Sorry, Pete — racism doesn’t cause traffic collisions
Washington Examiner
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Poor Pete Buttigieg. He can escape from South Bend by moving to Michigan, but he can’t escape the reputation he earned in that northern Indiana city for racial insensitivity.
Buttigieg saw this in the results of the 2020 Democratic primaries. Having won Iowa, he finished fifth in South Carolina, carrying just 2% of the black vote. So what’s President Joe Biden’s second-most-useless Cabinet secretary to do? When not taking months off at a time from his job as boss of an entire federal department, Buttigieg has been spending his office hours overcompensating for his supposedly unforgivable racial sins.
CHAOS IS COMING TO THE SOUTHERN BORDER
To give specifics, the transportation secretary once committed the unforgivable sin of stating in public that “all lives matter.” He is also widely known, thanks in part to Biden’s presidential campaign of 2020, for his eight-year tenure as the mayor of a northern Indiana town whose first black police chief he fired and whose black fire chief he controversially cast aside and replaced with a white man.
Buttigieg might have had good reasons for doing any or all of these things. But in today’s Democratic Party, in which the color of people’s skin matters more than their competence or character and the very ideas of merit and colorblindness are branded as white supremacism, there is no possible explanation he can ever give that will fly.
This is why, instead of doing his job and dealing with mass airline cancellations, supply chain disruptions, or the East Palestine, Ohio, disaster, he has spent his time in office making public appearances to denounce bridges and roads as racist. (This idea has been pretty thoroughly debunked by historians, but it is the sort of thing Democrats must still profess in public, debasing themselves intellectually in order to receive approbation from the politically correct.)
Despite the great unlikelihood that Buttigieg will still have a political career after his performance at the Department of Transportation, he is now at it again, asserting that car crashes are also racist.
“We’ve got a crisis when it comes to roadway fatalities in America,” Buttigieg said in an interview with MSNBC senior charlatan Al Sharpton. “We lose about 40,000 people every year … and we see a lot of racial disparities. Black and brown Americans, tribal citizens, and rural residents are much more likely to lose their lives, whether it’s in a car or as a pedestrian being hit by a car. There are a lot of reasons related to discrimination, related to ways that roads are designed and built. Who has access to a safe street design that’s got crosswalks, good lighting, and who doesn’t have that access? That can drive disparities, and we have a responsibility to act on that.”
It is true that a disparity exists in car crashes — according to a study by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, non-Hispanic black people are 73% more likely to die in an automobile crash than non-Hispanic whites. The disparity for pedestrians dying in car crashes is even greater. But the idea that this is due to racism is a mere ideological assumption.
Wherever there is a racial disparity — for example, if there are disproportionately few black people in the field of library science — the prevailing Democratic ideology of critical race theory holds that structural racism must be responsible. Any attempts to give a reasonable or innocent explanation for such disparities (maybe fewer black people care for library science?) is, by that very fact, considered an act of “white supremacy” by critical race ideologues.
But this ideology produces completely bizarre and unacceptable implications. For example, is it racial favoritism that causes Asians to have by far the lowest passenger vehicle and pedestrian fatality rates? Of course not. This highlights that there can be any number of nonracial explanations for the fact that people of different races don’t die in car crashes in perfect racial proportion. The data could be skewed, for example, by the prevailing driving habits in the environment (urban, suburban, or rural) or region (South, Midwest, Mountain West, East Coast) where someone of a given race is more likely to live.
Another possible factor, sadly, is the current tendency for police to lay off black drivers in black neighborhoods for fear of losing their jobs when they should in fact be confronting some drivers for erratic behavior. Two Atlanta policemen were actually criminally charged for a confrontation designed to get suspected drunk driver Rayshard Brooks off the road. Brooks, whose condition became conspicuous because he had fallen asleep in a drive-thru line, woke up and assaulted the officers, seizing one of their stun guns and firing it at them before one of the officers fatally shot him.
Although the criminal charges were ultimately dropped against the officers, the city sent a powerful message by paying a million dollars to Brooks’s family. In Democratic-run cities, if you have the misfortune of being a police officer, the political leadership is determined to blame you. So why take risks that will save black lives on the road?
Just as the anti-police mentality of the Left has caused murders of black people to spike, it might also be causing motor vehicle collisions to harm them disproportionately. If so, racialist ideology will have once again put more black people’s lives at risk. Until more Democratic politicians grow a spine and stop wallowing and groveling like the pathetic Buttigieg, such disparities may never be fixed.