Bill Bennett's racist remarks

 

I wasn't going to comment on Bill Bennett's ugly, racist faux pas, but good lord, some people are trying to defend this garbage. 

CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social Security, and I was curious, and I've read articles in recent months here, that the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund Social Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn't -- never touches this at all.

BENNETT: Assuming they're all productive citizens?

CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it would be an enormous amount of revenue.

BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don't know what the costs would be, too. I think as -- abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No.

CALLER: I don't know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are, yeah.

BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don't know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean, it cuts both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well --

CALLER: Well, I don't think that statistic is accurate.

BENNETT: Well, I don't think it is either, I don't think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don't know. But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.

Cole says: "There is nothing for him to apologize for regarding this statement. It is a statement of fact, he was not advocating it, and, in fact, he noted that it would be an “impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do.”"  Cole goes on to say that an analogous situation would be "if you wanted to lower the rates of obesity in the United States, you could shoot all fat people."

First of all, it is most certainly NOT a fact that if every black baby in the US were aborted, crime would go down, for the very obvious, one would think even to a conservative, reason that babies don't commit crimes, now do they?  Or have Republicans passed some felony colic law while I wasn't looking?    And to make your fat analogy work, you'd have to shoot people who were at risk of getting fat sometime in the future.  Admittedly, that would be difficult to sort out, but if you stalk enough McDonald's drive-thrus and cookie aisles  at the grocery and pro-war Republican rallies and killed enough of those people you might be able  to execute enough future-fatties to make a difference.

No, what immediately popped into Bennett's murderous, authoritarian mind was that typically violent conservative impulse to eliminate problems by killing people, rather like his statement that beheading drug dealers was morally permissible. 

Just as George WMD Bush wants to preemptively nuke people unfortunate enough to have governments  on the Republican regime-change list (only after studying the very best intelligence, I'm sure), Bill Bennett fantasizes aloud about  preemptively killing people to reduce the crime rate in the US. 

Now, to see why Bennett's statement is racist, you have to look at the question that set him off on his exegesis of death as a solution to society's problems.  His sycophant caller had stated, assuming that Bennett would agree, no doubt, that, "the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund Social Security as we know it today."

And Bennett's response? "Assuming they're all productive citizens?"

Ah, productive citizens - no shiftless layabout babies.  Republicans hate those.   Next, "Maybe, maybe, but we don't know what the costs would be, too. I think as -- abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No." 

So, Bennett's thinking about demographics and abortion and, wait!  He read a book about that!  "....one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up." 

In Freakonomics, a lightweight pop-economics book, the argument that legalized abortion reduced crime rates was not racialized, but it's clear what Bennett was thinking when he read it.    And here, you get to peer into the abyss of the "conservative" mind as Bennett connects the dots.  He blathers on, "I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."

As disgusting and unworthy of defense as Bennett's train of thought clearly was, Matt Yglesias is also inspired to defend it: "Not only is Bennett clearly not advocating a campaign of genocidal abortion against African-Americans, but the empirical claim here is unambiguously true. Similarly, if you aborted all the male fetuses, all those carried by poor women, or all those carried by Southern women, the crime rate would decline."

Oh, sure, let Bennet get away with gluing the figleaf of "an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do" back over his ass.   Why would anyone defend this line of thinking?  One might as well point out that Hiroshima was crime-free after August 6, 1945.  So what?  Another  way to eliminate crime is to simply lock everyone up or kill them.  Does anyone think that Bill Bennett hasn't thought of that?

Let's just reduce Bennett's "reasoning" down to the bones, why don't we?  Just kill all the poor women, all the black women, all the single women and any other women who might get pregnant and bring little criminals into the world.  Why take chances that they'll get pregnant again? 

Then you'd have the perfect conservative utopia.

Comments

[Inquisitor]

Unfortunately, the gentlemen may be right from the scientific point of view given the right amount of data and the employment of the correct analytical methods.

What we ought to concern ourselves with is the general socio-economic circumstances that might have led to such a correlation being true and seek to eradicate them.

These remarks, in themselves, are not 'racist' but indicative of the racism and class deprivation that might make the correlation true.

