Profiling in the Head
By Crispin Sartwell
Virtually nobody, black or white, Republican or Democrat, endorses racial profiling. So when Governor Glendening signed a bill prohibiting the practice of targeting minorities for traffic stops and other police actions - making Maryland the 13th state to enact such legislation - he faced almost no opposition.
Anti-profiling laws are needed if nothing else as an expression of our resolve not to tolerate institutionalized racism. But they are no solution to the deep racism of our culture and our legal institutions.
The true locus of racial profiling is not in written policies but in the heads of us white people. If, when we look at a black man, we think of him with fear or loathing as a criminal, then there is no need for any explicit policy or even toleration of profiling; that black man is more likely to end up in prison than a white man.
It is an odd fact that, though we have reached the point at which almost no one but a few crazed neo-Nazis and fans of the Confederacy are explicit racists, the whole country still maintains a fundamentally racist social structure.
That is part of the intensely equivocal heritage of the civil rights movement. It taught white people not to say the wrong words or to engage in blatant acts of discrimination. It taught us how not to appear to be racists, even to ourselves.
The civil rights movement was absolutely necessary to the moral progress of America. But it also caused a kind of deep self-delusion or separation of appearance from reality that makes racism all the more elusive and difficult to address.
According to 2000 census figures, and though explicit segregation in housing and education is illegal, it has by some measures increased over the last decade. Segregation of families with children, for example, has increased dramatically in the northeast and midwest as more and more white families have moved to mostly-white suburbs. Many urban school districts have become more black-dominated. Milwaukee's, to take a typical example, has gone from 46% to 61% black in since 1980.
According to a report released recently by the Justice Department, 791,600 of the1,242,962 people in American state prisons in June 2000 were black men. 79 percent of state drug offenders came from racial minorities.
It is ridiculous to claim that 79 percent of the people who use or traffic in drugs in this country come from racial minorities. And we have no way at all to know whether black men are more likely to be criminals than white men; all we know is that they are much, much more likely to be caught.
In Cincinnati, Timothy Thomas, 19, was shot to death April 7 as he fled from police trying to arrest him on misdemeanor warrants, mostly for traffic offenses, sparking three days of riots. Five of those warrants were for violations of the seat belt law. I've been pulled over a couple of times on the same grounds. The policeman in each case just told me to buckle up and have a nice day.
It's hard not to think those differences have something to do with race. But it needn't have anything to so with profiling policies.
What has to happen is not a change of law, but a change of heart. And the first step in that change now has to consist of getting brutally honest with ourselves about our real attitudes toward black people.
The profiles we must excise are in our heads.
