Speaking at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Daily Wire Editor-in Chief Ben Shapiro confronted members of the audience who insisted that “insitututional racism” was the cause of the black community’s problems. Shapiro offered the packed auditorium cogent reasons for the deeply-troubling statistics reflected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics – African Americans comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population yet commit more than half of all murders in the country, and 93 percent of the victims being black.
The exchange went like this, according to The College Fix:
Questioner: You also say violence is a personal choice, which clearly ignores the last century of housing segregation and gentrification that’s forced blacks into the poorest, most violent communities. You then said that whites do not have an inherent better sense of self-responsibility than blacks. So, how can you explain the high levels of violence in black communities if they are in fact inherently same in decision making as whites, without considering forced racialized housing segregation?
Shapiro: First of all, I would note that the black murder rate in the United States is about ten times the white murder rate in the United States. And this has been consistently true for the last hundred years essentially. Which is unfortunate, but also suggests, unless racism has stayed exactly the same for the last hundred years, which clearly it hasn’t, something else is in play. When there’s a differential you have to look for the possible confounds. Segregation obviously, housing segregation is evil and terrible, we all agree on this. The problem is that to blame current levels of black violence on housing segregation, which went out of style 30 years before you were born, is a little bit of a stretch, particularly when people who are committing the violence now are all young black men who are teenagers, they’re younger than you, probably. So the idea that housing segregation is to blame for the disproportionate violence, I don’t buy it 50 years after the Civil Rights Act. It just doesn’t wash for me.
Questioner: So then what would you say is the cause?
Shapiro: The answer is, here is a politically incorrect curve, the answer is the culture of single-motherhood breeds violence. Without the fathers in the home it creates violence.
Shouted from audience: Who says?
Shouted from audience: Where’s the evidence?
Shapiro: Where’s the evidence? The evidence is that violence escalates in every community that has an escalated level of single-motherhood.
Shouted from audience: Cite your source!
Shapiro: Look at the Department of Justice statistics, it’s all there.
Shouted from audience: Yeah, but cite it. Which one?
Shapiro: Go to the Department of Justice website, and you will see this is true. I mean, I can’t go do it for you. Prisons are filled with people of every race who grew up in single parent households. The bottom line, and again, the reason you can’t attribute this purely to racism, and listen, again, everyone believes, or should believe, that racism is evil, and that Jim Crow was evil, and that slavery was evil. I mean, all of this should go without saying.
The question was, why it was in 1960 when Jim Crow was still in effect Black single motherhood was 20 percent in the United States, and today the Black single motherhood rate is in excess of 70 percent in the United States? Is that due to an increase in racism? To what is that due? Is that due to increased housing segregation? And we know, forget crime, we know with regard to poverty, as I say, the single best generator of poverty in the United States is single-parent families. So, let me ask you the question, and it’s an honest question, it’s not a “gotcha.” The honest question is: If you believe that housing segregation is responsible for modern black ills, why are certain modern black ills tripling or quadrupling in size since the end of housing segregation?
Shouted from audience: There’s no end!
From audience: When did it end? It’s still going on.
Shapiro: I’m sorry?
From audience: It’s still going on.
Shapiro: Housing segregation is still going on in the same way it was for your grandparents?
Shouted from audience: Yes!
Questioner: Blacks occupy largely the same communities that they were racially forced in to in the 40’s and 50’s.
Shapiro: Ok, and the argument is they are free to leave now because there are no state and federal laws against them leaving. Ok, if you want to pretend the law did not change, if you’re going to pretend nothing has changed, then we can’t really have a conversation. The fact is the law is different now than it was then. Otherwise the Civil Rights movement meant nothing.
From audience: Do you not believe in proliferation?
Questioner: But now there’s de facto, not de jure segregation.
Shapiro: Ok, now, that’s true, but de facto segregation and de jure segregation are two different things. If you’re going to talk about institutional racism, what is the institution that is racist now?
Questioner: It’s the institution that was established that perpetuates today, that creates—
Shapiro: What is the institution now, though?
Indistinct shouts from audience
Shapiro: But again you’re not naming an institution, you’re saying that happened fifty years ago and it still has impact. I agree. Things can happen fifty years ago that still have impact. That is not evidence of continuing white privilege and institutional racism. That’s proof that bad things that happen in the past have an impact on the present. Of course I agree with that.
Questioner: But we don’t see legislation to desegregate neighborhoods.
Shapiro: Because you can’t force people to desegregate.
Audience clapping, some shouting and laughter
Shapiro: I fully agree with this and I think it’s important to recognize that the power of government was used to segregate neighborhoods. Ok, it’s the power of government—
Questioner: Can’t it be used to desegregate?
Shapiro: No, the power of government is the Ring, ok? It can only be cast into Mount Doom. The government is the problem; the government forcing people to do things is the problem.
Questioner: That’s how we got here.
Shapiro: No, the government … that is how we got here in the first place, and the way we are going to solve this is by not having the government intervene, and instead getting back to the basic principles of capitalism. It turns out that capitalism doesn’t care what color you are; it just wants your money.
As the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency has reported, “the most reliable indicator of violent crime in a community is the proportion of fatherless families.”