The New York Times says: “Across the country, police and city officials are trying to crack down on sometimes violent youth gatherings, but the teens themselves say they need some way to socialize and blow off steam.”
Steve Sailer writes:
Never forget that you must always forget about the Floyd Effect. We wouldn’t want to learn a lesson as a society about what precisely caused black deaths by homicide and car crash to soar 44% and 39% respectively during the second triumph of Black Lives Matter because that would be embarrassing to the New York Times…
Any bets on how many paragraphs it will take the NYT before it mentions the word “black?” Excuse me, I meant, before the NYT mentions the word “Black.”
The NYT article reads as evasion at every level. The paragraphs march through sociological setup before reaching the racial pattern at paragraph 23. Even then the racial pattern enters through Steinberg (b. 1952) and Henning, not through the reporters. The reporters never write the sentence “most teen takeover violence centers on Black teens.” They let academics gesture at it while criticizing how others frame the issue.
The equivalence-making in the NYT does much work. The 1952 Korean War anxiety quote, the comparison to skateboarders, the Steinberg line about every generation thinking the kids are doomed. All of this softens what the article describes elsewhere: a 15-year-old in Detroit hiding from gunfire, an Oklahoma City lake shooting that killed one and wounded 22, takeovers ending with arson against police cars. Reporters cannot have it both ways. Either the takeovers resemble skateboarding, or they include gang shootings.
The Henning quote about “Black and Latino youth gatherings” lumps two groups whose homicide rates differ by a factor of six. CDC numbers for 2024 show Black youth firearm homicide rates 6.3 times Hispanic rates and 22.6 times White rates. The lumping is no slip. Distinguishing would force the question of what Black youth violence reflects, and the article exists to avoid that question.
Steinberg’s claim that adult concern reflects “dog whistling” runs into a problem. The 1990s superpredator panic tracked real numbers. Juvenile homicide arrests peaked in 1993 at historic levels and fell sharply afterward. The panic got the rhetoric wrong but the trend right. Calling the response a panic erases the data that drove it. The same pattern repeats with this article. The framing tells readers their concern reflects bias when their concern reflects observation.
The capitalization split deserves attention on its own. The NYT capitalizes Black and writes white lowercase. The choice rests on the claim that Black names a shared culture and identity while white names only a demographic category. The argument has supporters, but the consequence reads as uneven dignity-attribution. A reader who notices the asymmetry notices that the paper assigns moral weight to one group and not the other. Once noticed, the paper loses a measure of authority.
Reader comments tell the rest of the story. The top-voted responses come from self-identified liberals, interracial couples, urbanites who live near the takeovers. They reject the article’s frame in plain words. “It’s a behavioral problem.” “Apathetic, uninvolved, or absent parents.” “Where are the parents?” The editors aimed at one audience and missed it.
The reporting fails at the craft level too. The reporters do not appear to have attended a takeover. They do not interview anyone who organizes one. They quote a Detroit Youth Advisory Panel teen who uses the word “modality.” They quote academics. The takeover participants stay offstage. The story lacks the detail that would tell you who these kids are, where they come from, what schools they attend, what gangs claim what corners, where the guns originate. The article stays high-altitude and leaves the ground-level reporting to the comment section.
The article does include useful detail almost by accident. The Detroit mayor met with takeover organizers herself and brokered concrete responses. The Chicago police superintendent said plainly that the fights get worse over time. Mayors and police chiefs handle streets. They cannot afford the article’s framing. The gap between people running cities and reporters writing about cities runs through the piece.
The proposed responses – late-night basketball, youth advisory panels, more public space – have been proposed continuously since the Kerner Commission in 1968. None has stopped the recurrence. The article does not note this history.
The deepest evasion concerns the post-2020 homicide spike. The article calls it “pandemic highs” without engaging the timing. Murders rose sharply in summer 2020, after the Floyd protests and the police pullback that followed, not in spring 2020 when the pandemic began. Treating the spike as a COVID effect protects a reading. Treating it as a Floyd effect might force questions the paper has chosen not to ask.
You have an article that knows what it cannot say, says everything around it, and produces a comment section that fills in the gap.
Sailer (b. 1958) does what he often does: read the article through, count paragraphs to the racial admission, and audit the framing against the data.
The NYT piece performs several coalition-protective moves at once. The lede frames the issue as a perennial worry about youth, with a 1952 quote about Korean War anxiety supplying historical cover. The implication runs: every generation panics, this is just the latest panic. Then the article cites Laurence Steinberg (b. 1952), who attributes concern to “dog whistling” about Black kids gathering. Then it quotes Kristin Henning comparing current police response to White skateboarders in the 1980s, as if the empirical question of violence levels has been settled. Skateboarders did not shoot each other.
Sailer’s data point lands here. Black youth ages 15 to 24 die by firearm homicide at 22.6 times the rate of White youth and 6.3 times the rate of Hispanic youth, per CDC WONDER 2024. The Hispanic comparison kills the “Black and Latino youth” lumping Henning supplies. Lumping is the move that hides the gap, and any honest reporter checking CDC tables sees it in five minutes.
Through Pinsof, “dog whistle” works as a coalition vocabulary. The word lets readers refuse the empirical claim without engaging it. The professor supplies the vocabulary; the reader uses it; the loop closes.
Through Turner’s convenient beliefs frame, the experts hold structurally selected positions. Steinberg cannot say in the New York Times that Black youth violence runs empirically high without coalition cost. Henning, a Georgetown juvenile justice scholar, cannot frame the question as “what produces this rate gap” without losing standing in her professional networks. Their employment, citation patterns, invitations, and professional reputation all depend on the frame they supply. The article reads as if these were neutral expert opinions. They are coalition-aligned positions delivered through expert credentialing.
Through Alexander’s cultural trauma frame, the 1990s superpredator episode has been coded as trauma where Black youth were victims of White panic. That coding erases the empirical crime spike of those years. Once the trauma frame locks in, recurrence of the phenomenon gets read as recurrence of White panic, not recurrence of the phenomenon. The article performs that read.
Now the comments. The top-rated reader responses reject the article’s frame, hundreds of upvotes each. These are paying NYT subscribers, mostly liberal, mostly urban. Their pushback signals a credibility gap between the editorial coalition and the subscriber coalition. The editors write for an imagined progressive reader who wants the dog-whistle frame. The actual reader paying twenty-five dollars a month wants someone to say plainly that mob violence by teens of any race deserves arrest and prosecution, and that the racial pattern is real and worth addressing rather than burying.
Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings holds again at Lake Arcadia. Eighteen-year-old gang member, switch-equipped pistol, gang dispute that started as a fight between two women. The shooting maps to the gang-shooting category, not the AR-15 ideological-mass-shooter category that drives gun-policy media coverage.
The sixteen-year-old who used “modality” gives the game away. The journalist found a kid on Detroit’s Youth Advisory Panel rather than a kid attending the takeovers. The takeover participants do not get quoted. The kids on the youth board, who already speak the institutional vocabulary, do.
The gap to watch is mayoral versus editorial. Mary Sheffield in Detroit appears to take the issue more seriously than the NYT framing suggests. Democratic mayors handling actual streets pay a political price the editors do not. That price might force adjustments the editorial line cannot.
