Profiling and Black Victimhood

One out of three young black men are in jail or involved with the criminal-justice system. This factoid has become a staple in the African American community, chanted by rote as a badge of informed “black identity.” And it is true.

When I was growing up in the 1970s, my elders could defend a victim-centered perspective based on the stark absence of blacks in higher positions in society. How many black men have you seen running a corporation? How many black people does President X have in powerful Cabinet posts? How many black shows do you see on TV? How many black people do you see playing dignified parts in a white movie?

Obviously, because many black people have made real gains, such questions are no longer relevant. But the images at the front of many black minds today are not of Condoleezza and Colin, but of Rodney and Amadou. This reflex stems from the outcome of the war on drugs, which served to target black men in the search for narcotics and played a large part in making them almost half the prison population.

Sept. 11 has forced us to debate anew the tensions inherent in ethnic profiling--balancing common sense with the risk of casting suspicion on an entire people. As the country returns to normal, we should use this debate to inform the profiling issue regarding blacks. Sadly, many blacks are convinced that white America, focused for the moment on Osama bin Laden, is just taking a break from its war against black men.

Imagine an America in which blacks do not bop their heads in assent when they hear rappers shouting obscene anti-police lyrics. In which black undergraduates do not flock to courses on race and law to be taught that blacks are victims of a racist criminal-justice system. In which developing a “black identity” does not mean internalizing a sense that whites are the enemy and that to embrace school is to become one of them. A tantalizing vision. But it cannot come to pass until we squarely address racial profiling.

The very invasiveness of being stopped by the police, frisked and sometimes physically abused is uniquely suited to creating a sense of victimhood. The black man who has undergone such treatment is less receptive to recitations of declining black-poverty statistics and more likely to see Marian Wright Edelman as a fluke rather than as a personal inspiration.

Many whites are perplexed to hear so many blacks grousing about the horrors of “racism” as if it were 1920. But profiling plays a major role in convincing blacks that racism is as prevalent today as it was in the past.

All indications are that it is not--economic indicators, the number of blacks in high positions, results from polling data, the rise in interracial marriages. The friction between blacks and law enforcement is like the chimney standing after a house burns down, left alone as the most resistant feature of something otherwise reduced to shards and remnants.

Black Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson notes that vestiges of racism are concentrated among less-educated, working-class whites, and that police forces tend to draw from this group. He says that for many young black men, tense encounters with police are the most personal interactions with whites they will ever have. Can we blame a 17-year-old black for feeling helpless if he is shoved against the wall by surly white policemen while hanging out with friends--even if the officers are acting on a legitimate tip?

Profiling almost becomes a badge of identity. Black people assert there are “many ways of being black.” Dancing, speaking black English, listening to hip-hop are among them. But one assumption remains unquestioned: White people see all blacks through the same racist prism. Racial profiling bolsters this ideology.

The sense that blacks are a people under siege also leads to the notion that the black criminal is an innocent, condemned at birth by a society that denies his humanity. How much can one expect, many ask, from someone destined to be treated the way Rodney G. King was treated by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department? Remember: A child of 8 who heard such views expressed during the first King-beating trial in 1991 is 18 today. The upshot is a sense that while the white criminal is reprehensible, the black criminal is “misunderstood.”

Many blacks became convinced that O.J. Simpson was innocent of double murder after it was revealed that Mark Fuhrman, initially a lead detective on the case, had used “the ‘N’ word” in private discussions. Simpson’s trial became less about who murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman than a referendum on the issue of blacks versus cops. Crucially, the imperative to stick it to the LAPD was felt so deeply that it outranked the question of Simpson’s guilt.

Finally, this self-conception as strangers in our own land leads to a sense that school and learning is the lore of the oppressor. The black education establishment has consequently focused more on why black children cannot learn than on how they will learn. Its scholarship even highlights a “bias against black boys,” a misleading genderization of a race-wide crisis.

Surely, our solution will not be to stop focusing on the activities of young black men who exhibit traits and behaviors that reasonably suggest involvement in the drug trade. This would be inhumane, because it would leave innocent residents of poor neighborhoods at the mercy of hardened criminals. The question is whether we can “profile” in a way that does not leave black America feeling persecuted by marauding gangs of white men with guns.

Many black residents of troubled neighborhoods wish for more of a police presence to protect them from hoodlums. The key to fighting crime in these neighborhoods is to involve them in identifying and locating those most likely to be trafficking in drugs. Toward that end, police officers must gain residents’ trust by developing an on-foot presence rather than just trawling through in cars.

No one on the block cries “racism” when the drug peddler who has corralled dozens of black boys into the trade is taken off the street--as long as his fate is due to the combined action of residents and police. This kind of cooperation is already producing results in Boston. Similar programs should be instituted in cities across the nation.

Our task is to ensure that African American children grow up without experiences that lead them to see the police as their enemy. Many of us (blacks included) may wish that black people would just “get over” the blame game. And, surely, that game is taken too far too often. But this cannot happen as long as the perception reigns that young black men of any class are eternally subject to being stopped and frisked, or worse, unless they are wearing suits. When young black people regard Tupac Shakur’s “The Streetz R Deathrow” as a curious period piece rather than as “the way it is,” we will finally be in the America that the civil rights heroes fought for.

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John H. McWhorter is an associate professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley. His latest book, “The Power of Babel,” will be released in January.