What is racial profiling? I think most people would agree it is where an individual is observed and because of his or her race, some assumptions are made about their behavior. Let’s examine the Louis Gates case
Sergeant Crowley
Sergeant Crowley responded to a call of a possible Breaking and Entering. This was the result of a call to 911 reporting that a passerby and a neighbor saw two men, no race mentioned, attempting to force their way into a house. Crowley, who is white, and two other officers, one black and one Hispanic, responded to the call. Crowley began to investigate and Gates responded belligerently and called Crowley a racist. The altercation moved outside where a crowd began to form. Crowley warned Gates several times that he was becoming disorderly and even showed his handcuffs to make his point. The 911 caller said there was only one person shouting and it was Gates. Crowley is a highly regarded officer who trains other officers regarding racial profiling.
Dr. Gates
Dr. Gates is a well respected professor at Harvard University and had just returned from a long trip and found he was locked out of his house. To be fair, he was probably tired and irritated and having to deal with the issue of being locked out. He and another individual tried to force their way into the house. The witnesses, not knowing it was Gates and concerned about other reported burglaries in the neighborhood called 911. The police arrived, Gates saw that Crowley was white and assumed that Crowley’s being there was racially motivated and proceeded to call him a racist, insult Crowley’s mother, and take the dispute outside the house. So who exactly profiled whom?
Obama
Barack Obama, who was supposed to be the post-racial president really stepped in it, when he said the Cambridge Police acted “stupidly.” Perhaps there is a silver lining. By raising this local issue to national prominence, perhaps we can finally put to rest the battle of racial animosity. Let’s face it, there will always be prejudice. We are wired to be prejudiced. Our survival depends on being able to size someone up quickly as friend or foe and take the appropriate action. It is a natural instinct. However, unlike animals, we have the ability to reason and control our instincts.
This self control has been driven into whites for 40 years. You are guilty. You are racist. You must be re-educated. You’ve got to control yourselves. Has it worked? Well in a country that is still predominantly white, we elected a black man president with 53% of the popular vote. That’s more than Bill Clinton ever got by a long shot. It’s more than either Bush got and for a Democrat you have to go back to Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to find better poll numbers.
On the other hand, minorities have been told for the same period of time, you can’t be a racist, no matter what you say, because you don’t have power (that’s over, with Obama in the White House). It’s not your fault; you are a victim of society. You didn’t get the job because of racism, so let’s throw out the test. There is so much prejudice in this country you can’t get into college unless we put a box on the form to indicate your race and give you a helping hand. It’s not your faul; it’s not your fault. With all that conditioning who could be blamed for throwing the race card whenever there is a bad outcome and the other guy is white? It’s a conditioned reflex.
Playing the Race Card
I taught a graduate course in telecommunications. There was a student, who was black, that I really enjoyed having in my class. He actively participated and really enlivened the discussion. There was one topic that he didn’t seem to grasp and as a result he did poorly on an exam. He asked for a makeup exam, which I granted. My policy was that my makeup exams were notoriously tough. The reason was that the makeup focused on what you got wrong on the first test, and didn’t include a lot of what you got right. If you were going to get another bite at the apple, and you had more time to study and you knew where to focus, I felt that was the only way to be fair to the other students. He did worse on the make-up than on the original test but I took the higher grade of the two. With his other work in the class, he still got a good grade for the course. I later saw him on the elevator and he said to me, “I know why you failed me on those tests. It’s because I’m black.” Everyone took the same test, whites, blacks, Indians, Asians, immigrants, Hispanics, but I was accused of singling him out and failing him because he was black. What I found most interesting was that his body language showed he wasn’t really comfortable using the race card. He said it tentatively, rather than with the outrage some someone truly wronged. It was if someone had coached him to use it. Very sad.
A New Chapter
At the conclusion of today’s beer summit at the White House, they should symbolically take out a card that says RACE in bold letters on it and burn it. This should signal that we are all Americans, and using the race card should be as scorned as racial profiling. Whites have been learning this lesson for forty years; it’s time for everyone else to get the same education. We all have our prejudices. We must not assume that the motive behind every action is racial. Maybe the reason you didn’t get the job is that you weren’t qualified. Maybe the reason you didn’t get into the Ivy League school is that very few people do and your grades were not as good. Maybe the reason you didn’t graduate high school is that you didn’t study. With Barack Obama as President, it’s time to accept that anything is possible in this great country. You have to accept responsibility and work hard. I may not agree with much of what President Obama believes in, but he got to there by working very hard at what worked to get him there. There is no Affirmative Action checkbox in the voting booth.
