#virtuous lies

By: Jake Mackey

Published: Aug 2023

“Live not by lies.” —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A “virtuous lie” is a false, misleading, or highly contestable claim that is promulgated without qualification as flatly true in order to serve a purportedly emancipatory end, despite the fact that evidence of its falsehood, deceptiveness, or contestability is readily available. We live by these lies. They underlie a great many communications in the media, in academic journals, in government, and at elite educational institutions like my college.

For example, a recent announcement for a talk read: “In this lecture, [the guest] asks, what can we do about unkindness? How can [we] grap­ple with this messy, borderless concept, which has influenced so much of our post-1492 era?” The announcement does not so much assert as simply presuppose, and ask readers to accept, that “unkindness” is a distinctive characteristic of the post-Columbian world. Readers are invited to draw the inference that “unkindness” had less “influence” in the world before Europeans arrived in the Americas. Like much of the messaging on elite campuses, this one implies that the West in general and perhaps the United States in particular are uniquely culpable in history’s evils.

Another example: I attended a talk by a prominent author, a journal­ist, at a super-elite private high school. He took pains to paint North American slavery in the most gruesome of colors, as well one might for the edification of young people, who are inevitably ignorant of its true toll. In so doing, however, he told two virtuous lies: first, that slave-farmed cotton drove the expansion of the antebellum U.S. economy and, second, that increases in cotton productivity resulted from increases in the torture of enslaved people.

These two claims, both of which come straight out of the “New History of Capitalism” and, via Matthew Desmond’s contribution, are central to the 1619 Project, have been debunked.1 And yet these lies are virtuous. North American slavery was a moral abyss. One can never overstate its horror or overdo one’s condemnation of it . . . even if one lies. The lies of the “New History of Capitalism” are virtuous, serving purportedly noble goals, such as reparations, as the speaker took care to make explicit in his talk.

A third example: on May 21, 2020, as if to foreshadow the murder of George Floyd that was to come four days later, Kimberlé Crenshaw, a professor of law at both UCLA and Columbia and coiner of the concept of intersectionality, wrote in the New Republic that anti-black police and vigilante violence represented “modern embodiments of racial terror dating back to . . . the reign of white impunity rooted in slavery and Jim Crow” and opined that such violence was part of a pattern that amounts to “a kind of genocide.”2 In a similar vein, star attorney Ben Crump ti­tled his 2019 book Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People. Chapter two is titled “Police Don’t Shoot White Men in the Back.” Note that this was the tone of the discourse before George Floyd.

What we see in this catastrophizing rhetoric about genocide is the product of the virtuous lie that black people, and black men in particular, are being murdered by racist police with wild abandon. As Derecka Purnell put it in the Guardian: “We know how we die—the police.”3 This perception is the result of a virtuous lie. The lie promotes a distort­ed view of reality. It is a well-meaning distortion but a distortion none­theless, designed to bring attention to the cause, worthy in itself, of police brutality against black people.

The reality, of course, easily accessible to all online, is that while there are indeed disturbing anti-black disparities in the police use of nonlethal force,4 there do not appear to be racial differences in the way police deploy lethal force. In other words, police are, overall, no more disposed to kill a black person than a white person. This basic finding has been discovered and rediscovered again,5 and again,6 and again,7 and again,8 and again,9 and again,10 and again.11 And yet so taboo is this finding, and so sacred is the lie, that people have been fired for noting the former in order to correct the latter. Such was the fate of Zac Krieg­man, a director of data science at the news and information company Thomson Reuters. When he pointed out that Black Lives Matter, whatever the organization’s salutary contributions to our political life, was promoting a virtuous lie,12 he was fired.13

Indeed, Kriegman was not the only casualty of the virtuous lie that lethal police violence specifically targets black people. In 2019, a paper was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that found “no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic dispari­ties across shootings.”14 Due to an unusual set of circumstances, includ­ing a congressional hearing about policing, the article quickly became a flashpoint. First, it was officially “corrected,” though its findings were not altered. A few weeks later, George Floyd was murdered. Soon after, as the article began to be cited and contested in the ensuing debate about policing, PNAS asked two independent researchers to look into the article’s data and methods. They found that the article “does not contain fabricated data or serious statistical errors warranting a retraction.” Nevertheless, the article’s authors themselves retracted it, citing as their reason “continued use of our work in the public debate” about policing. PNAS chimed in, too, saying that “partisan political use” of the article warranted retraction.15 The virtuous lie and the political program it serves must be protected at all costs.

