Tim Wise at Counterpunch rebuts the notion being passed around (in the National Review, among others) in the aftermath of the Gates affair – that some degree of racial profiling might be unavoidable, and even appropriate, because disproportionate numbers of blacks commit violent crimes.
“For every 4.6 stops of whites, police are able to make an arrest, while they have to stop 7.3 blacks before finding evidence of criminality (4). What does this suggest? Nothing to Heather MacDonald, apparently, but to honest people it says this: police are more likely, on the basis of unjustifiable suspicion, to stop blacks than whites, and they are uniquely bad at predicting black criminality…….
But I doubt they would actually like where the underlying logic of their position leads. Indeed, if we are to use data to justify disparate treatment of this kind, we would need to go further than Charen or MacDonald would likely approve. For instance, whites have much higher rates, in all years, of drunk driving (5): so by the logic of Charen and MacDonald, police should put all their roadblocks and sobriety checkpoints in the suburbs and white rural areas, in order to catch the folks most likely to be guilty of a DWI. Likewise, whites have rates of child sexual molestation almost twice as high as the rates for blacks, according to the available data (6), so perhaps these two will soon call for rational discrimination against whites seeking to adopt? Or what about the corporate misconduct in which whites seem clearly to predominate? Will conservatives now call for affirmative action as a form of crime control in corporate America? After all, white men are demonstrating their ineptitude and even criminality repeatedly at the highest levels. Of course, they will do none of these things.”
My Comment
To Wise’s excellent points, I should add the following.
1. Psychological testing (tests by Banaji, Greenwald etc.) has shown that subconsciously even well-intentioned blacks tend to class random black faces displayed to them as less intelligent, less attractive, and less honest than white faces. That is, a high degree of color prejudice is simply built into current cultures – world over.
2. Psychological testing has also shown that groups naturally create an “outsider,” against whom they bond, during a polarized debate. And outsiders are created even among racially homogeneous groups, over trivial differences. The creation of outsiders thus seems coded into us.
Adding our assent to racial profiling as somehow rational and justified as a form of short-hand for genuine information-processing only tips the balance even more against innocent people. And then, factor in the rapid militarization of the state and its ever increasing belligerence to the population, white or black.
No. It’s one thing to argue that ordinary people are justified in making these sorts of rough calculations when they choose which neighborhood to walk through. Of course they are. It’s another to encourage state thuggery for the same reason.
Meanwhile, at least citizens get a choice about which neighborhood to walk through.
What choice do you have over financial crimes committed by the Treasury itself?