Data and Denial

Let's talk about data.

To ease us in, let's start with baseball. This will come to the chagrin of my Brewer fan friends, but the Cubs' Javy Baez is the best player in the National League. There's a statistical case to be made, where we could accumulate home runs and stolen bases. There's more sophisticated stats like DRS and WAR we could account for, but there's also an anecdotal case for Javy's superiority. Signs of greatness that cannot easily be tracked by the numbers. Baez is a creative force on the basepaths, a magician on the infield, and his spectacular play creates momentum for his team while demoralizing the competition. All of this adds up to a much fuller picture, albeit one that cannot be quantified easily. A level of nuance and investigation beyond that which is borne out numerically leads to greater understanding.

How much more then ought we take a nuanced approach to issues of far deeper importance.

In the past few weeks, I've seen a flood of responses on my social media timeline of friends either newly learning or newly becoming vocal about issues of racial injustice. But with that, I've recently seen a new thread developing.

This new position seems to be leaning heavily on statistics to support the claim that things aren't actually that bad. In particular, this train of thought seems aimed at disproving that Black men and women are disproportionately the victims of police shootings or brutality.

Before I go further, let me put some cards on the table. Yes, I have a bias in all this. Actually, I have many biases. And so do you. My white upper middle class upbringing left me with biases. The fact I've lived in a Black neighborhood for the past decade gives me a certain bias. My personality type is biased to generally trust comprehensive worldviews and expert opinions over personal stories. I have a social science degree, so I am not unfamiliar with soft science statistics (as well as how difficult they are to interpret). This too is a bias.

So with that said, I have some serious concerns.

First, I fear that the countervailing statistical analysis crowd is unfairly discounting the anecdotal reality that is not represented in official numbers.

Second, I fear the countervailing statistical analysis crowd is wrongly simplifying a much more complicated situation.

Third, I fear the countervailing statistical analysis crowd is miserably failing the test of neighbor-love.

Anecdotes

Stories don't tell the full story, but they do tell a story. They reflect real, lived experiences that impact how a person sees the world and sees their future. They are deeply powerful. And when I hear a similar anecdote, over and over and over again, it gains traction as a pattern that is more than anecdotal.

My friend was put in the back of a police car and unlawfully questioned while walking down the street. One of our college-aged interns was handcuffed in front of our students because he fit the description. Another intern was stopped and asked questions to determine if he was truant from school, while the white intern of the same age who was walking with him was not asked any questions. A victim of a robbery was aggressively questioned as if he was the suspect then when the interrogation ended the officer walked up to the white homeowner who had lent the victim a cell phone to call 911 and without provocation or invitation said, "I'm sorry you have to deal with human garbage like him."

Yes, these are all simply anecdotal evidence. None of them will show up in statistics because none of them were serious enough to merit an official report. But they are evidence nonetheless.

I could go on with more, but for one further example: I was teaching a class about the book Divided by Faith (which everyone should buy) at church and I asked the participants, if they felt comfortable, to share any experiences with racism they had. My invitation was not specific to issues around policing, but for the next 30 minutes person after person told stories of their encounters with law enforcement while every single Black person in the room nodded along knowingly.

Black people are not a monolith and do not have identical experiences. So, you might even have a real life acquaintance who would say they have never experienced anything like this and that's wonderful. I'm truly happy for them because for most Black Americans, they have and they carry these experiences around with them into every future interaction.

Simplifying

This season has seen a growing awareness of systemic racism, but many of the statistics I see being discussed fail to account for the existence of those systems.

We cannot draw claims out of a vacuum. We can't look at crime rates without also looking at poverty rates. We can't look at number of contacts with law enforcement without discussing the inattention paid to white-collar crime. We can't talk about "high crime neighborhoods" without a discussion of redlining, school funding models, and the history of highway construction.

Some statistical analysis that is seeking to control for other variables only serves to perfectly illustrate the need for greater care in gathering these statistics. A statistic without context is only a partial picture.

And statistics cannot answer deeper questions about motivations, backgrounds, and histories.

Further still, much of this countervailing analysis I see fails to seriously reckon with the reality that a plethora of statistics exist that tell us that discrimination in law enforcement is absolutely real. We can look at threat or use of force, traffic stops, racially disparate use of fines to fund the city budget, marijuana arrest rates, implicit bias in weapon identification, and on and on.

Love Thy Neighbor

Finally, and most problematic, my concern is heightened by the timing of these responses. If your Black brother says, "This is happening to me" and your heart or mouth's first response is "Let's see what the stats have to say about that." You have failed to love your brother. Full stop.

Again and again and again, the call for a time of listening and empathy has been made. When white Christians chose to disregard that and lean hard into an analysis that fits their pre-existing worldview it is nothing less than callousness. How long should this time of listening go on? I don't know, but I am absolutely certain that setting the timeline should not be up to those who are least impacted by the problem.

None of this is new. In fact, the Christian rapper Bizzle released a song six years ago that addresses everything I've discussed here. In the lyrics, Bizzle speaks of the broader reality of being Black in America, he name checks a list of Black men who have lost their lives wrongly, he talks of his fear to bring up these issue lest he lose his career, and even lists statistics that show this injustice. Most painfully, he laments that white Christians fail to hear his cries. In lines that may be hard to hear, Bizzle compares his experience to that of two twin brothers born and raised together. One of the children is being abused in secret. He expects his brother of all people should be the one who comes to his aid, but not only does his brother fail to listen and cry with him, the brother declares that Bizzle is overreacting and needs to get over it.

This is a time, in humility, to heed the voices of others.

White Christians, your Black brothers and sisters are saying something. They have been saying it all along. Long before cell phone videos or hashtags. Long before you were alive, this same narrative has been being told.

Let him who has ears hear it. Please do not obfuscate. Please do not troll. Please do not center yourself in the way you think and speak.

Do let yourself be challenged. Do sit in uncertainty. Do let yourself be uncomfortable.

Your witness depends on it. Your love for your neighbor depends on it.