Are White People Dumb?

No, seriously. Are they?

(Screenshot)

I didn’t understand it.

It happens about once a month. Sometimes it appears as an email punctuated with grammatical errors from one of the children George W. Bush saved from being left behind. Occasionally, it’s an all-caps DM from someone whose social media profile contains multiple flags and the word “patriot.” Other times, it’s just a screenshot of FBI statistics. In any case, they all asked the same question:

Why are Black people so violent?

Although I have spent most of my life resisting the African-American urge to slap the taste out of racists’ mouths, I would sometimes respond to these undereducated queriers with a Twitter thread explaining how arrests are a product of which crimes are reported, which laws cops choose to enforce and who police and prosecutors choose to charge with breaking the law. In other cases, I considered it a community service to teach these members of the mathematically challenged community how numbers work. Sure, they could’ve googled one of the bazillion articles and studies (including some I’ve written) dismantling the racist notion that Black people are genetically predisposed to violence, but I’m nothing if not a philanthropist.

To be clear, I wasn’t trying to white shame these Caucasian simpletons for their arrogant ignorance. Whenever I contemplated the paradox of Anglo-American audacity, I was reminded of the time my grandmother sat me on her lap and told me something that befuddled me at the time.

Smart people want to know what’s right and what’s wrong.
Dumb people want you to know they’re right and you’re wrong.

Don’t be dumb.

I didn’t understand.

To heed my grandmother’s don’t-be-dumb dictate, I always tried to learn things I wanted to know. I’ve read the studies that show white people see Black people as more threatening. I know how Black people are portrayed on television and in film. And, as someone born with Black privilege, I am acutely aware of the generations of conscious and subconscious racial propaganda that people of no color endured. I know why they believe this white nonsense. I even understand their reluctance to accept the fact that there is not a single racial or ethnic group on the face of the Earth that has committed more acts of wanton violence than the ancestors of white Americans.

Still, in a world where access to calculators, research and historical documents are literally sitting inside the same devices that perpetuate misinformation, I couldn’t figure out why my Caucasian brothers and sisters keep falling for the white supremacist okey doke. I wanted to know why they were so adamant about showcasing their intellectual inferiority on social media.

I wanted to understand them.

Then, on Thursday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon — the most unqualified, least educated secretary of education since Trump’s previous appointee, Betsy DeVos — testified before the House Committee on Education and Labor about her role in the Trump administration’s effort to shut down the Department of Education. During the hearing, this exchange happened between McMahon and Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.):