[Luis]

Again, Bill Bennett, one of the faces of conservatives in this country, reminds me that voting for conservatives is not a good idea for Blacks or anyone else. It seems that the only purpose in life for conservatives like Bill Bennett is to absolve people like him of any responsibility for the way Black citizens have been treated in this country. Institutional racism and racism in general, Jim Crow, discrimination, lynching, poll taxes, passing laws to make it illegal to teach Black people to read are just some of the crimes that have put a significant number of Blacks at a huge disadvantage from birth. They treat this vicious treatment as a minor inconvenience.

I am 50 years old. Almost none of my childhood classmates had parents who finished high school. Does Bill Bennett actually think that we had an advantage because we were born to parents who were treated as worthless human beings by the majority population.

He should drop to his knees each night and thank God that he had the good fortune to be born a Causasian male. I wonder how he would have turned out if he had been born to Black parents?

Lew

[Spoonerian]

Fat pussies like Bennett, and little sniveling twerps like Bill Krystol, and smelly freaks like Paul Wolfowitz would be miserable failures had they been born into the low class gangsta world. Unfortunately Bennett somehow achieved "capo" status in the white upper class criminal gangs.

The crime rate would actually be reduced by 100s of thousands if white murderers like Bennett were aborted. Is it ironic or does it stand to reason that the lower class mafias who only kill by the dozens seem to have higher personnel standards than their mass-murdering elitist counterparts?

[joão]

I read another article about Bennett that is very angry. I read this site and she doesn't usually write like this. His remarks pushed her over the edge.

William Bennett Should Have Been Aborted

[Elvira Black]

I think it would have been more prudent for Bennett to say, perhaps, poor, undereducated, very young single mothers. However, as another reader pointed out, white collar crime probably affects many more people (and sometimes the entire country, and/or other countries) so the magnitude of this type of crime is not being addressed in that context.

[John McAdams]

Planned Parenthood Advocates Abortion to Reduce Crime

And the bizarre thing is that Bennett, who explicitly rejects abortion, is under attack.

[John McAdams]

Freakonomics Author Tries to Cover Butt in Wake of Bennett Comments

In fact, the authors of Freakonomics made explicitly racial arguments in economics journal articles. They said nothing remotely racist, but they did stress the empirical connection between race and abortion and crime.

[Glaivester]

Let's just reduce Bennett's "reasoning" down to the bones, why don't we? Just kill all the poor women, all the black women, all the single women and any other women who might get pregnant and bring little criminals into the world. Why take chances that they'll get pregnant again?
Then you'd have the perfect conservative utopia.

Don't be ridiculous. Bennett's point was that to do such a thing would be wrong even if it did reduce crime.

As for arguing that aborting black babies would reduce crime, obviously, he meant that the crime rate would go down 15-25 years in the future when said babies would be in the peak "criminal years." Which, if you ignore the likelihood that there would be a strong backlash by blacks against society for creating such a policy, is probably what would happen. As a group, blacks commit crimes at a rate far above the national average (i.e. all racial groups together). There is no reason to assume that this will change over the next 20 years. Therefore, reducing the number of blacks in the U.S. would likely reduce the percentage of U.S. citizens who are criminals.

This would be a bad policy to institute, of course, because eliminating an entire race would have severe costs that would far outweigh the reduction in crime. But statistically, Bennett's point was accurate.

[Glaivester]

And Bennett's response? "Assuming they're all productive citizens?"

Ah, productive citizens - no shiftless layabout babies. Republicans hate those.

Actually, Tex, Bennett's point was that we should oppose abortion, even that of unproductive citizens. That is, the morality of abortion should not be determined by whether the aborted would have benefitted us had they been born.

The caller essentially suggsted that abortion was bad because it would provide fewer peopel to work to pay his Social Security. Bennett is essentially questioning whether the caller would favor abortion of people who aren't benefitting him and pointing out hte perversity of a system where the right-to-life is sublimated to some other societal goal.

[till]

Commonsense should make one realize that Bennett made a racist remark, and commonsense
should make one realize that
Bennett is not at the head of the
class when it comes to moral
principles.

From his mouth came both.