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Campus Racism: The “Other” African American Students
Posted by: | CommentsMustafa Jumale, a Somali American student at the University of Minnesota, has been blogging on experiences there and in South Africa. Here is what he just sent me about some of his own experiences and insights about the experiences of other African-origin students:
The experiences of Black South African and African American students at historically white universities and predominantly white universities are both problematic and unique. South Africa has had a black democratic government since the fall of the Apartheid government. However, incidents at the University of the Orange Free State University, in which a few “white” South African students asked university housing employees to participate in a game. The students asked the employees to eat food, which contained urine. Moreover, these [white] students video recorded the game and entered it in a competition that was facilitated by students that were employed by the university as resident assistants; furthermore, these students won the best documentary for their video. In the United States, ever year we hear about white students participating in parities with racial themes in Black History Month, like the recent incident at University of California-San Diego.
After the elections of former President Nelson Mandela and President Barack Obama, media outlets enabled a discourse, in which these countries were referred to as “post-racial.” As a Somali American at a predominately white university in the Midwest, I understand the struggles of being black and Muslim. My senior honors thesis is entitled “Post-Racial” Societies: A comparative study of South Africa and the United States. I argue that “post-raciality” is in and within itself problematic. I used ethnographic methods and qualitative approaches to examine the “Black” South African experience and “African American” experience at historically white universities and predominantly white universities in South Africa and the United States. Moreover, I opened the discourse to students at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and the University of the Western Cape by using a blog and facebook to generate discussion and to collect narratives of the experiences of students.
Here is an excerpt from an article from the Mshale (local African community) newspaper cited on his blog on some Somali Americans’ experiences in Minnesota:
“‘Minnesota nice’ at this university is covert racism,” Jumale said . . . just outside the university’s West Bank campus. Jumale’s sentiments stem from observation and interviews he conducted of least a dozen students for a research paper he wrote about the experiences of “Somali College Students at a Predominantly White Institution.” In his research, Jumale heard from a Somali honor student who majored in English Literature but was told by a professor on the first day of class that the course was “too advanced.” Then there was another student who told him he received a D in a term paper because, according to the professor, “the words in your essay are not words you would be able to understand.” But no grievance was more common than alleged harassment by the university’s police. Jumale heard complaints about police officers randomly searching Somali students’ supposedly looking for stolen property. Others complained about being asked to provide IDs while white students walked by uninterrupted. … It wasn’t until last October, when a police officer detained three Somali students for robbery, that Jumale and his fellow students realized that these were no trivial issues. …. Shafii Osman, a 19-year-old sophomore majoring in Biology, said he and two of his friends were walking from the university gym to a nearby MacDonald when an undercover police officer stopped them and asked for their IDs. . . . After looking at their IDs and searching their pockets, the officer allegedly said they “fit the description” of “East African males” who had just robbed Subway…. Osman said the officer ordered them into the car and took them to Subway.….. Despite the Subway employees’ failure to identify the men who had committed the crime a few minutes earlier, the officer allegedly asked Osman and his friends to pay for the sandwiches or risk criminal charges. They chose the latter. … With the help of an attorney, the three students were able to get their cases dismissed. But for one of Osman’s co-defendants, who did not want to be identified, the whole ordeal was so damaging that said he is still struggling to understand it. “It caused me a so much stress,” the friend said. “I was approaching exams with the possibility of being sent to jail.”
This is a common experience for native-born African American college students, as reported in research studies by social scientists on historically white campuses. And such academic and policing incidents are now becoming more commonplace for the “other African Americans” as they are sometimes called. They too are often viewed by many whites from the same white racial framing that has long negatively portrayed those African Americans whose ancestry goes back generations in the United States. BTW, Social scientists Yoku Shaw-Taylor and Steven Tuch have a very good edited book with chapters on various subgroups within this increasingly diverse group, titled The Other African Americans: Contemporary African and Caribbean Families in the United States.
Are We Becoming More of a Police State, For Americans of Color?
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Bob Herbert at the Times has some very revealing statistics on police harassment and malpractice in New York City:
Statistics will be out shortly about the total number of people who were stopped and frisked by the police in 2009. We already have the data for the first three-quarters of the year, and they are staggering. During that period, more than 450,000 people were stopped by the cops, an increase of 13 percent over the same period in 2008.
