Read Letters to a Young Progressive: How to Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don't Understand for Free Online

indeed probable that a black man would be sentenced to die for the premeditated murder of a white man. The Furman case was one that involved real evidence of racism.
    The result of the case was a moratorium on executions in the United States that lasted for five years. After the case, states modified their sentencing statutes to reduce racial disparity in executions. After executions resumed, many criminologists began examining executions to see whether those legal modifications had worked to iron racism out of capital punishment. Professor Bohm published his study in Race and Criminal Justice after several hundred post-Furman executions had been carried out. Unsurprisingly, he claimed evidence of continued racism in executions.
    As evidence of continued racism, Professor Bohm cited the fact that nearly half of those executed since Furman have been black, while African Americans constitute only about 12 percent of the population. What Bohm had obviously failed to emphasize—or, apparently, even consider—is that most homicides are committed by African Americans despite the fact that they constitute only 12 percent of the population of the United States. As of this writing, statistics indicate that blacks commit about 53 percent of all criminal homicides in the U.S.
    In other words, Professor Bohm perpetuates the myth of racism in the death penalty by failing to account for even the most basic of statistical controls—actual criminal behavior. This would amount to professional malpractice if only criminology were considered to be a serious profession. Fortunately, Professor Bohm’s studies are not widely read by the public. But they are assigned to college students in their sociology and criminology classes, with two unfortunate results:
    1. They motivate some students to dedicate their professional lives to finding solutions to nonexistent problems.
    2. They cause many students to become angry over things that aren’t even true.
    I have written this letter—indeed, this series of letters—to you in the hope that you will not get stuck in the second of those two traps. Life is too short to spend being angry about things that aren’t even true. Most of your professors fail to understand that. They think they’re working to overturn false criminal convictions, but really many criminologists are fostering false personal convictions about race and other important matters. In the process, they sentence their students to a life of self-righteous anger with little chance of parole.
    Author’s note: As of this writing, 18 million black babies have been aborted since the Furman case. Not one of them has committed a crime. None has been afforded due process. Professor Bohm has remained mute on that issue. Instead, he continues to claim that the execution of hundreds of black murderers over a span of several decades is an effort to control the black population by “extermination or threat of extermination.” During the same time frame, slightly more than half of those executed have been white. Meanwhile, as I pointed out in my last letter, approximately half of all black pregnancies end in abortion.

LETTER 8
     
    How to Slay Goliath with Just One Stone
     
    Dear Zach,
    Abortion is the issue where all the progressives’ noblest claims—to be fighting for racial equality, to care sincerely about the weakest among us, to have beliefs grounded in reason and science—are shown up for the sham they really are.
    Whenever I end up in an extended argument about abortion, I find that there are about six points I can expect to encounter before the argument has come to term, so to speak. But, fortunately, the six arguments all suffer from one fatal flaw, which makes them somewhat easy to rebut as long as the proponent of life stays focused on the central question of the abortion debate: “Are the unborn human?”
    I’ve listed the six arguments below—along with specific common-sense rebuttals to each.
    Zach, this issue is really