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The “Darkening” Effects of Incarceration
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photo credit: Troy Holden
Research has repeatedly shown that race, rather than being an immutable trait of individuals, is actually quite fluid and may change over time and by social context. In the February issue of the journal Social Problems (v. 57, #1), sociologists Aliya Saperstein (University of Oregon) and Andrew Penner (University of California, Irvine) report their analysis of data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), which demonstrates how incarceration affects convicted offenders’ self-perceptions of their race as well as others’ perceptions of their race (“The Race of a Criminal Record: How Incarceration Colors Racial Perceptions”). The NLSY asked a nationally representative sample of 12,686 young men and women (aged 14-22 years in 1979, when the survey began) a series of questions on a variety of topics, including their racial and ethnic identification; respondents’ race/ethnicity were also classified by NLSY interviewers. After the initial survey, participants were interviewed every year until 1994, when biennial surveying was initiated. In their intriguing and socially important study, Saperstein and Penner analyze NLSY data from 1979-2002 to see if participants’ own racial/ethnic identification changed and whether interviewers’ classifications of respondents’ race/ethnicity changed, depending on whether the respondent was or had been incarcerated in the intervening time period.
Without going into the complexities of the statistical analyses, which included numerous controls to rule out the effects of intervening variables, suffice it to say here that Saperstein and Penner found that NLSY participants who self-identified as European American in 1979 were significantly more likely to self-identify as black in 2002 if they had been incarcerated compared with those who had not been incarcerated. As Saperstein and Penner report, “these findings demonstrate . . . that incarceration leads to changes in racial self-identification and the effect operates primarily through making individuals see themselves as not quite white. To put this into perspective, consider that currently nearly 6 million people in the United States have been incarcerated . . . Based on our results, we would expect that more than 250,000 previously incarcerated individuals no longer identify as white as a result of their incarceration” (p. 103).
Saperstein and Penner also found that interviewers were more likely to change the racial/ethnic classification of NLSY respondents if the respondent was currently or had been incarcerated since the time of the last survey – and the change they made was to “darken” incarcerated respondents. That is, respondents who had been classified by interviewers as white prior to incarceration were more likely to be classified by interviewers as black once they were incarcerated.
Apart from further affirming the socially constructed nature of race, Saperstein and Penner’s study has, as they put it, “real-world consequences for racial inequality.” There is a good deal of research, some of which is cited by Saperstein and Penner, that shows that many white people associate black people, especially black men, with crime. This association is what underlies the practice of racial profiling by police, who, as I have pointed out on this blog before, target black neighborhoods for saturation policing, not surprisingly contributing to higher arrest and incarceration rates for blacks. This association also likely contributes to misidentification of criminal suspects by “eye witnesses,” thus resulting in higher erroneous convictions for blacks. I have also pointed out on this blog how incarceration contributes to poverty – especially poverty among black men due to their disproportionate incarceration rates – because a prison record lowers the likelihood of stable employment in a job that pays a decent wage. Saperstein and Penner’s analysis shows how “actual disparities in incarceration are exacerbated by stereotypical associations about the types of individuals who commit and/or are punished for committing crimes” (p. 110). Interestingly, more states are using early release of prisoners as a way to address fiscal crises, but as the Saperstein and Penner study reminds us, release from prison will do little, if anything, to reduce inequality; we must simultaneously address the invidious link between blackness and crime, not only in the minds of the general public, but also in minds of the formerly incarcerated themselves. Further research on why some people who have experienced incarceration change their racial identification from white to black and the meanings that race has for them, as well as for those who do not undergo this redefinition of self, would be most welcome.
Boston Cop Fired for Racial Slur in Email
Posted by: | CommentsBoston Police Commissioner Edward Davis said Officer Justin Barrett was fired yesterday for violating department rules when he sent the e-mail on July 22, 2009. In the email, Barrett called Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates a “jungle monkey.” The email was sent following the incident in Cambridge last summer when Prof. Gates was arrested in his own home on a disorderly conduct charge. “(Gates’) first priority should be to get off the phone and comply with police, for if I was the officer he verbally assaulted like a … jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC deserving of his belligerent non-compliance,” the e-mail said.
Barrett, for his part, said at the time, “I am not a racist.” Barrett sent the email to several individuals and to the Boston Globe. He went on to explain, saying, “It was a poor choice of words. I did not mean to offend anyone.”
No doubt some will argue that Barrett’s “right free speech” has been violated with this decision, but from my perspective it seems like an appropriate step on the part of the Boston Police Department, and a step in the right direction for those interested in equal protection under the law.
