President Obama movingly spoke of the
"pain" most African-Americans felt at the acquittal of George Zimmerman. But
Obama didn't speak solely because he felt obliged to make a generic observation
about the anger of most blacks toward the verdict, or even out of remembrance
of the fight he led in the Illinois state legislature more than a decade ago to
get a bill passed that put law enforcement on notice that racial profiling
won't be tolerated. It took many tries and four years to get the bill finally
passed. He spoke from a well-documented personal experience. He bluntly noted
in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope,"
that he was not always a high-profile, respected and acclaimed public official,
and there was a time in the not so
distant past that he suffered as he put it "the litany" of slights and abuses
that ranged the gamut. He ticked them off quickly: security guards tailing me
as I shop in department stores, white couples who toss me their car keys as I
stand outside a restaurant waiting for the valet, police cars pulling me over
for no apparent reason.
A year after Obama's election in 2008 New York Congressman Charles Rangel
cracked that if Obama, that is President Obama, strolled through East Harlem at nightfall sans
suit presidential entourage and limo he could be shaken down, spread eagled and
cuffed. Rangel took much heat for a seemingly impertinent and ridiculous quip
and walked it back but as Obama now strongly hints Rangel wasn't too far off
the mark in zeroing in on the endemic problem of racial profiling. Now that
Obama has used the Zimmerman acquittal as the backdrop to make his toughest and
strongest frontal address to date on racial profiling, this further confirms that Rangel may indeed
have been on to something.
Much of law enforcement, a wide segment of the public, and even some blacks
vehemently deny that black men are systematically targeted for stop, search and
humiliation by cops just because they're black. One Sanford police officer that
took the stand as a prosecution witness during the Zimmerman trial was no
exception to the rule. He flatly said that he didn't think that Zimmerman
profiled Martin. Though he slightly walked it back under further questioning,
he was credible because much of law enforcement has denied that profiling
exists. The Zimmerman jurors obviously didn't disagree with that view.
This is
not an academic point. The refusal to admit that racial profiling exists, not
to mention the endless columns by conservatives that call racial profiling a
flat out myth, has done much to torpedo nearly every effort by local and
national civil rights and civil liberties groups to get law enforcement and
federal agencies not only to admit that racial profiling happens but to do
something about it. A perennial federal bill served up by House Democrat John
Conyers to get federal agencies to collect stats and do reports on racial
profiling hasn't gotten to first base.
The
surging number of blacks in America's jails and prisons seem to reinforce the
perception that crime and violence in America invariably comes with a young,
black male face. And it doesn't much matter how prominent, wealthy, or celebrated
the black is.
Others
go much further than calling it simply a case of fanning racial stereotypes and
negative typecasting; they say that good police work is about the business of
catching criminals and reducing crime. And if more black men are stopped in
poor black neighborhoods or in any other neighborhood, it's not because they're
black but because they commit more crimes. This is bogus on two grounds. In the
overwhelming majority of stops of black men by police under stop and frisk
tactics in New York and other cities, blacks are not arrested or charged with
any crime. Also studies have found that blacks are stopped in disproportionate
numbers in predominantly white neighborhoods with the same result. They are not
arrested or charged with any crime.
Obama's
tick off of the ways blacks protest that they are profiled years after he first
said that he felt profiled follows closely on the heels of U.S. Attorney General
Eric Holder's blunt charge in his address at the recent NAACP convention that
he too believed he's been racially profiled in years past. Now that two of
America's most powerful and recognized officials saying the same thing about
profiling, they've rammed the issue back on the nation's table where it never
should have left.
Earl
Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new ebook is America on Trial: The Slaying of Trayvon
Martin ( Amazon ). He is an
associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al
Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the host of the weekly
Hutchinson Report on KTYM 1460 AM Radio Los Angeles and KPFK-Radio and the
Pacifica Network.
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Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
