatives and Republicans.

That is significant. It also mimics the probability scale envisioned above.

A 2016 YouGov survey asked white people if they thought black people typically “give more to society” or “take more.” For a large majority of conservative respondents, no amount of good black people do for society — teaching students, creating art, running a business, waving hello, nothing — could outweigh the racist laziness myth.

In an article called Trump Did So Well Because Many Conservatives Are Just Like Him, I collected surveys and studies to show how a significant portion of Trump supporters (though not all) hold extremely bigoted views. But the article didn’t dive into how much worse these views were compared to Clinton supporters. A 2016 Reuters/Ipsos poll of 16,000 Americans found that

In nearly every case, Trump supporters were more likely to rate whites higher than blacks [concerning positive traits] when their responses were compared with responses from Clinton supporters.

For example, 32 percent of Trump supporters placed whites closer to the top level of “intelligence” than they did blacks, compared with 22 percent of Clinton supporters who did the same.

About 40 percent of Trump supporters placed whites higher on the “hardworking” scale than blacks, while 25 percent of Clinton supporters did the same. And 44 percent of Trump supporters placed whites as more “well mannered” than blacks, compared with 30 percent of Clinton supporters.

Trump fans were also more likely to dislike minorities compared to other, more sane, Republican voters.

There is a wealth of other surveys that show comparable results to the four included here; they are not difficult to find.

Moving on from surveys, there are also scientific studies that indicate conservatism is deeper in the racist mud than liberalism. Research shows that dislike of government services and spending, especially welfare, increases as racial animosity does. A 2014 study from Northwestern University showed that whites with no political affiliation more strongly favored conservative policies when distressed over increasing racial diversity in the U.S. In fact, even those with a political affiliation — any — who became distressed moved to the right. A 2012 study of the U.K. showed social conservatism is linked with greater prejudice. Conservatives were less likely to agree with statements such as “I wouldn’t mind working with people from other races.” Other studies link antiracism and social liberalism. A 2013 study found that American conservatives had less favorable views of black people than liberals, unless black people had conservative values and attitudes (liberals also favored persons of color who thought like them). As with Trump, greater anti-black attitudes among citizens more strongly predict votes for the Republican candidate, even when he’s not running against a black man, for example with Bush. Areas of the South with histories of strong Klan activity correlate with stronger Republican loyalty. And so on.

No, not every survey nor study will fit into this pattern, but most do. That consistency across sources deserves serious consideration.

All this makes sense in light of what “conservative” and “liberal” actually mean at the conscious and subconscious levels — and how their adherents opposed or supported the civil rights movement, and other social movements, based on those meanings (see Which Broadened Freedom For the Oppressed? Liberalism or Conservatism? and Why Liberals and Conservatives Think Differently, From Someone Who’s Been Both), regardless of ideological changes within America’s parties, a topic conservatives who insist “Liberals are more racist because the Democratic Party supported slavery and the KKK” desperately need to study (see Republicans Used to be Liberal, Democrats Conservative). While not all conservatives are racist by any means, the evidence suggests that, while both sides have work to do to master true racial tolerance, more conservatives lag behind.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.