“Million Dollar Blocks” : Incarceration as the New Jim Crow
Posted by: | CommentsThere is some fascinating research being done these days with mapping and the visual representation of data, some of it illustrates the reality of incarceration as the new form of Jim Crow segregation.
Currently, the U.S. has more than 2 million people incarcerated in jails and prisons. A disproportionate of these come from a handful of neighborhoods, and in many places the concentration of incarceration rates is so dense that some states are spending in excess of a million dollars a year to lock up the residents of single city blocks. A lack of opportunity in the legitimate economic structure, combined with more opportunities in the unofficial economy, and the aggressive police state practices that Joe mentioned yesterday, fairly guarantees high reincarceration rates. In fact, roughly forty percent of those who are released and reenter their communities do not stay more than three years before they are reincarcerated. These “million dollar blocks” are almost exclusively also blocks where African American and Latino people live.
(Image of Brooklyn, NY from Spatial Information Design Lab, Columbia University.)
Blogger Julie Netherland notes the staggering public health costs of such policies, then poses the relevant question here: “how could we improve the health of these neighborhoods if we invested a million dollars into community development, jobs, or education … instead of incarceration? How many public health problems could be solved?” Indeed, I suspect the health of these “million dollar blocks” would look a lot different if we could shift the focus from incarceration to community development.
This systemic pattern of incarcerating black and brown young men from a few city blocks is a continuation of decades of social, political and cultural exclusion based on race. Legal scholar and litigator Michelle Alexander has a new book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, in which she argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Her work shows that by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness.
So, while it is important to celebrate the victories over Jim Crow won at lunch counters, it is imperative that we look for ways to dismantle the current, pernicious system of Jim Crow segregation.
Systemic Racism & the “Race to Execution”
Posted by: | CommentsThe New York Times reported recently that a leading group, The American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the current system of capital punishment almost 50 years ago, pronounced the project a failure and walked away from it (h/t to Sister Scholar). Even though there were other important changes in news about the death penalty last year, including that the number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely, but none of these changes was as significant as the institute’s move, which represents “a tectonic shift in legal theory.” The WSJ has more analysis of this issue here, suggesting we’re the throes of an upheaval in the administration of the death penalty.
We write here often about systemic racism and what that means. For compelling evidence about how race is built in to the very fabric of U.S. society, one needn’t look much further than the evidence about the race and the death penalty. Race is the single greatest factor in who lives and who dies when it comes to death penalty cases. A black defendant who kills a white victim is up to 30 times more likely to be sentenced to death than a white defendant who kills a black victim.
The imposition of the death penalty is even more likely when there is a black defendant and a predominantly white jury. Most minority defendants, especially in death penalty cases, are judged by predominantly white jurors. White male jurors can be especially persuasive in death penalty cases. Researcher Bowers, Steiner and Sandys (2001) analyzed cases in which a black defendant was accused of murdering a white victim found that the racial composition of the jury matters in death penalty cases. Once the proportion of white male jurors reaches 70%, the death penalty is far more likely.
The U.S. Supreme Court took this kind of data into consideration when it ruled in 1972 in the Furman v. George case and struck down the death penalty as “arbitrary and capricious.” Then, in 1987, the Supreme Court ruled again on the death penalty. In the McCleskey v. Kemp case, the court refused to overturn an individual decision to execute a particular man solely based on the bias in the system. Basically, what the Supreme Court basically decided that it didn’t want to look at the “statistics about race” because it wouldn’t consider the social science evidence in the case. The evidence, had they considered it, overwhelmingly showed a pattern of racial bias in who lives and who dies in death penalty cases.
instead, what the Supreme Court was suggesting was that they wanted to look at whether race played a role in each individual case, not at systemic racism. In some ways, what the Supreme Court was doing with this case was rejecting social science in the law and declaring that racial inequality is ineradicable and inevitable.
This is where the The American Law Institute comes in. They were attempting to “fix” what had been broken with the 1987 McCleskey v. Kemp decision, and see if there was some way to administer the death penalty in way that didn’t just reinforce racial discrimination already in place. Now, the organization has decided to abandon the project and admitted it was a failure. Another way of looking at this news is that this is further evidence that the death penalty is deeply, systematically racist and should be abolished.