Virtuous lies are not confined to high schools, colleges, major media companies, and scholarly journals. Our government and medical estab­lishment increasingly run on virtuous lies as well. For example, in 2019, California passed a bill, AB 241, that requires “implicit bias” training as part of routine continuing education for physicians, nurses, and physi­cian assistants.16 The bill asserts the following: “Implicit bias, meaning the attitudes or internalized stereotypes that affect our perceptions, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner, exists, and often contributes to unequal treatment of people based on race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, and other characteristics.” And in case you missed the causal chain running from implicit bias through behavior to health outcomes: “Implicit bias contributes to health disparities by affecting the behavior of physicians and surgeons, nurses, physician assistants, and other healing arts licensees.”

AB 241 is wholly based on a string of interconnected virtuous lies about implicit bias. The first virtuous lie is that researchers have settled on a coherent and consistent understanding of what the term “implicit bias” means.17 The second lie is that whatever implicit bias may be, we know that it influences behavior.18 The third falsehood is that we know that disparities in health outcomes are caused by the behavior of implic­itly biased medical personnel.

The truth about implicit bias is easy to state: “[I]t is not clear precisely what is being measured on implicit attitude tests; implicit attitudes do not effectively predict actual discriminatory behavior.”19 Moreover, with respect to disparate racial outcomes, it is important to note that measures that attempt to use implicit bias “to predict behavior find little or no anti-Black discrimination specifically.”20 This is good news! It means that racial health disparities are likely not wholly or even significantly attributable to the implicit bias of medical personnel.

What discrimination there is in medicine—and there surely has been and is discrimination—is based on entirely explicit attitudes supported by pseudoscientific theories. For example, it used to be a common prac­tice among medical laboratories to adjust the renal values of black patients to take into account black people’s supposedly greater muscle mass relative to white people.21 Such adjustments might, however, have caused doctors to overlook kidney failure in black patients. Again, some white physicians are said to believe that black patients are less suscep­tible to pain than white patients because, the theory goes, they have longer nerve endings and thicker skin.22 These are not “implicit biases.” These are wholly conscious false beliefs that can be dispelled by acquaintance with the truth.

Nevertheless, California’s medical personnel now must pay the opportunity cost of submitting to training for implicit biases, training that we know to be useless. In a sense, the mandating of implicit bias training is a fourth virtuous lie, for the fact is, “most interventions to attempt to change implicit attitudes are ineffective.”23 What we have, then, is an entire government-mandated regime of healthcare education built atop the foundational virtuous lie of implicit bias.24 Articles appear regularly to bolster the lie in journals that could once be trusted. If everything you knew about implicit bias in medicine came from the latest article about it in Science,25 for example, you’d know very little indeed.26

We live by lies like implicit bias because we suppose that doing so makes us good people. To question them is to align oneself with all that is oppressive. Our moral credentials are burnished if we condemn European contact with the Americas as the moment at which “unkind­ness” became a force in human affairs. We signal our ethical seriousness with respect to American slavery and continuing black socioeconomic inequality if we applaud rather than quibble when debunked theories are presented as plain facts to high school students. We stand ostentatiously on “the right side of history” if we endorse BLM’s narrative that black people are “intentionally targeted for demise” by police.27 Similarly, medical personnel in California now attest their racial innocence by submitting, ironically enough, to the proposition that their implicit bias is causing them to mistreat racial minorities and to a highly profitable training industry that purports to remedy it.

As in the case of the narrative about police killings, to question any of the claims built upon the virtuous lie of implicit bias is to court personal and professional disaster. Edward Livingston, then a deputy editor at the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), discovered this in early 2021 when he went on a JAMA podcast and made the mistake of suggesting that accusing doctors of racism was perhaps not the best way to resolve inequities in health outcomes and that the solution might instead lie in addressing socioeconomic disparities.28 This marked him for destruction. A petition against JAMA gar­nered nine thousand signatures, the podcast episode was scrubbed from the web,29 an investigation was announced, he was asked to resign his editorship, which he did,30 and he was made the subject of a “restorative justice session” at UCLA medical school, where he teaches.31 Yet the spread of the miasma was not stopped by these expiations. JAMA’s editor-in-chief, Howard Bauchner, who had had nothing to do with the ill-fated podcast episode, fell over himself apologizing for the incident but was investigated by an AMA committee and soon had to resign his editorship.32

