The fact that this post means I can feel good about "doing something" = white privilege

I almost didn't post this... but since popelizbet tells me it's International Blog Against Racism Week, I decided to go ahead and ride out the wank. If I can man the battlements to engage in internet arguments over Dungeons and Dragons, I can do it for this.

...

Okay, so here in Omaha, there's a "joke".

The "joke" has been most memorably phrased to me as police code NWO7... as in, the sirens go on and someone says, "Must be an NWO7 in progress." WO7 stands for "West Of 72nd". I'll let you guess what the N stands for, but if you know the answer, for the love of God don't shout it out.

The flipside of the "joke" of course is white folks being afraid, with varying degrees of seriousness, of going east of 72nd. The exact line of demarcation for what's considered the safe part of town varies from person to person... usually depending on how far west one lives. I've had people who live way out in West O act shocked that I'm around the 90s.

And of course, my neighborhood does have people of many races living here... and even if you go all the way out to Oakview you won't see a completely whitewashed crowd.

But the "joke" is there, and it's based on a hard truth. Not the truth that cops are all racist bastards, but the truth that racism exists. It is extant. It is part of the fabric of our society, in a pernicious fashion.

Cops exercise a broad amount of discretion in determining who they pull over, who they stop, who they question, who they move along. A lot of the stuff they consciously scan for... who looks like they belong, who looks like they don't, who looks like they're up to no good, who fits a "profile", who looks like they've got a reason to be somewhere... can be coded to race even if the officer expresses no overt racism.

It can be argued that when someone is pulled over or stopped, they have no way of knowing if their race had anything to do with it or not. And to those of us who are comfortably white, this might seem like an argument against "playing the victim card"... but honestly, I have to say I think the reverse is true. Because the truth is that most racial minorities (this post was spurred by cases involving African-Americans in particular, but I'm not going to start a laundry list because I know I'd leave someone out) do attract disproportionate amounts of official attention and suspicion and therefore when they're the ones that cops stop, or when they have cops knocking on their doors in the middle of the night to follow up on a sketchy report, or when they're the ones that cops single out of everybody hanging out in a parking or parking lot and ask them if they don't have somewhere else to be, they always have reason to wonder if it's not their race.

Almost anybody who's been pulled over for speeding knows the feeling of being singled out unfairly. If you're white, it generally stays personal: the cop's a dick, who pissed in his Grape Nuts, give an asshole a badge and he thinks he's God, etc. And because it's personal, you can go on about your day, bitching about Asshole Cop in your mind or even forgetting about him... you're not seriously worried that the next cruiser you see is going to do the same thing. You don't have to worry every time you see a cop.

If you had any reason to think, Is this because I'm white?, it would be a different experience.

So most people who are targeted by cops have no way of knowing for sure if their race made a difference in that particular case... but knowing that it happens, they have two choices: shut up and place nice and hope that the encounter doesn't become more than a temporary and embarrassing hassle, or confront. Some people would say it's never wise to confront the cops or that it's not fair to confront someone with an accusation of racism without proof.

To the latter, I will say that if the Gold Standard of being able to talk about racism is having proof on the order of someone saying, "Man, I've been waiting all day to pull over one of you types!", then we need to give up because racism wins forever.

To the former, I would agree that it seems like the safest course of action to not confront, in the short term, but in the long term... again, racism wins forever.

And this is why, even if Professor Henry Louis Gates's response to being called out of his home in the middle of the night was more "disorderly" than his own account claims, I cannot agree with anyone who says that he should have known better or that the cop was within his rights to respond by arresting him, or that this is not a matter for national attention.

The police officer was in his rights? What about the professor's rights? He was in his home. English common law recognized that "a man's home is his castle" even back when they had a real monarchy and all the tyranny that we eventually revolted from. The police had more need to demonstrate their reason for being there than he had to demonstrate his right to be there.

Sure, if someone said, "But wouldn't you be glad for the police's protection if they kept an intruder from invading your 'castle'?",

I would agree... but that wouldn't stop me from trying to verify their identity and their reason for being there if they knocked on my door in the middle of the night... and we come back to the fact that I could write it off as just a weird random happenstance.

There would be no reason for me to look for a larger pattern, it would just be a crazy story I could tell at parties, if I ever went to parties: "Let me tell you about the one time I came home late, and someone saw me struggling with the door and thought I was a burglar..."

Of course, I do belong to a few non-racial minorities that have been known to be targeted by police, and if there was at all a reason to think this was a factor, then for me to meekly comply and then laugh it off the next morning would be to validate that kind of discrimination, to give it license and strength.

So, if the question is put to me: do I think cops should just have to take it when they get called racist for doing their jobs?

That's the wrong question.

The question is, should the citizens that police officers exist to serve and protect just have to take it when they have reason to doubt they're being served and protected? That question applies to all people, obviously, but if the answer is that no, we should not, then as long as we know that racism exists (which we do know) and that it affects how police do their jobs (which we do know) then we can't ignore race as a factor in police interactions with the public. Even without proof in a particular case that the officer is an admitted racist or acted on racist impulses. It can't be ignored.

Oh, well, we (speaking to those of us comfortably white and comfortably middle class) can ignore it. We have that privilege. But it's not our place to judge when others choose not to, to call them stupid for asking the questions that we habitually avoid.

And we can sound so sophisticated when we duck them, too.

"It's tempting to see something as simple as a racial dynamic at work, but I see a more complicated question of class." is a popular one, but cases like that of Professor Gates, or Denzel Washington being unable to get a cab in New York, or then-General Colin Powell being stiff-armed by airport security, or actor Jeffrey Wright being ejected from a bar and tasered by cops show us the truth... presumably when these men find themselves on the receiving end of discrimination and official harassment, it's not because those doing it have identified them as wealthy successful men of color, but because of how dark skin "codes" to them: low class, no business being there, could be trouble.

Likewise, there was an article in Forbes explaining how the real issue was not one of race but of broader first amendment questions, and it raised some excellent points about the liberties that cops have taken with our liberties, but the existence of those points don't actually eliminate the racial side.

And that's the bottom line: yes, I'd believe the police officer if he said that anyone who had responded to that visitation the same would have been given the same response from the police, but it wasn't anyone who got the visit and not just anyone would have had good reason to believe their race was a factor.

Anyone who did receive such a visit and did suspect so would have had every right to speak out against it.

It's not the "smart" (meaning "safe") thing to do but it beats the alternative.