Likely more than half a million in one year. He adds:
An overwhelming 84 percent of the stops in the first three-quarters of 2009 were of black or Hispanic New Yorkers. It is incredible how few of the stops yielded any law enforcement benefit. Contraband, which usually means drugs, was found in only 1.6 percent of the stops of black New Yorkers. For Hispanics, it was just 1.5 percent. For whites, who are stopped far less frequently, contraband was found 2.2 percent of the time.
Racial discrimination and little open protest or concern with extreme police malpractice. Welcome to lockdown America? And much of this is also a waste of police time:
The percentages of stops that yielded weapons were even smaller. Weapons were found on just 1.1 percent of the blacks stopped, 1.4 percent of the Hispanics, and 1.7 percent of the whites. Only about 6 percent of stops result in an arrest for any reason.
Notice too that whites were the more likely to carry weapons and have drugs. I wonder why that does not get news headlines? Why don’t they stop more whites, as there would be more payoff?
As I have mentioned here before police brutality and other malpractice is a severe problem nationally:
Lest some think that we are ignoring lots of white victims of police brutality here, we might note that one social science study back in the 1990s analyzed 130 police-brutality accounts in several cities across the country. In that reviews of cases, criminologist Kim Lersch discovered that the targets of this type of police malpractice are almost always black or Latino. The latter made up 97 percent of the victims of police brutality, while the overwhelming majority (93 percent) of officers involved were white. Police brutality overwhelmingly involves white-on-black or other white-on-minority violence. (See full discussion in Chapter 5 here.)
Racism in Every Nook and Cranny of Society?
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I have been reading a couple of books by Malcolm Gladwell, top-selling pop-sociologist and savvy author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, and a popular writer for The New Yorker. He has written of the routine racism successful middle-class African Americans (Afro-Canadian) like himself face in everyday life.
(Photo: Wikipedia)
In Black Issues Book Review a few years back, Angela Ards has written about his experiences this way:
Race in America often comes down to the politics of hair. . . . A few years back, literary phenomenon Malcolm Gladwell discovered this absurd truism when he let his close-cut, blondish locks bolt into an Afro. The son of an English father and a Jamaican mother, Gladwell doesn’t “look particularly black, especially to white people,” he says. . . . Once he grew out that hair, his Jamaican heritage stood out, quite literally, and police officers began giving him undue special attention: more speeding tickets, more street stops, even once accosting him as a suspected rapist on the loose.
She adds:
Gladwell, raised in Canada and biracial . . . had no points of reference for this particular black American experience. The two seconds it took those officers to link his Afro with criminality “radicalized and racialized” him, he says, more than any experience of his life–and informs the questions shaping his current nonfiction best-seller Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.
Gladwell is by no means alone. A recent Gallup poll found that a fifth of black respondents reported suffering discrimination by police officers, a proportion that has increased over recent years. Another recent Gallup poll found that 83 percent of black respondents indicated they had experienced some racial profiling by authorities in the last year.
As I have pointed out before, a recent ACLU report has 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.”
The data clearly suggest no one can escape this racist reality of a “post-racial America.”
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)
Driving While Latino (DWL): More Racial Profiling
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Over at the Texas Observer the savvy Melissa del Bosque has more details on the extreme racial profiling that Latinos face in Texas, and not just being arrested in Dallas for speaking Spanish:
In Dallas, she notes:
At least 38 people have been cited for not speaking English since 2007. Almost all of them were Hispanic and none of the officers who issued the citations were Hispanic.
Interesting how speaking Spanish, or not speaking English, has become a common excuse for discrimination. ‘Tis now central to the white racial framing of Latinos. (Leading anthropologist Jane Hill has researched well much of the language of white racism, and Spanish-English language issues.)
Del Bosque next describes what it is like on the border, data that are often confirmed to me by numerous Latino students here at my university, who often get stopped for no good reason and often searched without a warrant:
While I’ve never heard of anyone being ticketed for not speaking English along the border, residents, who are mostly Hispanic, get the Dallas treatment all the time. They get pulled over and their cars are searched by the police. Last March, the ACLU released a report on the State-Federal funded Operation Border Star. . . . The ACLU found that an enormous number of border residents are pulled over for no reason. They cited the Hidalgo County cities of La Joya and Sullivan City as examples of the excessive number of traffic stops: “The Cities of La Joya and Sullivan City, which have between 4,300 and 4,700 residents, and their police departments combined to make 9,576 traffic stops as part of Operation Border Star. The result? 3,314 citations and 5,387 warnings issued. That’s roughly one traffic stop per resident.”
