Ferguson, Missouri now stands as a microcosmic expression of black America. It seems that partisans of all stripes turn to Ferguson and, without missing a beat, boil down the staggering battery of problems plaguing “the black community” to a single cause.

Neoconservative Republicans invariably attribute the rampant dysfunction of lower and underclass blacks to life under the control of the Democrat party. The usual suspects on the left can be counted upon to pin all of the seemingly insurmountable challenges facing blacks to—what else?—“racism!” Libertarians, or at least libertarians of a certain ideological flavor, reserve scarcely a word of condemnation, if that, for black purveyors of violence, choosing instead to account for this violence in terms of “police brutality” or “the militarization” of police.

So, both neoconservatives and libertarians are political determinists. When it comes to black pathology, the government is the devil.

And then there are white “race realists” who are convinced that the astronomical rates of crime, violence, illegitimacy, etc. that mark black communities throughout the country stem from the genetics of blacks themselves.   According to this line, since the average black IQ is lower than the average white IQ, blacks, on average, have shorter time horizons, less impulse control, and so forth. These genetic disadvantages, in turn, dispose them to engage in the sort of conduct on exhibit in Ferguson at the present moment.

There are two points that need to be made here.

First, all four of these explanations of black pathology bear more similarities to one another than their adherents would care to admit.

For starters, they are alike forms of reductionism. And they are alike exceedingly—which is to say, unreasonably—simplistic forms of reductionism.  

Moreover, race realists may or may not realize this, but their genetics-centered theory of the Fergusons of the world no more holds blacks culpable for their actions than do those theories advanced by neoconservatives, libertarians, and leftists: Within the framework of any of these models, blacks are exempted from all responsibility.

And this, of course, means that blacks are divested of their personhood, their moral agency.

Persons are subjects whose conduct is freely chosen in accordance with reasons. In stark contrast, objects are things whose behavior is determined by causes.

If it is to any of the forgoing explanations of black conduct that we must turn to understand the actions of, say, the rioters in Ferguson, then, paradoxically, there is no conduct here to be explained: the black rioters are no different from any other material objects whose behavior is to be understood solely in reference to the great law of cause and effect.

This is one problem—I think it is fatal—from which all scientific accounts of human conduct suffer: they are scientific. And even if they are only pseudo-scientific—some people would say that all of the “social sciences” fit this description—that they insist upon speaking the language of science in accounting for moral conduct is enough to convict them of an incorrigible confusion of categories: the vocabulary of morality and that of science are not only mutually incompatible; they are mutually incommensurable.

And this just means that the terms pertaining to the one category defy translation into the terms of the other.

Beside this, though, they just don’t work.

“Racism” has long served as a catch-all term that means virtually nothing. And it means nothing because it means whatever the person who happens to be using it at the moment wants for it to mean. In any event, it is as profoundly idiotic as it is offensive to suggest that the violence and destruction that are features of everyday life for underclass black communities throughout the country are a function of the fact that white people don’t like them (if this is what we take “racism” to mean).

And neither the Democratic Party nor Big Government (“Statism”) generally can account for the glaring dysfunctions of ghetto existence. The Democratic Party presides over some of the most affluent, low-crime areas of the country, places like San Francisco and all of New England, for instance. And Big Government is a fact of life for all Americans—yet, thank God, America is not Ferguson or Detroit.

That these three paradigms serve the purpose of exempting blacks of responsibility for their actions explains their value. Think about it: when was the last time you heard any of their proponents address, say, black rioters with so much as a fraction of the sternness that they reserve for reproaching their own children for misconduct that isn’t nearly as egregious as that on display in Ferguson?

It doesn’t happen.

But the genetics-based account of black conduct divests blacks of moral responsibility as well.

While genetics certainly determine, to some extent, all sorts of things, including intelligence, and while individuals and groups do indeed differ in all sorts of respects, including intelligence, the genetics-grounded theory of black criminality of the sort that makes the Ghetto the Ghetto is unconvincing.

When we look back throughout the history of our own country alone, we see that it has had more than its share of “Fergusons,” the vast majority of which, up until the first half of the 20^th century, have been perpetrated by whites.

It may surprise most people, black, white, and other, to hear this, but it is true all of the same.