There is a powerful documentary that tells this story in a fresh way called “Race to Execution” and it’s directed by Rachel Lyon, narrated by Charles Ogletree. While it’s been out a couple of years now, it recently re-aired on my local PBS station and I was moved by it once again. It’s a really powerful, and nuanced, telling of human stories of those affected by the death penalty interwoven with the court cases and social science research about race and the death penalty. (If you’re considering it for the classroom, there is lots of great additional material here.)
If race is the single greatest factor in who lives and who dies, and now the leading legal organization in the nation has admitted defeat in trying to change that, isn’t it time to abolish the death penalty and put an end to state-sponsored racism?
Anti-Latino Hate Crimes: Finally the New DOJ Acts
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New American Media has a El Diario/La Prensa, Editorial, today about charges by the U.S. Department of Justice that white law enforcement officials worked with and protected the white teenagers who attacked and beat to death Luis Ramirez, apparently as part of a hate crime.
According to these charges,
Pennsylvania police officers, including the police chief of Shenandoah, Pa., abandoned their duty to uphold the law and instead aided and abetted the teenagers who brutally attacked Luis Ramirez. . . . The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) says they deliberately undermined an investigation and fair process.
That does sound like the white law enforcement agencies approach in most of the Jim Crow South until recent decades.
The editorial reminds us of the brutal details:
In 2008, Ramirez was beaten in Shenandoah by a gang of white teenagers who left him foaming at the mouth. The medical examiner ruled that his death was a homicide caused by blunt force trauma to the head. A witness said she heard the attackers spewing ethnic slurs, like “f-ing spic.”
Only two of the attackers have been tried so far, and they were acquitted by an all-white jury of the serious charges against them. According to the editorial the collusion is reported to be substantial:
The DOJ lays out the relationships between Shenandoah police officers and the defendants’ families. The police chief was friends with Piekarsky’s [one of the white defendants] mother. A patrolman … was dating her. . . . the chief … ignored advice for the department to recuse itself from the investigation. A lieutenant . .. is charged with lying to the FBI and with advising the parents of one of the attackers to get rid of the sneakers he wore during the assault on Ramirez. … The dizzying list of charges includes that the police failed to record certain statements by [the various defendants] are all charged with conspiring to falsify official police reports, with the intent of impeding and obstructing investigations into Ramirez’s murder. Ramirez’s attackers gave a false account of the beating, according to the DOJ.
Anti-Latino hate crimes are on the increase. The most recent FBI report counted some 830 Latinos in the last year as being victims of racialized crimes, a significant underestimate given that most law enforcement agencies do not make a serious effort to report such crimes to the FBI. This is up from a few years back. (For more, see chapter 8 here)
One relatively good sign of the times, it seems, is that the U.S. DOJ seems now, under President Obama, to be taking hate crimes much more seriously.
More Driving While Black (DWB): Are Parts of the US a “Police State”?
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A few months back, in the Los Angeles Times Howard Witt had an important article on a lawsuit alleging that police officers in a Texas town are using property confiscation laws to create police-state type situations. One is Tenaha, in northeast Texas near the Louisiana border:
You can drive into this dusty fleck of a town . . . if you’re African American, but you might not be able to drive out of it — at least not with your car, your cash, your jewelry or other valuables. That’s because the police here allegedly have found a way to strip motorists, many of them black, of their property without ever charging them with a crime. Instead they offer out-of-towners a grim choice: Sign over your belongings to the town, or face felony charges of money laundering or other serious crimes. More than 140 people reluctantly accepted that deal from June 2006 to June 2008, according to court records. Among them were a black grandmother from Akron, Ohio, who surrendered $4,000 in cash after Tenaha police pulled her over, and an interracial couple from Houston, who gave up more than $6,000 after police threatened to seize their children and put them into foster care, the court documents show. Neither the grandmother nor the couple were charged with or convicted of any crime.
The town officials claim to be trying to deal with drug traffickers:
But civil rights lawyers call Tenaha’s practice something else: highway robbery. . . . David Guillory, an attorney in nearby Nacogdoches who filed the federal lawsuit, said he combed through Shelby County court records from 2006 to 2008 and discovered nearly 200 cases in which Tenaha police seized cash and property from motorists. In about 50 of the cases, suspects were charged with drug possession. But in 147 others, Guillory said the court records showed, the police seized cash, jewelry, cellphones and sometimes even automobiles from motorists but never found any contraband or charged them with any crime.