The fates of Kriegman, Livingston, and Bauchner, as well as my own reticence to push back on the high school speaker, reveal a central feature of the logic of the virtuous lie: to correct these lies is tantamount to opposing noble goals. Nobody wants to be the one who points out that a virtuous lie is not true. In the case of the high school speaker, any pushback would have come across as a defense of American slavery. In the case of “our post-1492 era,” to ask for evidence would be to mini­mize the enormity of the post-Columbian devastation of Native Ameri­cans and of the transatlantic slave trade, just for starters. Regarding claims of a state-sanctioned genocide of black people, to gesture toward research to the contrary would be to affirm the status quo and to oppose much-needed reforms.

The Epistemology of the Virtuous Lie

Let us distinguish the virtuous lie from two adjacent phenomena—Plato’s “noble lie” and Rob Henderson’s “luxury belief”—and then consider the choice of the term “lie.”

The noble lie. Plato introduces the noble lie in Book 3 of his Republic. Socrates, the lead character in the dialogue, urges that in order to found his proposed ideal city, they would need to craft “one noble lie which may deceive” the city’s three social classes, that is, the ruler class, the soldier class, and the producer class:

“Citizens,” we shall say to them in our tale, “you are brothers, yet god has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honor; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron.”

The point of Plato’s noble lie is to reconcile people to inequality and their place in the social hierarchy, in order to create the ideal city, with a place for everyone and everyone in their place. The mechanism of reconciliation is a naturalization of the hierarchy not by analogy or comparison to metals but through the assertion that people of differing stations are quite literally made of different metals. The rulers are gold­en, the soldiers silver, and the workers brass and iron.

Luxury beliefs. Rob Henderson defines luxury beliefs as follows: “Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.”33 People crave status symbols and signs of distinction. Some such signs are expensive clothing or tastes that can only be cultivated by those with surplus time and material resources. Beliefs can function as another status symbol, however. Henderson uses the example of “defund the police,” which is endorsed disproportionately by those of high socioeconomic status, who, as a result of living in places relatively invulnerable to crime, would suffer the least from defunding. This belief is a luxury for them. It has no material impact on them, but it signals their high status to their peers, who are equally safe from crime. Yet this belief is often unaffordable for poorer people, who tend to live in places that make them vulnerable to crime. “Defund” is a luxury beyond their means. If the elites, who dominate the media discourse and exert control in government, get their way and succeed in defunding the police, the costs of the policy will be borne disproportionately by the poor.

Virtuous lies versus noble lies and luxury beliefs. Virtuous lies differ from both Plato’s noble lies and Henderson’s luxury beliefs. Plato’s noble lie promotes acceptance of an inequitable social order, depicting it as natural, inevitable, and just. In contrast, the virtuous lie invariably produces dissatisfaction with the social order, which it depicts as illegitimate or unjust. The noble lie reconciles us to social inequality whereas the virtuous lie is intended to serve a project of dismantling inequality. Finally, the noble lie is ultimately metaphysical. That is, it purports to offer an account of the underlying nature of reality that can be adduced to explain social arrangements. The virtuous lie, in contrast, is concerned with the social arrangements themselves in their historical, sociological, economic, and psychological dimensions, as the examples above show.

Virtuous lies share with luxury beliefs both a commitment to emancipatory political programs and a concern to signal moral goodness. As Henderson’s example of “defund” suggests, however, luxury beliefs are inherently normative. They depict a prescribed course of action. Virtuous lies, in contrast, are purely descriptive. They purport to represent states of affairs as they exist in the world, for example, “police hunt and kill black people,”34 or “Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.”35 Virtuous lies like these provide the “factual” basis for normative luxury beliefs like “defund the police.”

Why call virtuous lies “lies”? A lie is, by definition, a false claim that is asserted despite its known falsity. A lie involves intent to deceive. I would not pretend to know that everyone who utters what I have called a virtuous lie knows that it is false (or at least highly questionable) and intends to deceive. Surely some do, but I imagine that many or even most who repeat virtuous lies do so sincerely, because they know no better.

Why might so many know no better? The term “lie” seems especially fitting here. Unlike the unwitting laypeople who repeat them, those who invent and promulgate these untruths, including activists, media compa­nies, and law professors, are in a good position to know better and have an epistemic obligation to the truth that should give them pause.

