epepke
Philosopher
- Joined
- Oct 22, 2003
- Messages
- 9,264
Police who say there IS profiling are lying and police who deny it happens are being honest. As Sgt. Joe Friday used to say, "Is that pretty much it?"
However, since I think police leaders pretty much concede it happens I'm going to accept that it does.
But based on my experience on message boards, people will defend a position to the bitter end. That's not going to change. If someone posted a link to a group of white police officers who admitted, "We are guilty of racial profiling, based on our own bias," some posters would respond:
As far as I can tell, what happens is that people don't deny that it happens and pretty much think that it is good. They just don't want it to be called "racism," and so they come up with all sorts of arguments that it is really something else. Like maybe "proactive policing." That sounds good, doesn't it?
But, of course, it is a feedback loop.
It could work quite simply. Let's just assume for a moment that there are no racist cops. That's false, of course, but for the purposes of argument, let's assume that all cops are noble and stalwart and good, and they don't have a racist bone in their bodies. Even under this admittedly unrealistic assumption, the same things would happen.
First, there's the drug trade. That is a huge part of police work. And while it is correct to say that white people use more drugs, not only in absolute numbers but in per capita terms, it's also true that there are a lot of black people involved in the drug trade. Since the very white 1960s freedom and hippiedom didn't win (probably because all those idealistic white people discovered cocaine and tax-free municipal bonds as much as anything else), we have the much-touted War on Drugs which since the 1990s has seemed a lot less of a metaphor what with the hardware coming from the military.
But this is nothing new. European settlers spent a while basically just fishing cod and only having small or short-term settlements, but eventually they moved on land and started growing tobacco. Then there was Johnny Appleseed, and one of the nicest things to do with apples is let them ferment and drink the result. If it got cold, you could also make apple jack, which was very nice. Around the time of the American Revolution, it was common practice at political functions to leave out a barrel of hard cider so that they could help themselves. Moving West and South, the apples weren't as nice, but corn and rye and wheat grew nicely. So you made distilled spirits. (And then people from Kentucky made rafts to float their product down to New Orleans, and sold the product and the wood and bought horses to ride back up to Kentucky, which gave us the Kentucky Derby and the shotgun shack.) Then German and Irish immigrants brought two different styles of beer, and Jewish immigrants brought new kinds of distilled spirits (having drunk schnapps for a long time, and then there were calls for Prohibition, which rather unsurprisingly the darling of the KKK, which had withered after Reconstruction but re-emerged on the event of lynching Leo Frank, a Jew. And Italians were pretty handy with wine, though New York pizza is nearly as addictive. Etc. and so forth and so on.
If anything, what is surprising is how long black people resisted going into the drug trade. Throughout the long time of legal segregation, black people really stuck very closely to non-exploitive means of making a living. They got pretty good at it. There was, for instance, an almost entirely independent black economy, with a network of banks that were by black people for black people. We have just emerged from the annual diabetes-inducing wave of It's a Wonderful Life. Not only is that ironic since Neil Bush, but you can bet that a real George Bailey wasn't lending any money to black people, though some other black people were.
Then the black diaspora after WWII and the GI Bill and all that led to a lot of black people deciding that they didn't want to be down South any more and wanted to go someplace like New York or Chicago, where they were quickly told, "Coloreds need not apply."
And, OK. That's happened to everybody. Irish need not apply. Italians need not apply. Jews need not apply. Even my German immigrant grandfather, when he came over in 1930, knew that Germans were paid considerably less than others. (He still thought it a paradise, because in Germany you couldn't find work. He said, you might have to move 300 miles to find work, but you could find work. Now, I've moved 300 or more miles for work, and recently I've moved three time zones and still couldn't find work. There are a lot of people in that situation. Think about that when you think about the economy now versus 1930.)
But there's still a problem. It's hard to tell if someone is German or Italian or Irish or Jewish at a distance. It's easy to tell if someone is black or white all the way across the parking lot or down the street from a cop car.
