Welcome to the ‘Club’

[babylonsister]

Welcome to the ‘Club’


By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: July 24, 2009


The arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., the eminent Harvard scholar, at his own home thrust the police’s treatment of minorities, particularly black men, back into the spotlight.

Whether one thinks race was a factor in this arrest may depend largely on the prism through which the conflicting accounts are viewed. For many black men, it’s through a prism stained by the fact that a negative, sometimes racially charged, encounter with a policeman is a far-too-common rite of passage.

A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted last July asked: “Have you ever felt you were stopped by the police just because of your race or ethnic background?” Sixty-six percent of black men said yes. Only 9 percent of white men said the same.

These views are not without merit. A series of racial-profiling studies across the country have found that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be stopped and searched than whites.

In fact, last year the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York law firm specializing in human rights, released a damning study of the racial-profiling practices of the New York Police Department. It found that more than 80 percent of those stopped and frisked were black or Hispanic. The report also said that when stopped, 45 percent of blacks and Hispanics were frisked, compared with 29 percent of whites, even though white suspects were 70 percent more likely than black suspects to have a weapon.

It’s such a sensitive issue for black men that even the Black Man in Chief dove into the fray on Wednesday, reiterating that the issue of racial profiling “still haunts us.” So passionate was his empathy that it caused him to err. His comment that the police behaved “stupidly” was not very smart. On Friday, he acknowledged as much.

Mr. Gates may be able to take some solace in the fact that his rite of passage came later in his life — a life that he told me on Thursday has been insulated “by a cocoon of racial tolerance, enlightenment and reason.” Still, as one commenter on my Facebook page put it: “Tell Doc, welcome to the ‘club.’ ”

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/25/opinion/25blow.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

[MADem]

1. Anyone who talks with an accent, speaks English imperfectly, is poor, is female,

are also at risk.

We, as a nation, have some growing up to do.

[Warpy]

2. Yeah, most of us have run into those guys

meaning cops who have gotten the wrong idea and have refused to back down when corrected by one of their "inferiors."

This is the kind of attitude that destroys respect for the guys who are doing a tough job.

[geckosfeet]

3. The Times makes it sound as if this was his first experience with racial profiling.

'Mr. Gates may be able to take some solace in the fact that his rite of passage came later in his life' -

The experiences he had while teaching at Duke, although less dramatic were no less founded in racial profiling.
See the fish blogs: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=6147767&mesg_id=6147767