Many conservatives subscribe to the myth of American exceptionalism. This is the belief that America is the greatest expression of human freedom in history. Specifically, America is different from the ‘old world’ of Europe with its castes in that no one is doomed to fail because of the accident of birth. This was to be a meritocracy free of nobles and lords! This has led to other myths like the belief that America is race-neutral. To protect these myths, conservatives whitewash the dark history of the United States—thus ignoring the overwhelming empirical evidence of ongoing discrimination against Black Americans. Racism deniers cannot entertain that the country whose global brand is ‘equal opportunity for everybody’ is not a meritocracy. The chicanery takes the form of academic fraud. Academic fraud is the deliberate falsification, misstatement, and alteration of evidence or data and the deliberate suppression of relevant evidence or data.
Ben Shapiro is a prime example. Shapiro, a political pundit and social commentator, has built his career on denying the undeniable truth that the United States is systematically racist against Black Americans. With a juris doctorate degree from Harvard Law School and a talent for fast-talking and cunning rhetoric, Shapiro has convinced many that his commentaries are based on intellectual rigor and evidence. To them, he’s done what everyone else has failed to do: he’s looked into it and found that there is no proof whatsoever that institutional racism is real! However, Shapiro’s arguments attempting to debunk systemic racism in America are not only flawed, but the evidence that he uses actually contradicts him.
The flaws in Ben Shapiro’s arguments are as glaring and numerous. Despite his educational background and quick-talking, Shapiro’s commentaries are riddled with academic dishonesty and—quite frankly—incompetence. The denial of basic facts about America’s legacy of systemic racism against Black Americans and how that legacy has shaped the national demographic is in service to a whitewashed version of American history. If, in order to arrive at a conclusion, you must be ignorant of the facts or deny them, then your worldview is a myth. Shapiro’s persistent denial of empirical data revealing America’s racism is an example of academic fraud. Shapiro routinely provides a generic introduction to statistical data that, upon closer examination, either fails to support his argument (which he is using it to prove) or, in other cases, flatly refutes him! His handling of data is so clumsy that it is almost as if he’s doing it on purpose—it’s hard to believe that a public figure as visible as Shapiro would leave himself so open!
A classic example of Shapiro using contradicting evidence is in the video titled “Benjamin Shapiro Debunks Viral Systemic Racism,” wherein Shapiro tries to discredit an anti-racist video that outlines the history of structural racism—specifically redlining. In this video, Shapiro concedes that redlining was an unethical policy but argues that laws such as the Equal Protection Act and the Community Reinvestment Act ended such practices. To back up his claims, Shapiro cites a study conducted by researchers at The Federal Reserve Bank in Boston, who found that disparities in loan denials were due to variables unrelated to race.
However, the study’s conclusion clearly contradicts Shapiro’s argument. While this study does acknowledge variables such as credit history and the type of home purchase as weighing on whether a bank will grant a loan, the study also concludes that “Nevertheless, after taking account of such factors, a substantial gap remains. A Black or Hispanic applicant in the Boston area is roughly 60 percent more likely to be denied a mortgage loan than a similarly situated white applicant.” The study also highlights the need for lenders, community groups, and regulators to work together to ensure that minorities are treated fairly. Shapiro either missed or deliberately ignored where the study explicitly acknowledged race as a significant factor in loan approval rates for African Americans.
Shapiro clearly misstated the conclusion of this study. He ignored where the researchers explicitly acknowledged race as a variable that accounts for the disparity in loan approval rates among African Americans. The researchers clearly state that, despite non-racial variables, race continues to play a definitive role in whether an individual will get approved for a loan.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is an example of how Shapiro does not thoroughly review sources. He provides the audience with a shallow introduction to data, which outright refutes his claim.
Even if we assume that the laws cited by Shapiro did end racial discrimination in lending, this does not explain the historical evidence that such policies played a substantial role in the existing Black-White wealth gap today. Outlawing redlining did not level the racial playing field. The study The Plunder of Black Wealth in Chicago: New Findings on the Lasting Toll of Predatory Housing Contracts found discriminatory housing policies resulted in the loss of wealth of $3.2 billion to $4 billion from Chicago’s Black homeowners from 195o to 1970.