There is something gratuitous about virtuous lies, not only when they are uttered cynically by knowledge-economy elites but even when they are uttered unwittingly and sincerely. Respected professors of law who specialize in racial issues and major media companies whose own data scientists have alerted them to the truth have no excuse. But neither do laypeople, really. The information that problematizes or even de­bunks virtuous lies is not kept locked away. Anyone who even halfway cares about what the world was like before 1492, whether slavery was central to the economic surge of the early United States, whether there is an epidemic of racist cops murdering black people, or whether implic­it bias is a well-defined construct that has a clear effect on behavior can find the truth with the click of a mouse, or at least a vigorous debate, that should cause one to back off of strong claims.

Those given to whataboutery will have been champing at the bit to utter one word in response to my theory: Trump. The man is, after all, a liar of world-historic proportions. One of his most vicious lies is that the 2020 election was stolen. Indeed, according to a recent CNN poll, 63 percent of Republicans still believe that Biden “did not legitimately win enough votes to win the presidency.”36 But Trumpian lies, and right-wing lies more generally, are manifestly not “virtuous” insofar as they are outwardly self-serving, even if the teller believes in the ultimate truth of the cause. They make no pretense of serving an emancipatory project. They serve a project of acquiring political power and they do so nakedly. In a sense, this nakedness is refreshing. After all, virtuous lies, too, are promulgated in pursuit of political power, but under cover of the pretense of fighting it.

Vicious Consequences of Virtuous Lies

Why not just embrace the most emancipatory virtuous lies? After all, they promise to inspire the activism and political will needed to address some of our most urgent problems. The answer is that virtuous lies offer only a false promise. Let me say why.

First, the internet has put any citizen with even a modicum of curiosity and a free Sunday afternoon in a position to adjudicate these claims for herself. We are in an era in which you simply cannot keep information from people anymore, and you cannot lie to them.

Second, the lies will alienate at least as many people as they inspire. The virtuous lie is not a reliable formula for any political change apart from greater polarization. In other words, a commitment to these lies on the part of the media and our knowledge-producing class more broadly means that there will always be a number of Americans who embrace the lies out of ignorance or tribal loyalty. There will also, however, be a growing number of Americans who, as I have already suggested, will figure out that they are being lied to. This will create, or is already creating, a division in which a side consisting of tribally committed virtuous liars faces off against a side consisting of people who resent being lied to. This division is and will be toxic to our politics and hence to our democracy. It will only promote the rise of more Trump-like figures, who feed on and exacerbate the resentment of voters who dislike being lied to.

Let’s take just one of the virtuous lies discussed above, the lie about racist murders by police, and follow it through. Some might say, sure, perhaps it is not quite true that the police go out hunting for black people. But this fib is innocent because it has beneficial effects. The proof is right before us: after all, it has spurred a massive nationwide and even worldwide movement for change. What could be bad about such a lie?

I would answer that the lie is not worth it. The cost of the lie is paid as a psychological toll on all Americans, but on black Americans especially: the needless psychological suffering that results from hearing that you are being “hunted” by agents of the state in your own country. As Musa al-Gharbi put it in these pages, speaking of such narratives more broadly:

For people of color, getting “educated” in America is to be cud­geled relentlessly with messages about how oppressed, exploited, and powerless we are, and how white people need to “get it together” to change this (but probably never will). Narratives like these grew especially pronounced during the post-2011 “Great Awokening.” The internalization of these messages may contribute to the observed ideological gaps in psychic distress among women and people of color.37

The cost of the lie is paid as damage to our perceptions of black and white race relations. Gallup has polled Americans on this almost every year since 2001.38 In 2001, 70 percent of black Americans said race relations were good. In 2021, not even half as many, 33 percent, could make that affirmation. The drop-off began in earnest in 2013, right around when use of terms like “racism” began to rise spectacularly in the media,39 and the newly formed Black Lives Matter began its messaging campaign.

The cost of the lie is not only ill-conceived campaigns to “defund,”40 but also damage to (already strained) trust between communities and police, especially black communities, whose disproportionate victimization by criminals shows they need policing, good policing, the most.41 The cost of the lie is black Americans’ sense of alienation within their own country. The cost of the lie is the creation of preconditions for destructive rioting the next time a cop is caught on camera killing a black person,42 whether under legally justifiable circumstances (such as to save lives) or not.

