When I ask most students how to win an argument, they say, "Rely on the facts." But there are two problems with that advice.

The first problem is that the most important arguments can't be decided by facts at all. You can't prove to me with facts that crime doesn't pay, that all men are brothers, that justice is blind, that the truth will set you free, or that democracy is the best form of government.

The second problem is that even when you're engaged in a dispute that seems open to resolution by examining facts, the facts by themselves are unenlightening or misleading. It's how you interpret facts that gives them meaning. That's the issue I'm discussing here.

This technique involves arguing that facts and statistics have some meaning other than the one which first comes to mind. Consider this example. How would you explain to a conservative Southern Republican, like Strom Thurmond or Trent Lott, why statistics and nightly news stories don't prove that young black males are more violent than their white counterparts?

To begin with, you may have to concede part of the package. In this case, you'll probably have to concede that males are statistically more likely to be violent than females and the young are statistically more likely to be violent than the middle-aged and elderly, and there probably are biological reasons for this. But the racial connection is one that you want to dispute.

Below are two strategies I suggested you could use. After I use them, I'll show you another strategy that a student used to solve this problem.

1. I examined cause-effect logic. Yes, increased rates of violence in America happen to be correlated with skin color as well as gender and age. But is it the skin color that causes this correlation? If not, what does?
2. I used the technique of analogy to compare/contrast American urban social conflicts to those in other settings, like other countries. In particular, I asked if we could compare the situation of young urban black males in the U.S. to that of any population groups elsewhere with statistically high rates of violence? Are there important aspects of these two different situations that are similar?

Using the first technique, we can easily see that young urban blacks might be influenced by poverty more than by skin color, as Clarence Darrow would say. And we could further argue that the stress of poverty is felt most by males because of the traditional role of males as breadwinners in our society.

But there are problems with this argument. Those who don't buy it will be quick to point out that there are many honest poor blacks (including young males), and if poverty really caused violence, then no poor young black man would be even trying to lead an honest life. Nor would the role of the Church or African community organizations be as strong as it is if poverty automatically made young men violent. And if they're really astute, your opposition will point out that inner city African-American males are actually richer, by a large margin, than the poor of many third world countries. Yet the poor of Calcutta and Lima are not statistically an abnormally violent population. So why do we have the uniquely destructive violence of young African-American males?

I'd answer this question by agreeing that poverty alone does not create violent behavior, but arguing that poverty in combination with certain other social circumstances might. It would then be up to me to show how the situation of young black males differs in some important way or ways from the situation of the poor of, say, Lima or Calcutta. One of the main differences, surely, is that the poor of Lima or Calcutta are isolated from the rich and have no knowledge of the lifestyles or posessions of the rich. A poor person in Lima or Calcutta has probably never seen anyone whose lifestyle was much better than his own. If he lives in a shanty without running water or electricity, he doesn't have a TV in his home, or a nearby library where he could look at magazines or surf the Web. Nor does he have just enough cash, from time to time, to choose between buying all the groceries he needs and buying a single gold chain or an expensive pair of sneakers from a local store. Nor can he look up over his head and see luxury SUVs cruising the freeways he can't even walk.

Could envy and/or a sense of the unfairness of life be the problem here? Are there similar situations in other countries that would support that interpretation? An example that comes to mind is Russia, which has a tremendous crime problem. Russia comes to mind because this is also a society with disappointed expectations of fairness and social justice. First of all, under communism the Russian people were told that there would be a classless society, and material wealth would be distributed from each according to his means to each according to his needs. The reality was that communist party bosses grew rich from the people's labor. Then capitalism was supposed to bring a brave new world of economic and social opportunity. But so far capitalism has just made the rich richer and the poor poorer, and some of the same privileged party bosses are still in power. The disappointed expectations of the poor have bred cynicism, frustration, and desperation. The result is a large criminal class among the poor. But here skin color is not at all an issue. Social circumstances are the issue. Specifically, the crucial factor seems to be not poverty itself, but a huge gap between real wealth and economic expectations.

This was my reason why the facts don't say what they appear to say. But a student pointed out to me that you could also develop a more-than-adequate explanation of high young black male arrest rates by looking at the process of arrest and re-arrest. That is, you could look at how our judicial system goes about deciding who's dangerous and who's not.

At the outset we've already acknowledged that young males of all backgrounds get in more trouble with the law. But young black males are about twice as likely to be arrested and prosecuted for misdemeanors like speeding, drinking under age, getting into fistfights, shoplifting, or using a stolen credit card than young white males are. What's more, anyone who's arrested once is twice as likely to get arrested again a second or third time. So once arrested, young black males are as much as four times more likely to be re-arrested later even if they aren't convicted of the first offense.

Young black males are also less likely to get off with fines or probation instead of time behind bars. But many young people are influenced to become criminals by the criminals they meet behind bars. This tendency is probably exacerbated if the people a young convict meets in prison are young men like himself, of a similar background and perhaps even from the same neighborhood. Gradually over time, it becomes harder for such a young man to envision himself choosing a different life, especially if there are few or no alternative role models in his original community.

It probably isn't true, as some civil rights organizations contend, that the news media simply ignore all crimes committed by young white males. But that doesn't have to be true to explain the racial divide in the arrest statistics. A slight tendency to be more wary of young black males can get compounded over time, as each successive brush with the law makes others more likely. What's more, the young man in question is probably getting angrier, more frustrated, and more disillusioned with the way the courts work every time he goes through this experience. When a man doesn't respect the laws or believe they're fair, he'll break more of them.

What did I do here? Well, first of all, I relied on the patterns of development we talked about at the beginning of the course. There they are--cause/effect analysis, process analysis, and comparison/contrast and analogy. We're still using the same tools we began the course with.

In any case, remember that facts NEVER speak for themselves. You must speak for them.