In our “justice” system the police and other authorities often hold the trump cards, unless you are upper class and very well-off, and can afford expensive legal fees:
Once the motorists were detained, the police and the Shelby County district attorney quickly drew up legal papers presenting them with an option: Waive their rights to their cash and property or face felony charges for crimes such as money laundering — and the prospect of having to hire a lawyer and return to Shelby County multiple times to attend court sessions to contest the charges.
However, this is bigger than a little east Texas town of 1000 or so. Latino and Black drivers in the Southwest face this problem in numerous other areas:
According to a prominent Texas state legislator, police agencies across the state are wielding the asset-forfeiture law more aggressively to supplement their shrinking operating budgets.
Recently, Greg Moses, editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolencehas added his insightful commentary on what is going on. In towns like Tenaha police can detain
people for no reason, take their cash, spend it, meanwhile filing no charges of wrongdoing. All the while, the authorities of East Texas or wherever could count on a federal court order that would allow them to go after the banking, tax, and employment records of their innocent victims if they tried to get their money back. . . . The discovery motions also revealed that collection accounts were not always well kept. One front-line collector argued that he kept bulk numbers only and could not provide evidence of how much money was taken on any single occasion. To get your money back from these actors, they may demand that you prove it’s not contraband and then prove how much they took.
In defending against the lawsuit a local official has sought
to use the forfeiture funds to pay for her defense. In early October [2009], the ACLU filed a brief with the Texas Attorney General’s Office to prevent the forfeiture funds from being spent to defend alleged abuse of forfeiture powers.
Numerous research and policy studies, including some by the ACLU, have shown that this type of racial profiling is all too common in the United States today.
In recent years many law enforcement agencies have used a policy of screening and stopping motorists just because of their racial characteristics—what black Americans call the offense of “driving while black” (DWB). A recent ACLU report summarized racial profiling studies involving numerous police departments as showing “large differences in the rate of stops and searches for African Americans and Latinos, and often, Indians (Native Americans) and Asians, even though these groups are less likely to have contraband.” For example, black rappers and other black musicians have been explicitly targeted for special surveillance, stopping, and searching without reasonable suspicion by police departments in New York, Miami, and Miami Beach. In addition, in numerous states police officers have been documented stopping motorists of color on vague notions that they might possibly have drugs. State judges in California, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Minnesota have periodically issued orders against such racial profiling, in some cases as a result of studies showing significant racial disparities. (Sources here)
Ticketed for Not Speaking English
Posted by: | CommentsA cop in Dallas ticketed a woman for not speaking English. Here’s a short video clip on this story about racism directed toward Latino folks (2:23):
It’s ok though, because the cop has apologized.
Criminal Alien Program Results in Racial Profiling
Posted by: | Comments“A top priority for ICE has been to target the “worst of the worst” in the illegal population—criminal aliens incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails; those who may pose a threat to national security or public safety” ICE Annual Report FY 2008 [pdf].
Sounds reasonable, right? Of course Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should ensure national security and public safety by deporting criminals. No wonder the Homeland Security Committee allocated $180 million to this program in 2008 to ensure that incarcerated non-citizens are deported.
However, a new report from the UC Berkeley Law School finds that ICE “is not following Congress’ mandate to focus resources on the deportation of immigrants with serious criminal histories.” Instead, it is encouraging local police to engage in racial profiling and to arrest and deport people who engage in minor infractions of the law such as kicking over traffic cones or public urination.
Racial Profiling? Under the Criminal Alien Program, local police have the authority to call immigration on anyone who they suspect to be undocumented. Turns out that Hispanics are the ones police are most likely to suspect are undocumented. In a study of arrest patterns in Irving, Texas, the UC Berkeley Law School found that 96% of the people held under this program were Hispanic. Moreover, police were more likely to arrest Hispanics for minor offenses once the city began to participate in the Criminal Alien Program.
Not all Hispanics are undocumented. In fact, most Hispanics living in the United States are legal permanent residents or citizens. In Irving, Texas, however, once police began to co-operate with ICE, discretionary arrests of Hispanics for minor traffic offenses rose dramatically.
In 2006, ICE began a partnership with the city of Irving, which enabled ICE to investigate the immigration status of people held at the Irving Jail. Under this partnership, if Irving police arrest someone they suspect to be undocumented, they contact ICE to determine their immigration status. Of course, police officers can’t tell someone’s immigration status just by looking at them. In fact, in September 2007, of the 269 individuals Irving police officers referred to ICE, only 186 were turned over to ICE. The others were lawfully present in the U.S.
