Roland Fryer’s Battle Against the Woke Left

Leftwing academics claim that blacks in America are oppressed. They call for reparations and affirmative action programs to help them. But these people are hypocrites and liars. How do we know this? When a black person doesn’t share their views, they act ruthlessly. Such people have to be eliminated. The ‘woke” left doesn’t care about blacks or anybody else who doesn’t parrot their views. Roland Fryer found this out the hard way.

Who is Roland Fryer? He is a brilliant economist who won the John Bates Clark Medal. This is an award given to the best economist under 40 and often predicts a future Nobel Prize. Moreover, not only is Fryer black, he came up the hard way. What more could the left ask for? Fryer got an endowed chair at Harvard. He was at the top of the academic heap. Harvard was happy to have him on the faculty.

Here is an account from the Harvard Gazette that shows how ecstatic Harvard was: The Psychology of Tota... Desmet, Mattias Best Price: $15.00 Buy New $18.02 (as of 02:37 UTC - Details)

Roland Fryer, the Henry Lee Professor of Economics, has been awarded the American Economic Association’s John Bates Clark Medal for his pioneering research on the economics of race and education.

Among the most prestigious awards in economics, the medal is presented annually to an American economist under 40 who, according to the association, has made “the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.” Fryer, 37, is also the first African-American to receive the honor.

“My reaction when I received the call informing me of the award was disbelief,” Fryer said. “I asked that they put it on the website so I could believe it. Putting the shock to the side, the overwhelming feeling is one of happiness for my field.

“It’s just a terrific time for the study of race, education, and inequality in America,” Fryer added. “Many work in these areas, and I really think of it as ‘our’ award. With luck, it will inspire more students, new ideas, and fresh approaches to the study of inequality in America.”

Fryer joined the Harvard faculty in 2003 as one of the youngest professors in the history of the University, and at just 30 became the youngest African-American to receive tenure from Harvard.

Even before coming to Harvard, Fryer had distinguished himself with his novel approach to questions of race-based economic issues and of why African-Americans are harder hit by poverty than other demographic groups.

His research has addressed why African-Americans have lowered life-expectancy rates, dying on average six years earlier than whites, and why blacks exhibit higher rates of certain chronic conditions, including high blood pressure, cardiovascular problems, and kidney disease.

In another oft-cited investigation, Fryer investigated the phenomenon of African-Americans “acting white,” by studying black teen students who perform better in school than their peers, and possible workplace biases against job applicants with unusual first names. Fryer has used the lens of economics to study issues that touch on a wide array of social concerns, including Ku Klux Klan membership, school segregation, and outcomes for children of mixed-race partnerships.

Fryer in 2008 founded EdLabs (the Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard University) to promote research efforts into racial disparities in education, and he continues to serve as the organization’s faculty director.

“The John Bates Clark Medal is an amazingly prestigious award,” Economics Department Chair Gregory Mankiw, the Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics, said yesterday during a brief ceremony to honor Fryer. “Today we have seven members of this department who have received this award, and that is an amazing group of people. This is a great honor for the department, for the University, and especially for Roland.”

“This is an incredibly well-deserved honor for someone who has done work that has enlightened us all,” added Lawrence Katz, the Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics. “I think it’s extremely meaningful that the American Economic Association is providing this recognition to Roland Fryer.

“Roland is someone who has dedicated his scholarship, and much of his life, to making progress on what are probably some of the most intractable and difficult problems in the world, and certainly in the United States,” Katz continued. “There is no issue that’s been more difficult for this country to deal with than those concerning the historical and contemporary racial divide, and the themes that Roland has developed in his amazing work, I think, can help bring us toward both a more just and more productive society.”

Fryer is the recipient of numerous other awards and honors, including a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation, and the inaugural Alphonse Fletcher Award.

Fryer is a 2009 recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. In 2009, he appeared on Time Magazine’s annual list of the world’s most influential people. In 2011, he was awarded a “genius” grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In 2012, he was awarded the Calvó-Armengol International Prize, which is one of the most prestigious prizes recognizing young economists and social scientists.” See here.

It turned out, though, that Fryer rejects the woke left’s worldview. He punctured one of their main myths. He showed that policemen aren’t racially biased in cases where they shoot blacks. In fact, the evidence shows that the police shoot fewer blacks suspects than white suspects.

Here is an account of Fryer’s study:

“A new study confirms that black men and women are treated differently in the hands of law enforcement. They are more likely to be touched, handcuffed, pushed to the ground or pepper-sprayed by a police officer, even after accounting for how, where and when they encounter the police.

