Conservative Black thinkers deny racial bias in criminal justice disparities

Evidence

A prominent Black linguist at UC Berkeley did not agree with Davis’s assessment. The Black proportion of the prison population “neatly reflects the rate at which they commit crimes,” maintained John McWhorter—without evidence—in Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. This 2000 best seller catapulted him into the spotlight as America’s best-known Black conservative intellectual. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1168

Categorization

• XREF: McWhorter as assimilationist counterpoint to Davis’s structural/reparative antiracism — a clean case for placing an external argument in Kendi’s three-way scheme.