“Worst of the Worst”? Most of the people detained under the Criminal Alien Program in Irving, Texas were arrested for misdemeanors. In fact, only 2 percent were charged with felonies. The Berkeley report provides “compelling evidence that the Criminal Alien Program tacitly encourages local police to arrest Hispanics for petty offenses.” For example, in Irving, Texas, in April 2007, ICE agents began to offer 24-hour access to their services to the local police. Immediately thereafter, the rate at which Irving police arrested Hispanics for minor arrests began to rise. In April 2007, Irving police arrested 102 Hispanics for Class C misdemeanors. That number rose continuously until September 2007, when they arrested 246 Hispanics for Class C misdemeanors – minor offenses for which the maximum fine is $500.
It looks like the $180 million Congress appropriated to ICE is not enhancing public safety. Instead, it is encouraging local police to arrest Hispanics for petty offenses and deporting people for offenses as minor as driving with a broken tail light.
This study of one city in Texas resonates with work I have been doing with deportees in Jamaica and Guatemala. Deportees I have spoke with consistently tell me that they were stopped by police for a minor offense and subsequently placed in deportation proceedings.
A deportee I met recently in Guatemala told me this is exactly why he does not plan to apply for re-admission to the United States, even though his daughter still lives in the US. He does not want to live in a country where he will be arrested for minor traffic violations and hassled by police on a regular basis. Who does?
[Note from blog admins: ~ This is a re-blog from here. Professor Golash-Boza will be joining Racism Review as a regular contributor, writing about her research in Jamaica, Brazil, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic where she is interviewing people who have been deported from the U.S. for a book she is writing. ]
Prof. Gates’ Arrest, Cambridge Police and Racism
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(image from here)
News about the arrest of Harvard Professor Gates seems to be flowing out of the news-machine-spigot at full force these days. At least part of the story seems to be shifting toward Crowley, the Cambridge cop who was centrally involved in Gates’ arrest. Here, I’ll go through a few of the main links to various parts of the story, and then – as we do here – draw on some social science research to see if that can illuminate what’s going on here.
Several people are defending Crowley. Some of these defenders are not surprising, such as this blogger who sees Crowley – a racial profiling expert for the Cambridge police – as being treated unfairly because he is white. Other Crowley defenders are somewhat more surprising, such as Dr. Boyce Watkins, an African American professor at Syracuse University and often ardent critic of the racial status quo, who writes:
After my battles with Bill O’Reilly made me the most hated professor on the Syracuse University campus last year, I always thought I was the radical guy in the room. But in this case, I must encourage temperance and fairness. Whether it has killed slaves in the past or destroyed careers in the present, the mob mentality has never been good for America.
From a centrist perspective, the Christian Science Monitor has a piece called, “Gates Arrest: Racial Profiling or ‘Tempest in a Teapot,’” and the staid CSM comes down decidedly on the ‘tempest in a teapot’ side of this. The CSM emphasizes “bad behavior on both sides,” as in this quote from a representative of the Cambridge Police:
“It wasn’t Professor Gates’s best moment, and it was not the Cambridge Police Department’s best moment.”
Then, the CSM includes this line which is the heart of their argument in this article:
Law enforcement analysts are inclined to agree, suggesting that the incident may have been only a “tempest in a teapot.”
Unfortunately, the evidence from the ‘law enforcement analysts’ – one crim professor a radio talk show how and a legal blogger – is pretty thin. The evidence they glean from quote by the crim professor tend to be critical of Crowley’s actions, as in:
“The best motto for a police officer is that sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” says George Kirkham, a former police officer and now a professor of criminology at Florida State University. “People wind up venting, and you have to let them vent.” “We are a country founded on Jeffersonian ideals, and people don’t like government in their lives,” says Professor Kirkham. “[Police] need to be aware of that.”
So, here, Kirkham is basically saying that Crowley should not have arrested Gates no matter how “tumultuous” his behavior. The key phrase here is the use of “Jeffersonian ideals.” Now, I’m assuming the ideals to which Kirkham is referring here are the ones about government not interfering in people’s lives, and not the ones that Jefferson wrotes about in Notes on the State of Virginia in which he argued for the inherent inferiority of blacks, including (presumably) Sally Hemmings, the woman he enslaved, raped, and her children by Jefferson. Still, I think Kirkham is right here, it would be a good idea to keep these latter Jeffersonian values in mind when dealing with anyone and particularly with African Americans. My point here is that even the *expert* in this case is so completely steeped in the white racial frame that he doesn’t even realize the multiple connotations of what he’s saying to this CSM reporter. And, for their part, the CSM reporters and editors never step outside the white racial frame to evaluate this case even though this is supposedly an “analysis” piece.
