Heather Mac Donald is not too blunt

John McWhorter, a black professor of English and Comp Lit from Columbia University and a Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has written a brief review of Heather Mac Donald's book The War on Cops.

The basic point of McWhorter's review is this: Mac Donald's book is, in the main, factually correct and well-reasoned; nevertheless, the book will have no practical impact because blacks are incapable of accepting bluntly stated facts and arguments about problems in their own communities.

McWhorter writes:

[T]he facts have been established beyond any doubt about the tragic incident in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 9, 2014: Officer Darren Wilson did not execute an innocent Michael Brown in cold blood. Yet Brown’s martyrdom is now accorded near liturgical status by purportedly thoughtful people. For example, Wilson’s guilt was taken as fact in the widely acclaimed best seller, Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

Instead of blasting Coates for his inability to acknowledge the truth (and condemning the liberal idiots at the MacArthur Foundation for rewarding such a denialist), McWhorter criticizes Mac Donald for her supposedly flippant "tone:"

Mac Donald’s claims are mostly correct. Yet her book is hard to read—not so much for what it covers as for its tone, which leaves a question about the author’s ultimate intent. ... Such flippancy will alienate most readers on the fence—and virtually all readers on the left.

Instead of condemning the perpetuation of false narratives by black propagandists, McWhorter invents fancy terms justifying the continued lies:

Mac Donald isn't interested in the roots of the resulting antiempiricism and hypersensitivity, and that’s OK. The last thing I am arguing is that she or others are at fault for not attempting to empathize with black pain. The issue here is pragmatic. We assume that The War on Cops is a call for some kind of change. Yet it is written in too pitiless a tone to reach the people it describes. Take the chapter titled, “Is the Criminal Justice System Racist?” Its logic is solid. However, its air of “oh, come on!” flouts entrenched sensibilities which, whether we like it or not, are with us for the foreseeable future.

Antiempiricism? Isn't that just a fancy way of saying that blacks refuse to acknowledge facts? Even though Ms Mac Donald's facts and conclusions are impeccable, we are apparently supposed to condemn her as insensitive to oh-so-delicate "entrenched sensibilities," merely because she forcefully points out the flaws in the utterly false narrative that Obama and Holder, Inc peddled for two presidential terms. Tragically, this narrative served only to enflame blacks' irrational sense of victimhood even more and to alienate and isolate them even further from the norms of mainstream America. Barack Obama and Eric Holder shamelessly retarded the long-term integration of their race into mainstream America, but we are supposed to think that the problem is with the bluntness of Ms Mac Donald's well-reasoned analysis.

Additional note: Here is a link to an article by Heather Mac Donald in which she describes how militant students at Claremont McKenna College and UCLA attempted to prevent her from speaking there. Simply shameful.