Text 15920, 85 rader
Skriven 2005-10-09 17:04:14 av Alan Hess
Ärende: race and crime
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http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/bal-op.pitts09oct09,1,7304560.story?c
oll=bal-pe-opinion
Conflation of race, crime hits home


By Leonard Pitts Jr.

October 9, 2005

WASHINGTON // My youngest son was arrested last year.

Police came to my house looking for an armed robbery suspect, 5 feet 8 inches
with long hair. They took my son, 6 feet 3 with short braids. They made my
daughter, 14, fresh from the shower and dressed for bed, lie facedown in wet
grass and handcuffed her. They took my grandson, 8, from the bed where he slept
and made him sit on the sidewalk beside her.

My son, should it need saying, hadn't done a darn thing. In fact, I was talking
to him long distance - I was in New Orleans - at the time of the alleged crime.
Still, he spent almost two weeks in jail. The prosecutor asked for a high bail,
citing the danger my son supposedly posed.

A few weeks later, the prosecutor declined to press charges, finally admitting
there was no evidence. The alleged perpetrator of the alleged crime, a young
man who was staying with us, did go on trial. There was no robbery, he said.
The alleged victim had picked a fight with him, lost and concocted a tale. A
surveillance video backed him up. The jury returned an acquittal in a matter of
hours.

But the damage was done. The police took a picture of my son the night he was
arrested. He is on his knees, hands cuffed behind him, eyes fathomless and
dead. I cannot see that picture without feeling a part of me die.

So I take personally what William J. Bennett said. For those who missed it, Mr.
Bennett, former education secretary and self-appointed arbiter of all things
moral, said recently on his radio program that if you wanted to reduce crime,
"you could ... abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate
would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous and morally
reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down."

The comment has been widely denounced. Mr. Bennett says critics are quoting him
out of context, leaving out his denunciation of the idea and the fact that he
was criticizing a thesis that holds that making abortion readily available to
low-income women in the 1970s led the U.S. crime rate to drop in the 1990s.

Fine. I get all that. But see, my anger doesn't stem from any mistaken belief
that Mr. Bennett wants to practice eugenics on black mothers. No, what bothers
me is his easy, almost causal conflation of race and crime. Not class and
crime, not culture and crime, but race and crime. As if black, solely and of
itself, equals felony.

It's a conflation that comes too readily to too many. The results of which can
be read in studies such as the one the Justice Department co-sponsored in 2000
that found that black offenders receive substantially harsher treatment at
every step along the way than white ones with similar records.

They can also be read in that picture of my son, eyes lifeless and dull with
this realization of How Things Are.

I once asked a black cop who was uninvolved in the case how his colleagues
could have arrested a 6-foot-3 man while searching for a 5-foot-8 suspect. They
were looking for a black man, he said. Any black man would do.

So how do I explain that to my son? Should I tell him to content himself with
the fact that to some people, all black men look alike, all look like
criminals?

Actually I don't have to explain it at all. A few months back, my son was
stopped by police and cited for driving with an obstructed windshield. The
"obstruction" was one of those air fresheners shaped like a Christmas tree.

So my son gets it now. Treatment he once found surprising he now recognizes as
the price he pays for being. He understands what the world expects of him. I've
watched that awful knowledge take root in three sons now.

The conflation of black and crime might be easy for William Bennett, but it
never gets any easier for me.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for The Miami Herald. His column appears
Sundays in The Sun.

Copyright + 2005, The Baltimore Sun | Get Sun home delivery

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