Al Sharpton pictured above with Jesse Jackson and Cindy Sheehan has called William Bennett’s Comments blatantly racist.

Civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton said on CNN that Bennett’s comments were “blatantly racist.”

“(He) stated as a fact that if you did this it would in fact lower the crime rate which clearly is him making blacks and crime synonymous,” Sharpton said.

And Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic National Committe said, “the comments were “hateful, inflammatory” and asked whether they represented the values of the Republican party.

Yeah Right!

Is it that Sharpton does not want the African American community to think about the ten million aborted African American babies since Roe?

Is this the real story here?

Update #1

Read what Freakonomics author, Steven D. Levitt has to say at his Blog regarding Bill Bennett’s comments.

Here are my thoughts on this exchange:

1) People should bear in mind that this took place on an unscripted radio show in response to a caller’s question. It was clearly off-the-cuff. This is a very different situation than, say, Bennett’s writing an op-ed piece.

2) Race is not an important part of the abortion-crime argument that John Donohue and I have made in academic papers and that Dubner and I discuss in Freakonomics. It is true that, on average, crime involvement in the U.S. is higher among blacks than whites. Importantly, however, once you control for income, the likelihood of growing up in a female-headed household, having a teenage mother, and how urban the environment is, the importance of race disappears for all crimes except homicide. (The homicide gap is partly explained by crack markets). In other words, for most crimes a white person and a black person who grow up next door to each other with similar incomes and the same family structure would be predicted to have the same crime involvement. Empirically, what matters is the fact that abortions are disproportionately used on unwanted pregnancies, and disproportionately by teenage women and single women.

3) Some people might think that my comments in (2) above are just ducking the race issue because it is politically correct to do so. Anyone who has read Freakonomics knows that I am not afraid to take issues of race head on. Much of the book deals with challenging issues of race (e.g. black-white test score gaps, black naming patterns, etc.). I mean it when I say that, from a purely fact-based and statistical perspective, race is not in any way central to our arguments about abortion and crime.

4) When a woman gets an abortion, for the most part it is not changing the total number of children she has; rather, it is shifting the timing so those births come later in life. This is an important fact to remember. One in four pregnancies ends in abortion and this has been true for 30 years in the U.S. But the impact of abortion on the overall birth rate has been quite small.

5) In light of point (4) above, it is hard to even know what Bennett means when he says “you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” Implicit in his comment is the idea that some external force, like a government, is forcing blacks to have abortions. This is obviously a completely different situation than abortion as we know it today, in which a woman chooses whether or not to have an abortion now, and then starts her family later in life, when her situation is more stable and conducive. The distinction between a woman choosing to control her fertility and the government choosing to limit her fertility is fundamental and people often seem to lose sight of that.

6) If we lived in a world in which the government chose who gets to reproduce, then Bennett would be correct in saying that “you could abort every black baby in this country, and
your crime rate would go down.” Of course, it would also be true that if we aborted every white, Asian, male, Republican, and Democratic baby in that world, crime would also fall. Immediately after he made the statement about blacks, he followed it up by saying, “That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.” He made a factual statement (if you prohibit any group from reproducing, then the crime rate will go down), and then he noted that just because a statement is true, it doesn’t mean that it is desirable or moral. That is, of course, an incredibly important distinction and one that we make over and over in Freakonomics.

7) There is one thing I would take Bennett to task for: first saying that he doesn’t believe our abortion-crime hypothesis but then revealing that he does believe it with his comments about black babies. You can’t have it both ways.

8) As an aside, the initial caller’s statement is completely wrong. If abortion were illegal, our Social Security problems would not be solved. As noted above, most abortions just shift a child from being born today to a child being born to the same mother a few years later.

The FLAP is here.

CNN has Bennett under fire for remarks on blacks, crime.

Congressional Democrats blasted former Education Secretary William Bennett on Thursday for saying that aborting “every black baby in this country” would reduce the crime rate, and demanded their Republican counterparts do the same.

The Comments……. in answering a caller’s question, took issue with the hypothesis put forth in a recent book that one reason crime is down is that abortion is up.

“But I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. ”

He went on to call that “an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.”

Senator Harry Reid and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi at a news conference yesterday condemning Secretary Bennett.

Reid, D-Nev., said he was “appalled by Mr. Bennett’s remarks” and called on him “to issue an immediate apology not only to African Americans but to the nation.”

Rep. Raum Emanuel, D-Ill., said in a statement, “At the very time our country yearns for national unity in the wake of hurricane Katrina, these comments reflect a spirit of hate and division.”

“This is precisely the kind of insensitive, hurtful and ignorant rhetoric that Americans have grown tired of,” said Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Illinois.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, called on President Bush to condemn the comments by Bennett, who was anti-drug chief in Bush’s father’s administration.

“What could possibly have possessed Secretary Bennett to say those words, especially at this time?” Pelosi asked. “What could he possibly have been thinking? This is what is so alarming about his words.”

And the President knuckled under and issued a statement.

The White House on Friday criticized former Education Secretary William Bennett for remarks linking the crime rate and the abortion of black babies.

“The president believes the comments were not appropriate,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.

Flap was listening to the show when Secreatary Bennett addressed the caller. There were no racist connotations or implications in the discussion. This is much ado about nothing.

The President’s comments are well……..DUMB!

An ABC news video of the Flap is here.

William Bennett’s response on the Hannity and Colmes televison show last night is here.

BENNETT: Sure. Well, the context was a radio show that I was doing yesterday, and the topic was abortion and we were talking about bad arguments in regard to abortion. A caller suggested he was opposed to abortion because he said if there were more babies there would be, eventually, more tax payers and a larger GNP, a smaller deficit. I said you want to be careful with that kind of argument because someone could postulate a situation where child’s not likely to be a productive taxpayer. I said, arguments in which you take something that’s far out, like the GNP and try to connect it up with abortion are tricky. I said make the case of abortion on the basis of life and protecting life. I said abortion is invoked in another way; you could make an argument that if you wanted to lower the crime rate, you saw the quote; you could practice abortion in very large numbers. You could do it in the black community; you could do it in other places. This is, by the way, the subject of a book for economics by a professor at Yale.

I said, however, if you were to practice that, widespread abortion in the black community or any other community, it would be ridiculous, impossible, and I appreciate you putting it on the screen, morally reprehensible. So I think morally reprehensible, when that is included in the quote makes it perfectly clear what my position is. A number of the people whom you have cited as condemning me have not made the inclusion of that remark, and so they make it seem, Alan, as if I am supporting such a monstrous idea, which of course I don’t…..

Read the entire transcript here.

So, should Bill Bennett apologize?

NOPE!

Bill Bennett’s page is here for more.