There is a final cost to be reckoned with. Police killings do not ultimately constitute a distinctly “black” issue, and a narrative that casts it as such has inherent limitations. First, the narrative’s framing is divi­sive: there are “black” issues and there are “white” issues, but there are no “American” issues that affect us all. This framing requires activists to leverage enough guilt or empathy among Americans who are not black to enact a “black” agenda of reform. Moreover, the “hunting black people” narrative is impotent to make common cause with those seeking justice for unjustified police killings of people of other races. (Almost half of the people killed by police are white.43) This impotence undermines the possibility of a broad-based, nonpartisan movement for reform.

For example, when police (both, as it happens, Latino) in Fresno, California, killed an unarmed white teenager, Dylan Noble, in 2016, and the killing was caught on video,44 Noble’s friends, family, and sympathizers initiated months of protests. But when protesters displayed “White Lives Matter” placards, perhaps inspired by Black Lives Matter, they were predictably decried as “racist.”45 What if there had been a movement for police reform not based on identity politics with which Dylan Noble’s family and supporters could have made common cause? Later, a young black man, a rapper, Justice Medina, organized a protest in Fresno for all the lives lost to police violence, including that of Dylan Noble. He named Dylan Noble in one of his songs, and he sought to distance himself from BLM: “I’m out here for the human race,” he said.46

Medina is precisely right: police reform is not well addressed through identity politics, in which one group’s grievances are pitted against another group’s perceived sins, biases, and privileges. The issue of police violence falls instead within the broader purview of American identity, which emphasizes our mutual bond and shared interests as citizens. Writing of the killing of a white woman, Hannah Fizer, by a police officer in June 2020, Adam Rothman and Barbara Fields point out that “a successful national political movement must appeal to the self-interest of white Americans” and advise that “those seeking genuine democracy must fight like hell to convince white Americans that what is good for black people is also good for them.” Only in this way will we find “the basis for a successful political coalition rooted in the real conditions of American life.”47

The upshot is that virtuous lies, whether about the police or about any other matter of concern, will get us nowhere. Only if the media and knowledge-producing classes eschew such lies and hew closer to the truth can we hope to depolarize our discourse, restore faith in our information-generating institutions, and bring together a broad swath of the country in solidarity to confront the challenges that face all of us as American citizens.

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By: Erec Smith

Published: Feb 24, 2024

My impetus for dedicating the bulk of my career to combatting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives began on a listserv for Rhetoric and Composition, the field in which I teach as a professor. Upon hearing a well-received speech claiming that the teaching of Standard English to Black students was a form of racism, I wrote an email questioning the efficacy of that argument. My inquiry induced a level of opprobrium I did not expect. I was called a white supremacist, and blatant lies were spread about me on social media.

Besides these robust attempts to degrade me, I noticed a consistent infantilization of anyone Black who was “brave” enough to speak up against me. Mind you, this extremely woke listserv was a safe place to voice disdain for anyone who refused to embrace a victim narrative—no bravery required—but in order to abide by that narrative, anyone Black had to be cast as a downtrodden victim punching up and speaking truth to power. Anyone Black except me, of course. For wanting Black students to have the utmost agency and to flourish in today’s society, I, a Black man, was shunned by whites and Blacks alike.

The U.S. is currently celebrating Black History Month, and I’ve been asked to share my thoughts about how this month of celebration aligns with DEI initiatives. The answer to that question depends on the type of DEI. Some DEI initiatives align with the classical liberal values of the civil rights movement, and indeed of America’s founding, such as freedom and equal opportunity for all, regardless of skin color. Other versions of DEI, however, are undergirded by critical social justice (CSJ), an ideology that pits whites and Blacks against each other; whites are perpetual oppressors, and Blacks are perpetually oppressed. This variation of DEI, which I refer to as CSJ-DEI, is the ideology that was on display during the aforementioned listserv debacle. It insists on the perpetual victim status of Black Americans and, in so doing, is ideologically opposed to the celebration of Black Americans because it focuses on their trials, not their triumphs. Black History Month is supposed to be about Black empowerment, but CSJ-DEI depends on Black disempowerment.

One can get the gist of CSJ by understanding its primary tenet: “The question is not ‘did racism take place?’ but rather ‘how did racism manifest in that situation?’” This philosophy assumes that racism is always already a part of any interaction between whites and nonwhites; one just has to find it. Assessing the facts of a particular situation is considered unnecessary, even naive. One need not think when it comes to racial justice; the narrative—the script—does the thinking. Does this lack of agency, this deference of volition to a pre-scripted narrative, sound empowering?

