Fred Moolten
Canonsburg, PA
Please forgive the provocative title. I don’t mean it literally, nor am I even sure what is meant by “racial profiling”. What I do know is that I and many other members of the white majority who consider ourselves fair-minded, face a dilemma that demands attention.
Recently, I have read eloquent and sometimes heartbreaking words from black parents concerned for the welfare of their sons. They know that as with other groups, the large majority of black Americans are good and decent people. Unlike others, however, they know that their sons face a world that will unfairly stigmatize them as criminals until proven otherwise – an indignity that they must live with on a daily basis, with its attendant humiliation, harassment, and too often worse, as many grieving parents will testify.
If I walk down the street at night in a lonely neighborhood and see a young black man approaching, I know what I have just written in true, and that the stranger probably intends me no harm. But I also know something else. I know that from the statistics of street crime – mugging, robbery, assault and the like, perhaps conducted at gunpoint – a young black male is more likely to be a perpetrator than his comparable white counterpart. The approaching stranger may not be dangerous, but he is more likely to be dangerous than if he were white.
Fear is hard to rationalize away by philosophy. To understand that most people of all races are good is a poor antidote for the pounding heart and the sweating hands. That is my dilemma. How do I – how do we as a society – resolve the conflict between our empathetic need to avoid inflicting unfair burdens on the black community and our need to protect ourselves from dangers that may not be overwhelming but are real?
One solution is to deny one of the twin horns of the dilemma. Racists solve this by stereotyping – blacks are thugs, hoodlums, and drug dealers, and deserve no empathy. The other extreme is to deny any disproportion between the possible threat posed by a black male stranger and a white one. These solutions are certainly both convenient, but if there are based on a false reality, neither will eventually prove any solution at all.
In the commentary following the Zimmerman verdict, I have seen the predictable and outrageous claims of the racists. What additionally troubles me, however, has been a relative absence of commentary from thoughtful, intelligent, and fair-minded black journalists and other leaders that acknowledges the legitimacy of both horns of the dilemma as opposed to only the anguish of black parents. I hope that as tensions, ease, this will change.
I don’t pretend to know a final resolution to the dilemma, but a start is to address it by acknowledging that concerns on both side of the racial divide have some legitimacy. If that inspires black and white leaders to say to reach others’ communities, “We understand why you are troubled, we care, and I want you to know we will do our best to give you less cause to worry “, that will be a step forward.
Whatever the definition of racial profiling, I believe that there has been a disconnect between the publicly acceptable philosophy that race should play no part in assessing threats to safety posed by any individual and the private views of most Americans, probably including most black Americans. I will end this essay, then, with questions. Does a person’s race affect the threat level he (or occasionally she) poses? If so, how much should it influence our assessments? And it if shouldn’t lead to stereotyping (and I believe it must never be allowed to do that), how do we incorporate it into the way we interact with strangers of another race?
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