Fibre of the Brain

The racist lurking in the shadows

I am a racist. I don't act or talk like a racist, I don't believe being black or Hispanic makes someone any less worthy or intelligent than I am, and I don't believe it makes that person any less deserving of every right that I enjoy. I believe in affirmative action, I support civil rights of every kind, and I have friends of every color. But when I walk down the street alone at night, I am a racist, because I have learned to follow a certain set of rules: walk quickly, don't make eye contact, don't look nervous, and—unwritten, perhaps, but still universally recognized—if he's black, walk faster.

SARAH ENGLAND/YH

There is a reason I subconsciously follow this rule, just as there is a reason that New York City's Street Crime Unit (SCU) stopped Amadou Diallo on Thurs., Feb. 4, 1999, just as there is a reason they targeted black bodyguard Patrick Dorismond on Thurs, Mar. 13, for an undercover drug bust, and just as there is a reason they stopped three former Yalies and a Brown alum (two of whom were black men) on Mon., Jan. 10 for running a red light and driving an allegedly stolen car.

That reason is simple. More black men are convicted of crimes than any other racial group. Whether this means they actually commit more crimes or are just targetted more often for arrest is hard to say, but the statistics seem to prove it: in 1995, 33 percent of black men in their 20s were imprisoned, on parole, or on probation; African-Americans make up over half of the prison population; they are also seven times more likely to go to jail than are whites. Yet anyone who has ever watched the news doesn't need statistics to come to this conclusion. Black men, in popular consciousness, are the proverbial bad guys. They do drugs, they shoot each other in the streets, they rob, they steal, they riot. Considering this stereotype, it makes sense to be more afraid of a young black man walking toward you late at night than of an elderly white woman. And maybe it even makes sense to assume—as a group of SCU officers did last February—that a young black man named Amadou Diallo looking nervously down the street at night from a narrow doorway had done something wrong. Maybe. But just because it makes sense doesn't make it right.

Racial statistics are not an excuse for racist policing. They can't be, because if we are to sanction assumptions based on race then we are to sanction racism itself. And if we are to take the next step, if we are to sanction violent actions based on race, chalking it up to standard police procedure, then we are in effect right back where we started 150 years ago. Lynchings used to be de facto standard police procedure. It used to make sense to look for a black perpetrator if any crime was committed against a white person—particularly a white woman. That's who was most likely to have done it, police reasoned, so that's who they should target in their search. Any efforts to deny this obvious fact were met with force. Back then, if a black man resisted being abducted by a mob of angry white men waving guns, he was beaten. On Mon., Jan. 10, when Jason Rowley and Sheldon Gilbert, JE '97, resisted being abducted by a group of angry white men (plainclothes police officers) waving guns, they were beaten.

Still, there is a major difference between the tragedies that occur today and those that occurred many years ago. Racism used to be a symbol of pride; now it is a label that most people avoid, and that few people recognize in themselves. I don't believe that Edward McMellon, Sean Carroll, Richard Murphy, and Kenneth Ross were looking to kill a black man when they shot Amadou Diallo. I believe that they thought Diallo was reaching for a gun, that they thought that the shots from their own guns that ricocheted back at them were shots that Diallo fired, and that they felt genuine remorse when he died. I don't think that any of them meant to be racist, just as I don't think that the police who stopped and almost shot at the Yale alumni meant to be racist. Nor were most of the officers of the SCU who stopped and searched 45,000 mostly African-American and Hispanic men in 1997 and 1998 (80 percent of whom were entirely innocent). New York police officers, like most police in major cities, are not trained to be racist, but they are trained to stop people who look suspicious. And in America, whether consciously or not, suspicious is still a synonym for black.

We can, and probably should, try to put a Band-Aid on the problem of racism in law enforcement. We should make laws against racial profiling, better train police officers to know when to shoot, and try to improve relations between black men and the police. But until I walk down the street alone at night, hear footsteps behind me, and do not find myself relieved when I turn to see a white woman rather than a black man following me, no Band-Aid we put on can ever hope to truly heal a 400-year-old wound.

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