Thinking critically (about race)

Critical thinking is one of the fundamental skills that I as a university lecturer try to encourage in my students. With this skill, one can be more skeptical about processing the information that we receive, whether in the readings that are assigned in a class, conversations that we have with friends and colleagues, and the news that we hear or read. Given the rise of "fake news", this seems especially important now, but what does critical thinking mean in practice? 

This thought came to me as I was reading an opinion piece recently in the New York Times by the columnist John McWhorter. In the column, Professor McWhorter discussed how the acquittal of Daniel Penny in the killing of Jordan Neely should not be weaponized by activists as evidence of racism. While I agree with the sentiment that we should not jump to conclusions, particularly since we do not know the motivations behind Penny's actions, I was still surprised by a couple facts that McWhorter used to substantiate how America has become a less racist country. He referred to a study in 2017 that "one in four recently married Black American men had a spouse from another race or ethnicity, as did more than one in 10 recently married Black women." This, he argues, shows that America has improved on race relations over the past fifty years since interracial marriages were decriminalized by the US Supreme Court.

What struck me was not the prevalence of interracial couplings (which is indeed a positive change, in my opinion), but the difference in the numbers between Black men and women in those relationships. If we assume that there are similar numbers of Black men and women, but more Black men marry non-Black women (or men), then who are the Black women marrying? I then remembered (and confirmed) that a disproportionate share of American prisoners are Black men, nearly 30 percent of the Black male population, while 4 percent of White men and Black women are incarcerated. This discrepancy in imprisonment may reduce the pool of Black men that are available to marry (at least in terms of being able to meet a potential partner), so the difference in interracial marriage rates is even starker. One possible explanation is that with fewer Black men available to partner with, many Black women simply do not marry. Coupled with the evidence that Black women (and Asian men) face discrimination in dating, the differential interracial marriage rates are not that surprising, but also a depressing wrinkle in McWhorter's analysis. 

So what did I take away from these dueling facts about interracial marriage and incarceration rates and on the issue of racism in general? Maybe America is becoming less racist in one way, but it still has a long way to go in others. And this is what thinking critically helps me to do and what I hope my students learn, to recognize that things are never just black or white.