If you are like me — a straight, white, middle class, progressive-minded male — you are concerned/sympathetic/empathetic/angry about the state of African-Americans in this country.
But you rarely, if ever, get a chance to witness the daily truth of that state.
I did the other night.
I had been working late at the office — I’m a lawyer by trade (horrors!) — and was on my way home in the way-far-out suburbs, going up a one-way north street to the exit for the interstate. I was in the far right-hand lane, with a police officer in the lane beside me. There are five lanes at this point on the road — the far left-hand lane is for right-hand turns. Apart from me and the officer, there is one other car two lanes from me. If traffic were lighter, it’d been non-existent.
The officer slows down.
I watch him move over to the far left-hand lane — three lanes. Beyond him I see a young African-American guy — doo-rag, track suit, backpack — walking in the street, but very close to the curb, not impeding traffic, and clearly visible to northbound traffic.
The officer slows and comes up behind him. He fires up his lights — the ones on top of the car, you know the ones I mean, I think they’re called “flashers” (and yes, for a lawyer who does criminal defense work, it is embarassing not to know the colloquialism for them). I roll past them and make my turn, but I check the rearview, and see the officer already move on.
Well, my curiosity is piqued.
I come around the block to move up beside the young man, now walking on the sidewalk, and ask what happened.
Well you guessed it. The cop told him to walk on the sidewalk. I shook my head, expresse my incredulity, wished him well, and drove on. (I regret I didn’t offer him a ride — the product of middle-class whiteness, I guess.)
I suppose it could have been worse — the cop could have ticketed him, patted him down, ran the guy’s name through the computer. All possibilities far more outrageous and egregious in terms of violating civil rights. A minor inconvenience to the young man, as his rather nonplussed attitude to my question revealed, not worth even discussing, like an everday occurrence.
Still.
What was the dire emergency that required flashing those lights at the guy? Woulldn’t pulling up beside him (in a marked car and in uniform, by the way) and saying, “Son, it’d be a good idea to walk on the sidewalk. For your safety, you understand.” And how crucial was it to cross three lanes to do this? With no one else out, stopping and calling out to the young man would have sufficed.
An everyday occurrence.
WWB.
Walking While Black.
I’ll never forget one of the first times I understood how deep the racism runs. (I’m a white guy, too).
When I was 11 years old, I was just discovering baseball. I was one of the shortest kids in my class in those years (I didn’t grow until very late!), so I naturally gravitated to the baseball hero a shorter kid could most easily admire: “Little” Joe Morgan, of the World Champion Cincinnati Reds, two time Most Valuable Player and one of the greatest players in baseball history. He now does baseball games on TV… you might have heard of him! You might recognize him… I’m sure I would. I can still see him flapping his arm at the plate, or stealing a base.
In 1988, Joe Morgan was walking through Los Angeles International Airport. The police decided he fit the profile of a drug dealer.
Apparently they never watched baseball. When I heard this story I could not believe it. Would Pete Rose have been suspected of being a drug dealer? (No way, but ironically Rose actually had mafia friends.)
noted that Los Angeles police unlawfully detained Hall of Fame baseball player Joe Morgan at
the Los Angeles airport on the basis of a tip that “made all black men suspect”
From a description posted on the web:
Morgan says, “He [the cop] pointed over my right shoulder, indicating that he wanted me to go that way. When I turned, he pinned my arms behind me, put his knee in my back, and knocked me to the ground.”
“‘Why are you doing this to me?’ I cried out. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“‘I’m an authority figure. I’ll show you what authority is, you’ve been up against us before.’ I did not know what he meant then or now. I thought he was crazy.
“When this cop’s partner walked up, he said to him, ‘D’you see him take a swing at me?’
“The other cop said, ‘Yes.'”
Ultimately the officers threatened to publicize the fact that he, Joe Morgan, was held on a drug investigation, and asked him, “How do you think that’ll play?”
WWB, even when you’re a Hall of Famer and a hero to little kids and not-so-little kids of all different colors.
Hey now.. the word “son” could be construed as offensive. Seriously.
As for what police do and don’t do, I can tell you I worked in an organization that was headed by an African-American and more than half the top brass was African-American and a simply majority of the officers on the street were African-American.
Yet I can tell you that my organization as a whole often did target young African-Americans dressed in a similar manner as the young man you described in your diary. In my organization’s case, it was not based on racial discrimination. I’m sorry for organizations which do discriminate based on race or other prejudicial factors.. but in my organization’s case, it was simply based on a practical knowledge that the majority of our “customers” were dressed like that.
I can’t speak for the officer you witnessed but it could be that he/she also wanted to see the young man’s face to see if he were someone legitimately wanted for involvement in a crime.
Police in America have a difficult role that is not well understood.. and it is based on a lot of factors, including the public-at-large’s desire that the police contain crimes of one nature (burglaries, assaults) more than another (“white collar” or financial crimes).
Crimes of one nature (burglaries, assaults, child rapes) are invariably committed by the poorest and least educated segment of society. In some areas (like where I worked) this means African-Americans. In others its a different ethnicity (including “whites”). But these are the crimes that the public considers to be the “real crimes” and these are the criminals the police spend most of the time dealing with.
