The soft bigotry of lazy abstraction

By W.W. | CHATTANOOGA

THE civil unrest in Baltimore in response to the death of Freddie Gray has reignited an old debate about the relationship between culture and poverty. The battle lines have been drawn in the opinion pages of the New York Times. On Friday David Brooks argued that costly big-government efforts to alleviate poverty haven't done much to improve conditions for those living in Sandtown-Winchester, the Baltimore neighbourhood where Mr Gray lived. "Saying we should just spend more doesn’t really cut it," Mr Brooks writes. "[T]he real barriers to mobility are matters of social psychology, the quality of relationships in a home and a neighbourhood that either encourage or discourage responsibility, future-oriented thinking, and practical ambition." Ingrained codes of behaviour have "dissolved", he argues, leaving residents of impoverished areas "without the norms that middle-class people take for granted."

Paul Krugman is very annoyed by this line of thinking, though he does not mention Mr Brooks by name. "It has been disheartening to see some commentators still writing as if poverty were simply a matter of values," Mr Krugman writes, "as if the poor just mysteriously make bad choices and all would be well if they adopted middle-class values." According to Mr Krugman, thinkers like Mr Brooks have it back to front. The decline in values Mr Brooks laments is plainly a response to a hopeless lack of economic opportunity for the working classes. "[I]t should be obvious," Mr Krugman avers, "that middle-class values only flourish in an economy that offers middle-class jobs."

This is an important debate, but it is not the debate to have now.

As much as they bicker, Messrs Krugman and Brooks both agree that just about any occasion can be used to mount a favourite hobbyhorse. Mr Brooks is ever on the lookout for a chance to push the all-important role of culture. Mr Krugman scans the horizon itching to point out "the devastating effects of extreme and rising inequality". Culture and inequality certainly have something to do with the Baltimore riots, but Baltimoreans did not suddenly take to the streets to protest their poverty. They rose up to protest an apparently fresh instance of a very specific pattern of injustice. The Baltimore police are notoriously brutal. According to the Baltimore Sun, the city paid out $5.7m between 2011 and 2014 to settle police-brutality suits. The victims have largely been African-American. When Freddie Gray, a black man, died under mysterious circumstances in police custody, it was the last straw.

"To us, the Baltimore Police Department is a group of terrorists, funded by our tax dollars, who beat on people in our community daily, almost never having to explain or pay for their actions," wrote D. Watkins, an essayist and Baltimore native, in an op-ed on April 28th, again in the New York Times. Mr Watkins then offered a number of illustrative anecdotes drawn from personal experience, such as the time when "a cop clothes-lined a kid named Rick off a moped. Rick hopped up, yelling, 'What did I do?' and was instantly clubbed down by the cop and his partner. Rick’s face was badly bruised for weeks." Nearly every Baltimorean who took to the streets to protest Gray’s death knows a Rick, or is a Rick. This is the problem.

It is, in fact, a problem of both culture and inequality, but not as Messrs Brooks and Krugman would have it. That is, it is a problem of police culture and inequality under the law. In 2005 more than half of Baltimore's black men in their twenties were either in prison or on parole, according to one study. This is largely a consequence of tactics in the "war on drugs", including changes in sentencing guidelines, which have disproportionately hurt young black men.

Prosecutors are often reluctant to bring criminal charges against police who brutalise or even kill citizens. It is remarkably difficult to fire an abusive police officer. So it is impressive that Baltimore’s prosecutor charged six officers for Gray’s death, yet their bail is much less than that of a black Baltimore teen who smashed a car window during the protests. If Baltimore had not been burning, those officers might not have been charged at all.

So why are Messrs Brooks and Krugman using the occasion of Baltimore’s protests to squabble over whether values explain material conditions or material conditions explain values? There's a soft bigotry—let's call it the soft bigotry of lazy abstraction—in their indifference to the specifics of Baltimore’s problems. The details matter. When people are literally screaming to be heard, and pundits hear nothing but evidence to support preconceived ideas about what the real problem is, the commentary misses the point.

Messrs Brooks and Krugman should take a cue from their colleague, Ross Douthat, who cared enough about the people of Baltimore to address an issue that actually speaks to their distress. "After the untimely death of Freddie Gray", he wrote on Sunday, "no issue looms larger than the need to discipline, suspend and fire police officers who don’t belong on the streets—and the obstacles their unions put up to that all-too-necessary process". Quite right. One wishes the issue would loom rather larger in his colleagues' minds, so that they might apply their knack for sniffing out cultural pathology and denouncing the injustice of inequality to problems actually afflicting the people they seem to worry about.