With this book, Reilly enjoys a certain amount of good fortune based simply on the current nature of political discourse. By 2021, we’ve all became familiar with how bad the mainstream media are at covering contentious issues and how much worse social media are at doing so. The nation’s political rhetoric has gotten so extreme that an author like Reilly can make a splash and gain an audience just by saying things that come as surprises but that are backed up by statistics. For example, some of the rhetoric around police shootings implies that the police are intentionally and systematically targeting innocent Black men for murder, but Reilly points out that nearly all the Black men killed by police are armed. Can we liberals still pin these disparities on racism? Yes, we can, but it’s more about racism built into the structure of society than about cops shooting young men for the “crime” of being Black.
Most of the book is about how statistics reveal a more complicated and nuanced story than you are likely to see in a political meme. Differences between the white population and African American population extend far beyond skin color, so different outcomes can hardly be pinned strictly on people being treated differently from each other based on their skin. For example, younger people get killed by the police at a higher rate than older people, and the while population is significantly older than the African American population. If your goal is political mobilization, you might not value nuance, but if you want to understand where conservatives are coming from, Reilly is a big help.
Reilly poses fair questions even if liberals don’t agree with his answers. Whereas radicals look back to 1619 for the source of today’s racial disparities, Reilly looks at the loss of fathers in the Black community starting around 1970. Contemporary sociologists have confirmed Reilly’s contention that a lack of fathers weighs on boys and young men, although they have found that it’s the proportion of fathers in the community that’s the major factor rather than a boy having a father in his own home or not [link]. As a conservative, Reilly is satisfied pointing to welfare as the reason that marriage rates dropped. As a liberal, I’d rather find an answer in the other demographic changes taking place at that time. A lot was changing in our society around 1970, and a lot has changed since then. Reilly’s statistics show that African American communities historically had a higher proportion of fathers in the home when racism was worse, so it can’t simply be “racism” that has led to this issue. Can Reilly be sure that welfare is really the culprit here? If so, he hasn’t backed up that claim by showing that other changes are not to blame. You can learn from this book, but be skeptical.
On immigration, Reilly argues from the perspective that our nation’s immigration policies should help our nation, while liberals often put the needs of would-be immigrants first. From his perspective, for example, Reilly questions birthright citizenship, which was written into our Constitution in order to address a totally different situation from the one we face today. On this topic, statistics can’t prove that we should or shouldn’t put our own nation’s needs first, but Reilly’s take on the topic at least gives us liberals a relatively reasonable conservative position to think about and argue against. He’s no friend of the alt-right, and we can’t simply dismiss his views on immigration as racist. (Obviously, of course, we can of course dismiss his views in just this way, but doing so is a missed opportunity to engage honestly with our fellow Americans who disagree with us.)
Reilly concludes by taking down the Alt-Right. This chapter doesn’t perfectly fit the theme of the book because there’s no taboo against trashing the Alt-Right, but it serves the purpose of helping us liberals remember that conservatives can disagree with us even while they also disagree with the nutters on the right.
Are the “obvious facts” that Reilly cites really taboo? Yes and no. The “taboo” label applies only to the touchiest topics, such as police violence or gaps in outcomes between groups. They’re taboo enough that I’m not going to go into much detail with this review. Reilly pushes some hot buttons, and it’s not feasible to address them properly in this review. I can talk about birthright citizenship, but I’m not going to bring up… certain other topics.
If you’d like to get a sample of Reilly’s position, this Spiked article is a good start.
“Michael Brown: the founding myth of Black Lives Matter”
Compared to What?
If you’re looking for a grander, more historical and global view from a perspective similar to Reilly’s, read Thomas Sowell’s Race and Culture: A Worldview. That book delivers such a strong challenge to the left’s take on inequality that I rarely recommend it. Race and Culture is from 1995, and Taboo is better for current events.
If you’re looking for someone to use statistics to assess rhetoric in the field of gender politics, Debra Soh’s book The End of Gender is the same sort of book as Taboo, albeit from a liberal perspective. Like Reilly, Soh shocks the reader with taboo information that’s readily available but rarely sought out.
Reilly on Twitter
I follow him on Twitter, and based on his tweets I figured I’d give his book a try. If, like me, you make a point of following people you disagree with, he’s worth a try. He’s @wil_da_beast630.