One stop per resident! Yet more signs of the naïveté of arguing for a “post-racial America.” And of the sad US reality of weak or no constitutional rights, in too much everyday police and other institutional practice–especially if you are not white.
Racist Profiling: Why Do Mainstream Media and Officials Ignore the Data?
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One glaring aspect of the mainstream media’s treatment of the Gates incident is its general failure to discuss research data on racial profiling. Data-free opinions increasingly trump investigative reporting seeking empirical evidence. Racist profiling of African Americans and other Americans of color of color remains widespread. There is much empirical evidence.
One Gallup poll found that 83 percent of the black respondents thought that racial profiling was widespread, and in another recent poll some 20 percent of black respondents reported that they had faced such such racial profiling or other discrimination by police in the last 30 days.
A recent ACLU report has summarized racial-profiling research 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.
There have also been a number of recent court settlements. In 2008 the ACLU and other plaintiffs settled a class action lawsuit on racial profiling by Maryland State Police (MSP) officers in the Interstate 95 corridor. Studies over a long period showed motorists of color were disproportionately targeted and stopped and searched without good reason. An ACLU report notes that the settlement
agreement provides substantial damages to the individual plaintiffs, a requirement that the MSP retain an independent consultant to assess its progress towards eliminating the practice of racial profiling, and a joint statement by all parties involved in the lawsuit condemning racial profiling and highlighting the importance of taking preventative action against this practice in the future.
This profiling by police is not the only racial profiling that Americans of color face. Researchers Thomas Ainscough, Carol Motley, and Anne-Marie Harris, among others, have reported on audit and other studies that show discriminatory treatment of black and white customers in retail establishments, including poor service and various kinds of surveillance, searches, and neglect routines.
A recent Southern Poverty Law Center report Under Siege: Life for Low-Income Latinos in the South found too that in southern areas Latinos
are routinely cheated out of their earnings and denied basic health and safety protections. They are regularly subjected to racial profiling and harassment by law enforcement. . . . And they are frequently forced to prove themselves innocent of immigration violations, regardless of their legal status. (p. 4)
Numerous other studies (see here) show these patterns for many other walks of live, for African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Middle Eastern Americans. Many whites seem predisposed to see African Americans and other Americans of color as inherently deviant or criminal, a centuries-old idea in the white racial framing of this society. It is no wonder black men like Professor Gates often run into this problem. It probably happens millions of times a year in the United States.
One can think of a number of strategies against profiling. For several years, U.S. House member John Conyers and U.S. Senator Russ Feingold have introduced the End Racial Profiling Act, which prohibits racial profiling and requires law enforcement departments to collect stop-and-search data, to have effective complaint procedures, and to insure that those abused by police departments have a right to sue. This legislation has yet to be passed. (Guess why?) In May 2008 even the United Nations Special Rapporteur on racism called on the US Congress to pass the End Racial Profiling Act, as well as to set up an investigative commission to examine continuing racial discrimination.
Interestingly, there are modest educational steps that might help somewhat. Thus, in one psychological study Canadian researchers showed 264 photos of Chinese, black, and white male faces to 20 whites. After they had been trained these volunteers for hours on seeing subtle differences in these human faces, white volunteers were less likely to associate negative words and concepts with black faces than they were before the training. One researcher suggests that such training in seeing facial differences might reduce racial profiling by police and others. What do you think?
Racism, Sexism and the ‘Beer Summit’ (SECOND UPDATE)
Posted by: | CommentsIt looks like Lucia Whalen won’t be joining the guys for a beer tonight. The White House beer party seems to be a “guy thing.” Why wasn’t Whalen invited? If you’ve been following the news about the arrest of Prof. Gates, you know that Whalen is the woman who set the incident in motion with a 911 call to Cambridge police. There are still a few questions and puzzles about this highly racialized incident.
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photo credit: C. Young Photography)
Whalen had mostly been silent until her press conference yesterday. At that conference she again said that she never said anything racist in her 911 call and that she had been taught by her Portuguese American parents to treat everyone the same. The transcript of her call backs her up on this point, as it clearly indicates she did not suggest black men were breaking in, which means there are very serious problems with the police reports that she told them those breaking in were black. Black men are not mentioned in her call, but she does mention that one of the men possibly looks Hispanic, so she did use that racial identifier, but one not mentioned by anyone else including the police reports.
