Jonathan Zimmerman: The Historical Fallacy
Nobody knows what caused police officers to kill Sean Bell, a 23-year-old African-American, outside a Queens, N.Y., nightclub last weekend. Not the Rev. Al Sharpton, who met with Mayor Michael Bloomberg to demand"fairness and justice." Not the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, who called the episode part of a"pattern of police abuse." Not Councilman Charles Barron, who warned that African-Americans would not remain"peaceful" while"they are being murdered."
Not me. Not you.
But we pretend we do know, thanks to a common error of logic. Call it the historical fallacy. The historical fallacy works like this: Because something happened in the past, it is happening in the present. Consider the buildup to the war in Iraq, our most egregious recent example of the fallacy in action. As President Bush repeatedly reminded us, Saddam Hussein had once possessed and used weapons of mass destruction; therefore, Hussein must be harboring WMD's now.
The problem, of course, lay in the facile word"therefore." Saddam's prior use of WMD's gave us ample reason to suspect that he might have more such weapons. Yet it did not give us fair cause to assume he still possessed them, as the world has now learned.
So: In the urban United States, African-Americans have often faced racially motivated harassment, abuse, and assault by the police. No serious person disputes that long and ignoble history. But it does not follow that this particular tragedy was racially motivated.
Remember, too, that the five officers who fired at Bell included two blacks and an officer who is both black and Hispanic. Were the minority policemen acting out of racial motives, as well? It's possible, of course: minorities can be as"racist" as white people. Until we have a full investigation of the shooting, however, we really won't know. So why not just come out and say that?
Consider Bishop Lester Williams, who was scheduled to perform Bell's wedding later that day. Reflecting on the hail of 50 bullets that killed Bell, Williams told news reporters that the shooting illustrated a"grave crisis" between the police and the black community in southeastern Queens."It's Little Iraq," Williams said."We don't feel protected."
By invoking the metaphor of Iraq, however, Williams unwittingly echoed the historical fallacy at the heart of our Mideast misadventure-- and of our charges of police racism. To repeat: Just because Saddam used WMD's in the past, we can't assume he owned them in the present. And just because police officers in the past have abused African-Americans, we can't assume that racist abuse was at play in the shooting of Sean Bell.
Indeed, in our own history, the greatest victims of the historical fallacy have been African-Americans themselves. In the postwar United States, young African-American men have committed a disproportionate percentage of our violent crimes. That's a historical fact, and you can look it up. But it hardly follows that every African-American man is a violent criminal, as too many bigoted whites still presume. If you cross the street to get away from a young black man, you're guilty of the historical fallacy. And it's blacks who suffer the most from it.
So it's particularly disturbing to see blacks indulging the same fallacy, in the wake of the Sean Bell tragedy. History is important here, because it helps us ask an urgent question: Was race involved in the Bell shooting? But history can never give us the answer, which depends on the complicated details of this case. Let's wait until all of the facts are in, then, before we assume the worst about them. Our history is pretty bleak, I know, but our destiny is still up for grabs.