Good answer

[msgadget]

I've seen black and white conservatives snicker over the reaction to radio host William Bennett's abortion remarks (http://mediamatters.org/items/200509280006). Some go so as far as pointing out Margaret Sanger's (founder of Planned Parenthood) association with eugenics without, surprisingly, associating the Party of Lincoln with its modern day crusade against Civil Rights. In other words, PP is rotten and suspect for that association but their party's actions are, for some reason, not to be held against them.

Anyway, here's a clip from an op-ed by Eugene Robinson:


Perhaps the ostentatiously intellectual Bennett went back and read Levitt's original 2001 paper on the subject, co-authored with John J. Donohue III. The authors do mention race briefly, in a discussion of the falling homicide rate, but attribute most of the decline to those race-neutral factors that Levitt later cited in "Freakonomics." To bolster their argument, they cite research on abortion and lowered crime rates in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe -- not places where you're likely to find a lot of black people.

If he was citing Levitt's work, Bennett could have said that to lower the crime rate "you could abort every white baby" or "you could abort every Hispanic baby" or "you could abort every Asian baby," since every group has unwanted, poor children being raised by single mothers.

So now that we have Bennett on the couch, shouldn't we conclude that he mentioned only black children because, perhaps on a subconscious level, he associates "black" with "criminal''?

That's what it sounds like to me. I grew up in the South in the days when we had to drink at "colored" water fountains and gas stations had separate "colored" restrooms; I know what a real racist is like, and Bennett certainly doesn't fit the description. But that's what's so troubling about his race-specific "thought experiment" -- that such a smart, well-meaning opinion maker would so casually say something that translates, to African American ears, as "blacks are criminals."