According to a Boston.com report:
The Gates quagmire began shortly after lunch on July 16 when Whalen, a 40-year-old fund-raiser for Harvard magazine, saw from her office window what appeared to be two suspicious men trying to break in to Gates’ house. According to the police report, Whalen said she “observed what appeared to be two black males with backpacks on the porch” about 12:45 p.m. “She told me that her suspicions were aroused when she observed one of the men wedging his shoulder into the door as if he was trying to force entry,” Sgt. James Crowley wrote in the police report.
Whalen’s attorney, Wendy Murphy, corrected what she and Whalen view as major errors in the police and media reports this way:
She did not know the race of the men when she called 911 because of her distance and that their bodies were turned away from her vantage point. Criticism was exacerbated when Mr. Gates challenged police to explain why they would believe “a white woman over a black man.” This statement is issued solely to correct the record and to emphasize that the woman is not racist and was acting as a responsible citizen, with appropriate concern for the safety of the community. She has worked in Cambridge for more than fifteen years, about a hundred yards from where Mr. Gates resides, and was aware of several recent break-ins in the area.
Whalen also says in her call and statements that an older woman called her attention to the Gates house, and Whalen then assisted with the 911 phone call, but had only a brief conversation with Officer Crowley. One question here is exactly how a neighbor and university colleague who made the initial 911 call failed to recognize prominent Harvard Prof. Gates in broad daylight at his Harvard house?
At the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson asked some tough questions about that police report:
So why, then, does Crowley’s official report say that Whalen told him she had seen “what appeared to be two black males with backpacks” on the porch of the Gates house? Is it Crowley’s position that Whalen is lying? Is Crowley lying? Or did the sergeant, or perhaps his dispatcher, just assume that if a break-in was taking place, the perpetrators had to be black?
Tenured radical makes an important point about how whites, including callers and police officers, often do not think about what they are doing. Whites in such settings are usually thinking out of a version of the white racial frame, and do not think about the dangers they have created and can create for black people. Indeed, white people
put black people in danger every day, an insight that was crucial to southern women’s activism against lynching as early as the 1930s. I have learned that while many of us believe racially integrated neighborhoods are desirable, and some of us actively seek them out, no one talks to white people about their responsibilities for reigning in the racism that inevitably follows when white and black people come into proximity with each other. There is no doubt in my mind that white people put black people into danger all the time as a result of their good intentions, and that being aware of this is a full time job. I worry, for example, every time a close friend of mine I have known since college — a major property owner in the neighborhood, with an Ivy degree, wealthy, and a football celebrity — borrows my lawn equipment, because to your average cop he is just another _________ (fill in the blank) walking down the driveway and up the street with someone else’s electric mower.
One national poll found that white respondents were much more likely to fault Gates than Crowley for the incident, but black respondents responded strongly in the opposite direction. Why is this? Retired Seattle police chief, Norm Stamper, notes why whites, who mostly have good experiences with the police, generally view them in a different way from black residents:
But if you’re a struggling black mom, for example, whose husband is serving a long prison term for simple possession of pot (when, under identical circumstances, more affluent offenders, disproportionately white, walk), and whose well-behaved male teens have been stopped and frisked repeatedly, called names and/or had guns drawn on them, you’re not so likely to have warm and fuzzy feelings toward the local PD.
Stamper then summarizes his experienced view of what may have happened, and how it could have been otherwise:
I did offer my opinion that had Gates been white he would not have been arrested. This belief was reinforced when Sgt. Leon Lasher, the imposing black officer pictured standing with Crowley and the small handcuffed prisoner on the porch of that cheery yellow home, answered a reporter’s question. Yes, he said, the outcome likely would have been different had he handled the contact with Gates. This from a man who supports his white colleague’s actions “100 percent.” The second thing we must do is strengthen police competence, and come up with a better definition of what it means to play “by the book.” See, Crowley may in fact have “followed protocol,” as Lasher maintains. But I take issue with the all-too-common practice of police officers baiting a citizen into committing an act of disorderly conduct so that he or she can arrest that citizen for… disorderly conduct. However offended Crowley may have been by Gates’s conduct inside his own home, that behavior was not a crime.
Given this veteran police view, and the issues noted above, it is more than odd that Officer Crowley is being treated as an “equal” in this little beer party (which he reportedly suggested) and not as a possible perpetrator of police racial profiling or worse. President Obama’s and others’ “let’s play nice” beer routine ignores the national black anger over chronic police malpratice such as profiling, which police malpractice is extremely widespread in all areas of the country.
