Thank you for your response. I have not discounted objective science. It is essential for understand the natural world. However, when dealing with human behavior, any explanation that does not take into account the subjective perceptions of people is incomplete. What folks in the IDW might do, though, is assume that if it cannot be measured objectively, then it is not important. That would be a mistake in my view. Much of the angst about police brutality is wrapped up in fear and distrust of police, just as much as it is the objective fact of someone getting killed.

The questions you ask about who is “right” or more “accurate” tend to apply more to natural phenomena — one needs to be incredibly accurate to determine the trajectory of an object sent into space. However, for complex social phenomena, it is always a combination of objective facts and what people agree to be the best representation of events.

This is unsatisfying to most people — but is indeed the way that social life works. Ask a husband and wife to describe their marriage. Even in the best of marriages, how they describe it will be different. No one description is more accurate than another. Instead, through interactions with each other, friends, and family, they have each developed an understanding that their marriage is either “good” or “bad”. Hopefully they agree!

Thomas Sowell has done some interesting work — I wish he would have engaged more with other academics who studied race, so his ideas could have been more nuanced. Larry Elder is a talk show host. He is not relevant to this discussion.