It is disingenuous to assume that racial discrimination stopped when it was made illegal when we know that anti-discrimination laws were not enforced in any measure.
The evidence that outlawing a practice doesn’t miraculously stop it from being practiced is in Shapiro’s two examples of legislation. Shapiro mentions the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Act of 1868 and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. If Shapiro’s theory were correct—that a law is sufficient to end a practice—then there wouldn’t have been the need for the Community Reinvestment Act. The Fourteenth Amendment should have been enough. What circumstances compelled Congress to pass the CRA 109 years later? Or even the Fair Housing Act before then?
The Fourteenth Amendment and the Community Reinvestment Act do not even address the same problem, but the Fair Housing Act, which targeted racial discrimination in mortgage lending, was not enforceable. People are deterred from breaking the law if there is a potential for real punishment, and with the FHA, there wasn’t!
The point is that if simply passing a law is not enough to end a behavior, why does Shapiro think it is enough to end racial discrimination? The same problem persisted after the Fourteenth Amendment, the FHA, and the Community Reinvestment Act.
Redlining, blockbusting, and racially restrictive covenants were used to maintain a racial monopoly on assets and opportunities, particularly in real estate. Real estate became indicative of the middle class after World War II with the development of suburbs and the G.I. Bill in 1944. However, African Americans, including veterans, were shut out of this new society—with fewer than 100 black veterans approved for the 67,000 mortgages issued by the G.I. Bill in the New York and northern New Jersey suburbs. Historian Ira Katznelson has stated that “the law [G.I. Bill] was deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow.”
Redlining not only created the Black ghetto but also robbed African American veterans of their rightful benefits after bravely serving their country during World War II. Despite the significant contribution of over a million African American soldiers during the 1940s, they were denied access to G.I. benefits—leaving them economically disadvantaged. This gross injustice perpetuated the cycle of poverty in Black neighborhoods, exacerbated by the practice of redlining, which systematically denied these communities access to resources and opportunities. Shockingly, federal government redlining policies have caused a staggering loss of wealth in black neighborhoods. Homeowners in redlined neighborhoods have gained 52% less, or $212,023 less, in personal wealth due to property value increases over the past 40 years compared to their greenlined counterparts. This is a stark reminder of the devastating effects of systemic racism that continue to impact African-American communities to this day.
Shapiro and other conservatives cling to the myth that America is not systemically racist with the same fervor as children holding on to the belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Even when presented with overwhelming evidence of systemic racism, they refuse to acknowledge it as fact. They prop up their denial with distorted data, logical fallacies, and sophistry!
White America’s wealth wasn’t earned through their supposed merit, business ingenuity, or innovation but rather by laws that shut a population out of the same opportunity and access to resources in order to render them noncompetitive. Black Americans’ poverty is not due to some imagined lack of ambition, ignorance, or laziness but the direct result of intentional government and private policies and practices. These policies were not accidental—mind you—but were intentionally designed to perpetuate a racial hierarchy inherited from slavery.
Shapiro argues that African Americans do not face racism in their quest for employment, and he seeks to debunk the findings of a famous study titled “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination” by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan. The study found that White names receive 50% more callbacks for interviews than Black names.
However, Shapiro provides his own theory for the apparent difference in treatment, claiming that people use first names as a stand-in for social class. He argues that the issue is a question of class discrimination rather than racial discrimination, as people discriminate against Lakisha as opposed to Steve Johnson or Steve Washington because they believe that Lakisha comes from a more impoverished background. Shapiro notes that this is not restricted to the Black community, as it also happens in the Jewish community.
Shapiro’s rationalization fails to acknowledge an important point made in the cited study: that the social class affect must be something of independent interest, which requires the assumption that African Americans with the selected names come from a lower social background than the average African American, or that whites with the selected names come from a higher social background than the average white. In fact, the study used data from birth certificates and the mother’s educational background to conclude that there is little evidence to support Shaprio’s claim that employers are inferring something other than race, such as social class, from the names. These results strongly suggest that racial discrimination continues to be a significant problem in the labor market.
Shapiro gives us no reason to assume that employment discrimination, which just so happens to militate against African Americans is attributed to employers reading social class into names as opposed to race, especially since the study refutes this conjecture.