A better source for “law enforcement analyst” might be Lowry Heussler, who has worked on police-misconduct cases in Massachusetts, the state where the Gates arrest happened. In a post for the blog The Reality-Based Community, Heussler provides a meticulous analysis of Crowley’s actions based on Crowley’s own words (the report he wrote about the arrest):
Read Crowley’s report and stop on page two when he admits seeing Gates’s Harvard photo ID. I don’t care what Gates had said to him up until then, Crowley was obligated to leave. He had identified Gates. Any further investigation of Gates’ right to be present in the house could have been done elsewhere. His decision to call HUPD seems disproportionate, but we could give him points for thoroughness if he had made that call from his car while keeping an eye on the house. Had a citizen refused to leave Gates’ home after being told to, the cops could have made an arrest for trespass.
Heussler goes on from there, offering a thoroughly devastating critique of Crowley’s actions as police – apart from the racial context – and based on Crowley’s on words. Basically, what he finds is that Crowley gets pissed off that Gates has accused him of racism, then works to escalate the situation by “inviting” Gates out onto the porch where he is arrested.
Now, to the social science. Henry Ferrell at Crooked Timber has a nice post called “Discretion and Arrest Power,” in which he discusses the relevance of Peter Moskos’ book, Cop in the Hood. Moskos, a sociologist and a CUNY professor at John Jay College, spent a year as a beat officer in Baltimore. In his book, Moskos discusses the “zone of discretion” that cops have and the ways that they try to expand their authority beyond that which they are legally authorized to do (Moskos, p. 117-118). In Moskos’ account of being Baltimore police officer (as Farrell recounts it) he both (a) uses a verbal invitation to induce the targeted individual to leave the building, and (b) then uses the attention of bystanders to generate a charge of disorderly conduct.
Crowley, for his part, maintains that he is “not a racist” and refuses to apologize. And, I think it’s quite possible that Crowley did not have any intention to racially discriminate against anyone when he showed up at the house on Ware Street responding to a call. I do, however, think that the confluence of events and factors shaped his response to the situation so that it played out in ways that are consistent with centuries of racial discrimination in this country. First, there’s the white racial frame that shaped Crowley’s view of what was happening and what kind of a “danger” Professor Gates posed. Second, there’s the “cop in the hood” mentality in which police are often forced to use their discretion to decide what to do in a situation that may seem unclear. Third, there is Crowley’s “reputation” as a “racial profiling expert” and Gates charge of “racism.” This, according to one experts’ speculation, pissed off Crowley and that’s where the escalation occurred. Now, Crowley – and his defenders – seem entrenched in the effort to shore up Crowley’s “racial innocence” and thus redeem him as a ‘good’ (read: not racist) white person.
This will, I predict, continue to be a huge news story. And, much of the coverage will be focused on Crowley and his supposed “racial innocence.” I find this a disappointing focus on this story because by making it a story about Crowley, it completely individualizes – and ultimately trivializes – the problem here. I hope that others – possibly Professor Gates leading the way – will use this incident to rerfocus our attention on efforts to change the racial inequality at the heart of our criminal justice system, and indeed, at the heart of our society.
President Obama on the Arrest of Prof. Gates
Posted by: | CommentsLast night, President Barack Obama answered a question about the arrest of Professor Gates during a press conference about health care. The President said that police acted “stupidly” and despite racial progress blacks and Hispanics are still singled out unfairly for arrest. Here’s the short clip (2:10) in case you missed it:
While it’s hard to imagine any of the previous presidents speaking out in this way about a “police matter,” the fact that President Obama would speak out should not, in fact, be that surprising. For Obama, racial profiling was a major issue for him as legislator in Illinois. He was the chief sponsor of a bill, which became law, that requires police to record the race, age and gender of all drivers they stop for traffic violations and for those records to be analyzed for evidence of racial profiling.
Melissa Harris-Lacewell provides an excellent analysis in The Nation both about Gates’ place among black intellectuals in the U.S. prior to this and about the significance of Gates’ arrest for what she calls “the post-racial project.”
Yet, for all this outrage (I believe I referred to it as a ‘tsunami of outrage’ originally, and it is certainly turning into that), James Crowley, the cop who arrested Gates, says he won’t apologize. And, lots of other white folks are lining up to defend him (starting with comment #8 at that link). This could get even more interesting.
