Cory Booker's misleading crime statistic backfires
Immigrant children are dying at the border, President Trump boasts of being "locked and loaded" against Iran and the Amazon rainforest is burning. No wonder critics say we media workers should not be spending time on presidential candidates' gaffes.
But this is also a time when the value of inconvenient facts is itself under siege, not insignificantly by a president who has topped 12,000 false or misleading claims, according to The Washington Post Fact Checker database. There may be little hope that Trump will change his fact-challenged ways, but that doesn't mean his Democratic rivals or the rest of us should join him.
With that in mind, I bristled at the sound of Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey repeating a misleading statement that he has used before in his talking points: "We have more African Americans under criminal supervision today than all the slaves in 1850."
Booker's reasons for making the claim, usually with great passion, are obvious. It's a showstopper. It's dramatic and alarming but also, in several unfortunate ways, wrong.
Alas, it is not totally wrong. Booker's mistake was in leaving out a crucial word: men.
He would have been right if he had said there are more black men under criminal supervision today than were in slavery in 1850.
A PolitiFact fact check back in 2014 backs that up. "There were about 1.68 million African American men under state and federal criminal justice supervision in 2013," it said, which was "807,076 more than the number of black men who were enslaved in 1850."
Author and scholar Michelle Alexander got that right in her best-selling 2010 book "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," which appears to be the source that eventually led Booker, among countless others -- including me -- to cite this chilling statistic over the years.
But Booker didn't quote it correctly and that's a problem. Even when the statistics are cited correctly, they can be misleading without some context. The overall U.S. population has soared since 1850. As a measure of racial progress -- or lack of it -- over time it is more useful to cite the percentages than the raw numbers.
Without plunging too deeply into the woods of the numbers, the Census Bureau reported nearly 39 million African Americans in 2010, which was more than 10 times the black population in 1850, when there were were 3.6 million African Americans, 3.2 million of whom were slaves in the U.S. population.
...continued
(c) 2019 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