CSJ-DEI is about leaning into to the “downtrodden Black person” narrative, but that narrative does not align with the reality of today’s America. Forget about the growing presence of current or recent Black immigrants and the enhanced socioeconomic status of many Black Americans today. According to the altered reality of CSJ-DEI, Black people must still be seen as irredeemably oppressed. Scholars Julian Adorney and Jake Mackey call this altered reality a “virtuous lie,” defined as “a false or dubious claim that is asserted without qualification because it is thought to advance an ethical agenda.” Exaggerated police statistics and the insistence that Black Americans are still caught in a form of slavery are just the tips of this “virtuous” iceberg.  

Virtuous lies are anything but virtuous in these situations, but they show up in traditionally virtuous places, such as scholarly journals. In the scientific journal Cell, prominent scientists insist that the Black individuals among their ranks “continue to suffer institutional slavery.” In addition, a philosophy professor argues that the “years 1492 and 1619 and 1857 and 1955 are still now” and insists she means this in “a meaningful, non-metaphorical sense” (my emphasis). The absurdity of these statements is matched, if not eclipsed, only by the fact that these authors were confident their arguments would be taken seriously. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was emboldened enough to say that a false narrative is acceptable if it feels “morally right”; to insist on facts is to be misguided.

Black History Month is too good for CSJ-DEI. It is about the celebration of figures in Black history who beat seemingly insurmountable odds. It is about figures like educator Mary McLeod Bethune, lawyer Samuel J. Lee, congressman Josiah T. Walls and many others of whom most are unaware. I firmly believe that these figures would scoff at CSJ-inspired ideas such as equitable math, the demonization of debate and the violence of teaching Standard English to Black students.

[ Autodidact, reformer and orator Frederick Douglass. ]

The misalignment of Black History Month with CSJ-DEI is exemplified by one of the most consistently celebrated figures of Black history: Frederick Douglass. As a slave, Douglass taught himself to read despite the fact that it was illegal. He had to be astute enough to be autodidactic and clever enough to do it without getting caught. When he escaped into the free states, he rose to become the most sought-after orator of the 19th century. Douglass’ life is an implicit counterargument to the CSJ-DEI narrative: If Douglass could accomplish this as a slave two centuries ago, what excuses do Black people have for embracing victimhood today, in a truly free society of which Douglass could only dream?  

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Virtuous Lie: 1619 Project (subthread):

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I've posted on most if not all of these before, and yet I wonder how many people still take the "truth" of these as articles of faith, regardless of what evidence is prevented.

Many leftists claim that black Americans are crushed beneath a vast, racist social machinery. It is hard to imagine a more demoralizing message.

By: Julian Adorney and Jake Mackey

Published: 24 Jan, 2024

Teenage depression and suicide rates have been rising in the US for years, but the rates among black teens are rising farther and faster than among those of other ethnicities. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey (2011–2021), the percentage of black teens who seriously considered suicide rose 69 percentage points from 13 percent in 2011 to a frightening 22 percent in 2021. The average increase among all ethnicities was 37.5 percentage points—just over half the rise documented in black teens. 

The same trend can be seen across multiple measures of mental health. In 2021, black teens were 63 percent more likely to have made a concrete suicide plan over the course of the past year than they were in 2011 (teens in general were only 38 percent more likely to have done so) and 75 percent more likely to have attempted suicide (the average increase among all teens was 25 percent). 

Complex social phenomena can rarely be attributed to a single cause. A range of factors—from increased social media use to less free play—may play a role in teen depression overall and black teen depression in particular. But there is one possible explanation for these disturbing figures that is less often talked about: the virtuous lie that we tell about the prevalence of racism in the United States.

A virtuous lie is a false or dubious claim that is asserted without qualification because it is thought to advance an ethical agenda. Well-intentioned falsehoods like this exaggerate—indeed often catastrophize—the extent and scope of genuine problems in order to draw more attention to them in the hopes of resolving them. 

We tell virtuous lies not only in order to change the world for the better but in order to showcase our allegiance to the noble causes that they promote. In our hyper-polarized and censorious world, one way to protect ourselves from the accusation that we don't care about issue X is to speak in hyperbolic terms about the severity of issue X.

