Telling Your Preferred Truth™

Musk, Tucker, and Textbooks

I had planned on making this newsletter all about Elon Musk’s sharing of a right wing meme on his Twitter account. I know, I should be more specific! This one was about the relationship between crime and race that showed up last week. But since then, that story has become yet another example of a larger issue I want to explore.

First, the Musk tweet. He had shared this meme suggesting that the media are overly focused on white on black crime when they should be focused on black on white crime.

The first thing to note here is the source of the data: the Bureau of Justice Statistics 2018 Victimization Survey, specifically table 14. The Victimization Survey is a measure of households asking if anyone had been a crime victim in the previous year. This is not the data we refer to when talking about crime rates — those deal with arrests. The majority of crimes in the victimization survey are never reported to the police (57% for violent crimes and 66% for property crimes). So we have no independent verification of the data reported.

Now, the data in the meme is a nearly correct reporting of table 14. That table breaks down the percentage of 3.5 million violent offenses¹ reported by people of one race/ethnicity by the race/ethnicity of the assailant. If you multiply the percentages in each category, you get the data listed.

Except, of course, it leaves out two categories. The actual table includes white on white crimes and black on black crimes. There were 2,200,000 of the former and 400,000 of the latter. Why are these not in the meme?

Because they don’t fit the preferred truth™ of Elon and the meme maker. They want to focus on black on white crime particularly in relation to white on black. What made this focus important? Days before this was retweeted, Jordan Neely was choked to death (accidentally or intentionally) by a white man on a New York City subway. It aims to say, “see, that is really rare: why don’t you focus on the other issue?”.

This same idea of preferred truth™ showed up in Tucker Carlson’s announcement that he will be doing videos on Twitter. He starts his pitch² by noting that the mass media doesn’t tell lies. Surprised? Well, he goes on to say that they don’t tell the full truth. His example is that while news reports correctly said that Neely had an arrest record, they didn’t dig into the fact that he had multiple arrests!³ So the media weren’t telling Tucker’s preferred truth that Neely was a bad guy who likely could have been a real threat to those around him (thereby excusing the young man on the subway).

This pattern has shown up in the textbook wars as well. Consider this story from Greg Sargent about an introductory sociology text, The Real World⁴, banned by a local community college board. Its offense? Not telling the board’s preferred truth:

One was to the book’s accurate description of Michael Brown, who was killed by police in 2014, as an “unarmed Black teenager.” The book’s offense? It didn’t also describe Brown’s size and weight, or that he was scuffling with a cop when killed — apparently failing to depict the victim as threatening enough.

Another objection: The book’s description of antifa didn’t mention its supposed role in the “2020 riots.” The book already describes antifa as “far left” and “extreme,” but apparently kids must also be taught wildly absurd right-wing agitprop suggesting that America is overrun with violent leftist terrorism.

Yesterday, the New York Times had a story about how the Florida Board of Education⁵ had rejected (or demanded revisions of) social studies textbooks. This time the preferred truth™ is to have less information. The story outlines the offenses:

The revisions outlined by the state included:

An elementary school textbook no longer includes “home support” guidance on how to talk about the national anthem, which had included advice that parents could “use this as an opportunity to talk about why some citizens are choosing to “take a knee” to protest police brutality and racism.” Florida officials said that content was not age-appropriate.

A text on different types of economies was edited to take out a description of socialism as keeping things “nice and even” and potentially promoting greater equality. The description was flagged as inaccurate, and mention of the term “socialism” was removed entirely.

A middle school textbook no longer includes a passage on the Black Lives Matter movement, the murder of George Floyd and its impact on society. The removed passage described protests, noting that “many Americans sympathized with the Black Lives Matter movement,” while other people were critical of looting and violence and viewed the movement as anti-police. The state said the passage contained “unsolicited topics.”

Manny Diaz, Jr., the Florida education commissioner, said in a statement that textbooks should “focus on historical facts” and be “free from inaccuracies or ideological rhetoric.”

The Preferred Truth™ always works to accentuate the bad things done by THEM and eliminate all nuances around things done by US. It’s unsettling and dangerous. We need to stay vigilant.

1. Table 16 makes clear that nearly 60% of those offenses are categorized as “simple assault”, a misdemeanor charge resulting from a fight.

2. Thank God for closed captioning on the video so I didn’t have to listen to him!

3. It is not uncommon for police to arrest a mentally disturbed person to extricate them from the situation without actually charging them with an offense.

4. Amazon lists it as #11 in sociology books sold.

5. Judd Legum reported Monday that the Board has banned a number of textbooks for supposedly being “pornographic”. Excluded are books showing a witch in a bathtub and one showing the bare buttocks of a young child in a book about foreign lands.