Driving While Black Can Get You Killed, Even When You Are the Police

The NY Times had a great oped in the wake of the New York City PD officer being shot while chasing down a suspect. It is good that the NY Times runs an oped making an important statement on the current state of race as paper after paper and media outlet after media outlet talks about a post-race America where apparently the racist undercurrent of our country somehow vanish. President Obama is an important step in this country, but he does not wash away the deeply held racism that infects all aspects of our society. (Just as electing a female President will not mean patriarchy is dead). But in truth this isn't just about the ingrained racism that in the hands of the Police is deadly to people of color, it is also an important lesson on police brutality which is spiraling out of control. Shooting after shooting the police are being put into uncomfortable positions and their only answer seems to be to shoot first and hope for the best later. In the case of Omar Edwards the young police officer who was chasing the suspect pulled out a gun while chasing someone who had simply broke into his car. Then, the white police officer on the scene instead of asking questions or finding out what was happening, shot first and then came to regret was is usually ok, shooting a black man in New York City. And it wasn't until they check the body of Omar who was HANDCUFFED WHILE HE WAS BLEEDING TO DEATH that they learned it was a mistake. Of course this to is standard procedure, not enough to kill someone, you handcuff their dying body. The lack of humanity the police have in dealing with people of color is part of the symptom of a fundamentally racist society that it is. The experience of being mistaken for a criminal is almost a rite of passage for African-American men. Security guards shadow us in stores. Troopers pull us over for the crime of “driving while black.” Nighttime pedestrians cower by us on the streets. And black men who work as undercover cops are occasionally shot to death by white colleagues, as happened to a young officer named Omar Edwards when he was off duty and in plain clothes last month in New York City. We have often been seen as paranoid for attributing these things to bias. But the racial stereotypes that link blackness and crime have recently become a hot topic in social science. These pervasive and often unconscious biases affect social transactions of all kinds. They drive voting behavior. They make it likely that black defendants will receive longer sentences than whites for comparable crimes. They wreak havoc with the job possibilities of young black men. And they give the lie to the idea that the Unites States is becoming a “postracial” country. The psychologists Gordon Allport and Leo Postman showed more than half a century ago that preconceptions about race distorted human judgment and sometimes caused people to recall things that had never happened. Their best-known study mimicked the parlor game “telephone.” In this version, subjects who often included students were shown a now-famous slide depicting typical passengers in a New York City subway car. At the center of the image stand two figures: a black man dressed in a natty suit and a white man in shirtsleeves holding a straight razor. After being shown the slide, subjects were asked to describe it to others who had not seen it. These people then described it to others, who then passed on their descriptions as well. Those who had heard the story secondhand were then asked to recount it. More than half the time, the razor was said to be held not by the white man but by the well-dressed black man, who was sometimes described as brandishing it wildly. ...“Being black in America today,” Ms. Pager writes, “is just about the same as having a felony conviction in terms of one’s chances of finding a job.” We experience the on going scourge of racism in all parts of our society today. But in the hands of the police around America it is just dangerous. RSS