The problem is that virtuous lies don’t necessarily make the world a better place. In fact, they may end up harming the very people they are intended to help. 

We can see this dynamic at work in one of the most prominent virtuous lies told in the modern US: the idea that almost everything about America is racist. The University of Washington’s “IT Inclusive Language Guide,” for example, specifies that the reference to a “brown bag lunch” is racially “problematic.” The School of Social Work at the University of Southern California decided to stop using the word “field” (as in “fieldwork”) because it is racist. In 2018, NPR informed its listeners that “white tears” are racist, while the New York Times berated real estate agents for using the term “master bedroom.” Ibram X. Kendi, popularizer of the term “anti-racism,” has argued that standardized tests are “the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black and Brown minds and legally exclude their bodies from prestigious schools.” Even if a black student somehow succeeds, despite Kendi’s concerns, in joining a STEM department, it matters little, because, according to an article in the peer-reviewed biology journal Cell, “today, Black scientists continue to suffer institutional slavery.” And it’s not just black scientists. According to a group of activists dubbed “Thirteenthers” by historian Daryl Michael Scott, slavery was never abolished but lives on through the Thirteenth Amendment. 

As if modern slavery were not enough, black Americans today also face “a kind of genocide,” according to law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, creator of the concept of intersectionality. In 2020, she wrote that black people are subjected to “racial terror” similar to that of the slavery and Jim-Crow eras at the hands of police and vigilantes. 

Virtuous lies like these spread, echoed by sympathetic outlets and voices, until the underlying ideas have penetrated deep into the mainstream. For example, in a recent survey, 54 percent of “very liberal” respondents believed that between 1,000 and 10,000 unarmed black Americans are killed by police every year. In another major survey, 80 percent of African American respondents thought that a young black man was more likely to be shot and killed by police than to die in a traffic accident. These beliefs, thankfully, bear no resemblance to reality. In 2020, 7,494 African Americans were killed in traffic accidents. That same year, 242 African Americans were killed by police, only 18 of them unarmed. All three of these numbers are too high, but the number of traffic deaths is orders of magnitude higher than the other two. Black people should be far more concerned about automobile safety than about fatal unarmed encounters with cops. 

The virtuous lie that racism is ubiquitous also manifests in fatalistic statements about how hard it is for black Americans to succeed. In their book Is Everyone Really Equal?, Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo (of White Fragility fame) argue that members of racial minorities “do not hold political, economic, and institutional power” in the United States. This conveniently ignores the countless black men and women who have risen to positions of power in government, business, academia, and other sectors. Worse, it sends a message of disempowerment to young black people. If one benefit of affirmative action is that it helps young black Americans to see people like themselves in positions of power, then the message of DiAngelo and Sensoy is disaffirmative action: no-one who looks like you has achieved anything in this country. 

For some on the farther reaches of the progressive left, it’s considered acceptable to claim that minorities lack any agency at all; they are crushed beneath a vast, racist machinery that they cannot hope to escape. According to DiAngelo and Sensoy, “The logic of individual autonomy that underlies liberal humanism (the idea that people are free to make independent rational decisions that determine their own fate) [is] a mechanism for keeping the marginalized in their place by obscuring larger structural systems of inequality.” That is: if you’re a black American and think you can get ahead through your own efforts, you’re deluded; you’ve fallen for the propaganda American society spouts to hide its racism.

For many on the left, it’s become an article of faith that nothing ever gets better, which means that race relations are still stuck in the antebellum period. For example, as Frank Wilderson III, a founding figure of Afropessimism, has it, nothing ever changes and even today, “Blackness is coterminous with slaveness.” George Packer has called this “historical fatalism.” As he puts it in The Atlantic: 

[H]istorical fatalism believes that nothing ever really changes. Mass incarceration is “the new Jim Crow”; modern police departments are the heirs of slave patrols. Historical fatalism combines inevitability and essentialism: The present is forever trapped in the past and defined by the worst of it.

Sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi sums up this catastrophizing strain of thought:

For people of color, getting “educated” in America is to be cudgeled relentlessly with messages about how oppressed, exploited, and powerless we are, and how white people need to “get it together” to change this (but probably never will).

It is hard to imagine a more demoralizing message.