And also, we got rid of segregation. (Didn't we?) I'm sure that everyone can agree that legal segregation was bad, but one of the results was that all those black banks and jobs and neighborhoods went to hell in a hat, and everything was swallowed up by the majority, which is white. And so one didn't have the option of being a big frog in a small pond except in entertainment (which doesn't employ very many stars) or the drug trade.
And so a cop who sees a young black man driving a nice car is automatically going to think "drug dealer" and see an opportunity for an arrest or even just some intimidation. And he's right, a lot of the time. Now, the young white man driving a nice car might be a drug dealer, too, and the cop might know that. But the young white man is also a lot more likely to be a spoiled rich kid with a car bought by Daddy, who can afford a big fat hairy lawyer and has political connections to the boss of the cop, and the cop certainly knows this. So, whom do you hassle to make up your quota? The cop might think the world of black people or even be black himself, but this is a no-brainer.
Then, of course, the black kids get their fingerprints and demographics into the system. And if they do something again, the little cop computer on the dash is going to go "ping." And then more is going to happen to the black kid for the same offense that the white kid gets away with, or no offense at all. And then the judge thinks "prior."
Well, do something like that for generation after generation, on the minority you can spot at a distance, and guess what happens.
Of course, as I said, we got rid of segregation. And quite a lot of laws based on race. And, if truth be told, a lot of discriminatory hiring as well. And some people say, "racism is gone! It was a problem in the past, but it's over, and things are better. Why don't these kids just pull them up by their bootstraps? I resent all that racist affirmative action and how blacks can blame anything on being black!"
Well, of course, there's evidence of quite a lot of still extant racism. But it's secondary. What is primary is that all of these white people (and some fortunate rich black people) neglect two things: 1) old money, and 2) grandfather stories.
It's the old money that buys the lawyers. Also, while Americans have this heroic image of the self-made man, there isn't a single success story that doesn't involve severe economic and emotional hardships in the past. People with buffers survive (though far from all of them do), and people without buffers don't. The buffer isn't a strong governmental social safety net, and what little there is, people resent, waving their hands about "welfare queens," which nicely fits into their moral values about rugged individualism. And of course, the number of successes is small compared to the number of failures, and it also happens with white people. But those white people are generally viewed as family moochers or just dismissed as the homeless; nobody makes myths of millions of white people sucking the economy dry and raising your taxes.
Of course, though, they did. Irish, Germans, Jews, etc. all received the same sort of treatment, but again, there's that distance identification problem.
Then there are the grandfather stories. Every culture passes down information. Let's be honest about this. The information passed down over the years by most people to their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren is likely still to be useful. My grandfather was trained as, I kid you not, a wagon-wheel maker, but the stuff he learned and passed down still works for me as a software developer. (It doesn't help me much as an entrepreneur, but I'm working on that.) What a black slave tells someone in the reconstruction era, what they in turn tell someone in the segregation era, and what they in turn tell someone in the post-segregation era is likely to be totally useless or even wildly counterproductive.
Like, for example, the don't trust white people, you act too white, crab-bucket mentality, which I'm personally familiar with especially amongst the older members of the family of my girlfriend, who is very black. In the segregation era, it was functional. Success was had by staying as far away as possible from white institutions, which kept the black institutions flourishing, so you could still save and borrow money and live. Now it just makes matters worse.
Or the traditional sexism and "big booty ho" attitudes of her younger relatives. Using sexuality to improve one's status is a rational niche move in an economy of poverty, but it keeps the economy of poverty going, and there really are much better even personal choices and the actual possibility of getting away if you can change your individual and cultural outlook.
All of this is maintained, generation and generation, by behaviors and patterns that are in turn reinforced by the very things they affect. It's a positive feedback loop and a very nasty one. And it really does affect black people dramatically more strongly than other groups.