Other crimes (drug use, non-assault sex crimes, embezzlement, fraud) are committed by a different segment of society and there is far less public pressure on the police to deal with these crimes.
In the municipal area where I used to work, if I ever ventured into a low-income area, I was invariably greeted (usually quite warmly) by a plethora of young men wearing an “outfit” similar to what you described. I can say that I probably knew the vast majority of “doo rag” weaers on sight and if I couldn’t remember their name, I knew with whom they were associated or whom to talk to if I needed to find them. As tragic as this is to say, that outfit (where I worked) was almost a trademark of an unemployed young African-American, whether or not they were ever one of my customers, and it makes it a fairly obvious distinguishing characteristic.
Furthermore, the colors and positions of some of the apparel you mentioned can often signify affiliation with non-incorporated organizations, something you may have been unaware of.
Again, I can’t speak for the officer involved. If he or she was harassing the young man in question, I strongly condemn his/her actions. But there may be more going on than meets the eye…
Pax
Considering that the apparel I describe is very typical of young white males these days, I find your justification for the officer’s behavior to be less than convincing. This style of dress is quite ubiquitous these days among all manner of young folk, even here in the boondocks of Indianapolis. This is profiling. And the profile reads, “Young and black; therefore, up to no good.” That your “organization” targeted similarly-dressed young men may mean less than you think — it may mean only that was the style in vogue among young people in the neighborhood and they were targeted because they were young people in the neighborhood.
After all, this young man could have been walking home from work, or from night school. (Bus service to certain neighborhoods and at certain times of night is really lousy around here — next to non-existent, in fact. Of course, it’s pretty lousy anyway, meant more to service the needs of the suburban mall shoppers than anything else.)
As to your point about a large number of African-Americans being police, including the top brass, so what? If they buy into racial sterotyping, they are no better than any bigoted white officer. Besides, it’s the system of policing that has operated by these principles for many years, and anyone wishing to join this system will have to abide by its codes and customs. And such codes and customs are adjunct to the role the police are, in reality, charged with playing. The French critic Anatole France put it best when he said that the law in its “infinite majesty” forbids the rich, as well as the poor, from sleeping under bridges, begging in the streets, and stealing bread to feed a family. On this point, we agree. I just don’t see it as a tough job to put the lower income levels of society under such constant scrutiny. It amounts to a punishment for not being rich.
All that having been said, I notice your reply is loaded with a lot of highly conditional words like “if” and “can” (the latter as a substitute for “may”) and “could.” I for one do not subscribe to a theory of civil liberties that allows so much insubstantial suspicion as a basis for the authority to harass, given the police are granted the office and authority of the state to kill.
jhngwa, I agree with you 100% that the system is rotten.. I really do. But I also know what the “reality” is – the politicians drive the police force’s agenda and the politicians don’t hear from too many liberal folks. They hear from people screaming for “law and order” and they hear from people who want a certain class of crime to be addressed at the expensive of another…
In my jurisdiction the style and manner of dress described was almost exclusively adopted by African-Americans. I can’t speak for your locale as I’ve only been to Indianapolis a few times and it was just in transit to go somewhere else.
Regrettably the majority of violent crimes in my jurisdiction were committed by young African-Americans dressed in this manner. That’s just a statistical reality. And as a result of this reality, the organization for which I worked (and again, with an African-American leadership, including on the political level) did target these young men for entirely practical reasons. You can call it “prejudicial” if you like but there was an enormously practical and realistic component to it.
As I said in my original comment, I have no idea what the intentions of the police officer in question were. Perhaps they were despicably racist. But perhaps they weren’t. It’s just too easy to make snap judgements based on insufficient evidence. I do indeed hope that young man was walking home from night school or some other honorable purpose.. I wish everyone on the street at night was engaged in likewise behavior. Unfortunately the reality is that few people are, regardless of ethnicity or manner of dress.
Indifferent of ethnicity, what I found to be the most troubling in my work in this field was the correlation between overwhelming ignorance and lack of education and the engagement in violent and some types of sexual crimes. Easily over half my customers did not read or write English beyond a first grade level and many could not read or write at all. Again, this was true indifferent of ethnicity.
Here in Romania for instance even the poorest and most rural citizens can read and write adequately if not quite well. It is inconceivable to think my own country has such a high rate of functional illiteracy. And that lack of even the most basic of skills to exist in a modern civilization takes its toll on the rest of us…
Pax
You keep mentioning “my jurisdiction” and “the organization for which I worked.” I would like at least a general description of what the “jurisdiction” and “organization” were. After all, you say now “[here] in Romania,” so I have a question about your expertise and abililty to appreciate the full range of what it is you were seeing.
As for African-Americans committing the most violent crimes, I have always questioned that statistic as it based quite a bit on arrest records, which, as I’ve been saying, are heavily influenced by a system which a priori targets young black males for suspicion.
This is one of the silver linings in the Janice Rogers Brown appointment. See her dissent in People v McKay
and this editorial by Ginger Rutland of the Sacramento Bee.