Even at the top of society, life is almost unbearably bad for black Americans, some prominent progressives claim. Writing in the New York Times, Chris Lebron, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins, describes being black in America like this: “Every day you feel like you’re living with a knee on your neck.” If even a professor at one of America’s most prestigious universities believes that merely existing while black is a life-and-death struggle, then the message to many young African Americans is clear: No matter how high you climb, every facet of your life will always be defined by racism.

Obviously, racism does exist in the United States, at both personal and institutional levels. Commentator David French notes that his black daughter is the target of harassment and of assumptions that she doesn't belong far more often than his white children are. Criminologist Radley Balko has presented a persuasive, exhaustively researched case that there is a racist element to the US criminal justice system. All Americans, whatever their skin color, should be committed to stamping out prejudice and institutionalized double standards like these wherever they encounter them.

But telling virtuous lies about the scope and impact of the racism that currently exists in the United States will not help us do that. Instead, it is likely to simply increase depression and anxiety among black people by encouraging a distorted, overly negative picture of the world. 

Gallup notes that in 2011, 65 percent of African Americans thought that relations between white and black people were “very good” or “somewhat good.” By 2021, that number had fallen to 33 percent. But this decline in perceived racial harmony does not reflect reality. In 2006, 52.7 percent of black Americans reported that they knew someone whom they considered racist. By 2015, this figure had fallen to 47.2 percent. Gallup notes that 94 percent of Americans, including 93 percent of white Americans, now support interracial marriage—respective increases of almost 45 percent and 55 percent from 20 years ago. When it comes to race relations, the progressive left is selling non-white Americans a doom-and-gloom message that is thankfully out of touch with reality.

The virtuous lie about racism also promotes learned helplessness among black people, by suggesting that every element of society is rigged to keep them oppressed and there is nothing they can do to change that.

A study published by the Manhattan Institute asked black students to first read two passages and then to agree or disagree with a variety of statements designed to measure the degree to which they felt in control of their own lives (for example, “When I make plans, I am almost certain that I can make them work”). The first passage was from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2015 essay “Letter to My Son.” In it, Coates claims that, “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage” and that “your body can be destroyed” if you “sell cigarettes without the proper authority” or even “turn into a dark stairwell.” The second passage was from Eric Kaufmann (who authored the study). It argued that “African-Americans are the descendants of conquerors” and that they lived in “sophisticated city states and kingdoms like the Ashanti Empire.” The study found that black teens who read the passage from Coates were 7–15 percent more likely to agree with statements indicating helplessness and disempowerment.

The virtuous lie that racism is endemic and prevents black people from ever getting ahead is unlikely to entirely explain the spike in suicidality among black teens. But the idea that catastrophizing about racism hurts the mental health of black teens makes sense. As Al-Gharbi notes:

the internalization of these messages may contribute to the observed ideological gaps in psychic distress among women and people of color. In many Left circles, great efforts are made to sensitize everyone to historical and ongoing bias and discrimination. Women and minorities are told to attribute negative outcomes in their lives to racism or sexism. They are encouraged to interpret ambiguous encounters or situations uncharitably (i.e., as manifestations of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.). These tendencies likely undermine the well-being of the very populations they are supposed to help. Heightened perceptions of bias and discrimination are robustly associated with mental anguish, social strain, and adverse physical outcomes. The more people perceive themselves to be surrounded by others who harbor bias or hostility against them, and the more they view their life prospects as hostage to a system that is fundamentally rigged against them, the more likely they become to experience anxiety, depression, psychogenic and psychosomatic health problems, or to behave in antisocial ways.

When we tell black children and teens that the system is rigged against them, that police have declared “open season” on them, and that they cannot succeed in life, we should not be surprised when some of them become depressed or even express a desire to end their lives.

We should, however, be careful not to understate the effects of racism. A Pollyannaish attitude can produce its own problems. If we refuse to listen to black teens when they tell us that they have encountered racism, we may leave them feeling unsupported, ignored, and alienated. They need to be supported appropriately and they need adults to help them put their encounters with racism into appropriate, and non-catastrophizing, perspective. We also need to be precise. Sound solutions to pressing societal problems must be based on accurate data and responsible claims. Virtuous lies can inhibit our ability to solve those problems. If we want to have a chance of truly improving society—and it can certainly stand to be improved—then we must begin by telling the truth about the current state of things, as best we can.

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The people who benefit from the belief in this immanent misery are elites who pretend to study it, gain power by preaching it, and/or receive buckets of money by pretending to have the answers.