Instead of focusing on the substantial data on racial profiling by the police, the mainstream media and most other public commentators are making this into a melodrama story of conflict and polarization. How about looking at the large amount of data on racist police profiling here and here and here and here, just to mention a few sources. One sign of continuing decline in the mainstream media is its failure to bother looking at social science and other important research data on the topics being debated.
UPDATE 1:
CNN has this report on another white Boston police officer:
A Boston police officer who sent a mass e-mail referring to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. as a “banana-eating jungle monkey” has apologized, saying he’s not a racist. .. Officer Justin Barrett told a Boston television station on Wednesday night that he was sorry for the e-mail. “I regret that I used such words,” Barrett told CNN affiliate WCVB-TV. “I have so many friends of every type of culture and race you can name. I am not a racist.”
The ape imagery straight out of the Thomas Jefferson’s racist frame. His lawyer says this was not meant to describe Prof. Gates himself, and his client is not racist. But of course no one is racist anymore just for operating out of that old white frame.
UPDATE 2 (August 3, 2009):
Here is an excellent article by African American author, Darryl Pinckney, who knows Gates and has experienced much racist profiling himself. He makes this point among many other good ones:
The thing about racial incidents these days is that the perpetrator usually denies that race supplied a motive for his actions, because everyone knows that racism is socially frowned upon, like smoking. Yet racism is still around; maybe more covert in some situations. It is not uncommon for a black person to be told that he or she is taking something that happened or was said the wrong way. Often the black person has no way of knowing if he or she has been, say, treated impolitely in a store or an office because of race. Maybe a clerk was just having a bad day. Think how hard it is to prove that one has been denied professional advancement because of race (or gender). Many black people have a conversation with themselves daily, about letting this or that go, about not being paranoid over every little thing. But sometimes you do know and are not in the mood to let the injustice go, even in the age of Obama. I was appalled by an article supposedly sympathetic to Gates that said he had been unwise to get angry with someone in uniform or that a professor with his skills should have calmed the situation down. Are we not frightened members of society if we recommend appeasing the police or showing respect for authority when it is undeserved?
Racism and Implicit Bias in Cambridge
Posted by: | CommentsIf you wish to gaze upon the depth and breadth of America’s racial divide–particularly the canyon-like gulf between white folks and black folks–you need look no further than the recent incident involving Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cambridge police officer James Crowley, and now, President Obama who weighed in on the matter a few nights ago, when asked for his reaction to Gates’s arrest on charges (since dismissed) of disorderly conduct. In this case, as with so many other news stories that have touched on race–the O.J. Simpson trial and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as just two of the more obvious examples–whites and blacks, generally speaking, and with obvious exceptions on both sides, see the story and the racial component of the story in fundamentally different (often diametrically opposed) ways.
To hear most white folks tell it, Gates was to blame. Yes, he was only trying to enter his own home when a white woman saw him (as well as his driver), assumed they were burglars and then convinced another woman to call the cops on her behalf. And yes, he produced identification for the officer when asked, indicating that he was indeed the resident of the house to which the officer had come to investigate the initial call. But because he became belligerent to Sgt. Crowley, and because he unfairly called Crowley a racist, he is guilty of escalating the situation, and thus, is the bad guy in the scenario. Meanwhile Crowley, according to the dominant white narrative, spread by media far and wide, is a wonderful and thoughtful cop, who is hardly a racist–after all he teaches a diversity training class and once gave mouth-to-mouth-resuscitation to a dying black athlete–and who was inappropriately smeared: first by Gates who accused the officer of asking him for proof of residency only because he was black, and then by Obama, who said the police had acted “stupidly” in arresting the esteemed professor in his own home.
CNN Panel About Racial Profiling
Posted by: | CommentsCNN’s Don Lemon speaks with a panel about racial profiling in America. The panel includes Prof. Andra Gillespie (Emory University), Tim Wise (antiracist writer and activist) and James Andrews (social media entrepreneur). The conversation is only available in two clips from CNN, I’ll post them both. The first one here is about (4:45).
And, here’s the second part from CNN (7:36) which is where Prof. Gillespie and Tim Wise discuss the difference between ‘having a racist moment’ and working on one’s own individual issues of prejudice and racism:
We’re often critical of mainstream news coverage of racial matters, but I thought that this was a step in the right direction, even if it was all too brief and necessarily superficial. The panel seems to agree that the Gates’ arrest represents a ‘teachable moment’ in American culture. What are your thoughts?
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.