But when it comes to the most lethal form of force — police shootings — the study finds no racial bias.

“It is the most surprising result of my career,” said Roland G. Fryer Jr., the author of the study and a professor of economics at Harvard. The study examined more than 1,000 shootings in 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida and California.

The result contradicts the image of police shootings that many Americans hold after the killings (some captured on video) of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.; Tamir Rice in Cleveland; Walter Scott in South Carolina; Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La.; and Philando Castile in Minnesota.

Mr. Fryer, the youngest African-American to receive tenure at Harvard and the first to win a John Bates Clark medal, a prize given to the most promising American economist under 40, said anger after the deaths of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and others drove him to study the issue. “You know, protesting is not my thing,” he said. “But data is my thing. So I decided that I was going to collect a bunch of data and try to understand what really is going on when it comes to racial differences in police use of force.”

He and student researchers spent about 3,000 hours assembling detailed data from police reports in Houston; Austin, Tex.; Dallas; Los Angeles; Orlando, Fla.; Jacksonville, Fla.; and four other counties in Florida.

They examined 1,332 shootings between 2000 and 2015, coding police narratives to answer questions such as: How old was the suspect? How many police officers were at the scene? Were they mostly white? Was the officer at the scene for a robbery, violent activity, a traffic stop or something else? Was it nighttime? Did the officer shoot after being attacked or before a possible attack? One goal was to determine if police officers were quicker to fire at black suspects.

In shootings in these 10 cities involving officers, officers were more likely to fire their weapons without having first been attacked when the suspects were white. Black and white civilians involved in police shootings were equally likely to have been carrying a weapon. Both results undercut the idea of racial bias in police use of lethal force.

But police shootings are only part of the picture. What about situations in which an officer might be expected to fire, but doesn’t?

To answer this, Mr. Fryer focused on one city, Houston. The Police Department there let the researchers look at reports not only for shootings but also for arrests when lethal force might have been justified. Mr. Fryer defined this group to include encounters with suspects the police subsequently charged with serious offenses like attempting to murder an officer, or evading or resisting arrest. He also considered suspects shocked with Tasers. Seeking Truth in a Cou... Curtin, Edward Buy New $26.95 (as of 02:59 UTC - Details)

Mr. Fryer found that in such situations, officers in Houston were about 20 percent less likely to shoot if the suspects were black. This estimate was not precise, and firmer conclusions would require more data. But in various models controlling for different factors and using different definitions of tense situations, Mr. Fryer found that blacks were either less likely to be shot or there was no difference between blacks and whites.” See here.

Fryer had transgressed against the woke code. After the study came out, Fryer had to sleep with an armed guard:

Here are the details:

“Harvard economics Professor Roland Fryer needed armed security with him to go out in public after he published a study finding no evidence of racial bias in officer-involved shootings, he said in an interview with The Free Press founder Bari Weiss.

Fryer, a top economist who became the youngest tenured black professor in Harvard’s history at just 30 years old, published a study in 2016 showing there was “no racial differences in officer involved-shootings.” After he published the study, “all hell broke loose,” Fryer told Weiss, noting people “lose their mind when they don’t like the result.”

“I lived under police protection for about 30 to 40 days,” he said during the interview. “I had a seven day old daughter at the time…I was going to the grocery store to get diapers with an armed guard.” See here.

Now Harvard was not so happy to have him. They wanted him out. After some dubious charges against him of sexual harassment, Claudine Gay, then a dean and later the affirmative action president of Harvard, suspended him for two years and took way his lab. The Harvard elite didn’t want Fryer around.

“Harvard University has suspended a high-profile economics professor after several women made sexual harassment claims and internal investigations were launched, according to an internal memo obtained by CNN on Wednesday.

Roland G. Fryer, who was also the faculty director of the Education Innovation Laboratory, was suspended for two years without pay after the university found that he “engaged in unwanted sexual conduct toward several individuals,” wrote Claudine Gay, a Harvard dean, to the economics department.

Fryer’s Education Innovation Laboratory, which focused on collecting data and research to help form government policy, will also be closed.

“I am deeply disappointed, particularly because the important and outstanding work of my colleagues in our economics research Lab has been forced to stop,” Fryer said in a statement. “Harvard has spoken. In due course, I will as well.”

After Fryer returns from suspension, he will not be an adviser or a supervisor. Dean Gay will decide if Fryer can teach an undergraduate course under a monitor’s supervision. He will not have access to graduate fellows, the letter said.

Fryer will be allowed to teach graduate classes but not graduate workshops.” See here.

Let’s do everything we can to support courageous academics who defy the woke tyranny!