Bobo

TheApostate, it's true that the media and some blacks do contributeto racism but if you really believe that's all, you're very wrong. Read the article on racial profiling below.

LoveAsianChicks, a double standard exists between what whites in America or Canada call themselves and what Blacks in those countries call themselves for obvious reasons. To reaffirm their affiliation with the country that they were taken from, Africa. Perhaps many blacks don't feel American or Canadian because they've always been treated as second class citizens....that's the double standard you should be concerned about. You shoud also read the article below. Personally, I don't give a shit what anybody calls themselves or wants to be called. But since you asked the question, I proposed an answer.

By Tim Wise

It?s just good police work.? So comes the insistence by many?usually
whites?that concentrating law enforcement efforts on blacks and Latinos is a
perfectly legitimate idea. To listen to some folks tell it, the fact that
people of color commit a disproportionate amount of crime (a claim that is
true for some but not all offenses) is enough to warrant heightened
suspicion of such persons. As for the humiliation experienced by those
innocents unfairly singled out, stopped, and searched? Well, they should
understand that such mistreatment is the price they?ll have to pay, as long
as others who look like them are heavily represented in various categories
of criminal mischief.

Of course, the attempt to rationalize racism and discriminatory treatment
has a long pedigree. Segregationists offer up many ?rational? arguments for
separation and even slave-owners found high- minded justifications for their
control over persons of African descent. In the modern day, excuses for
unequal treatment may be more nuanced and couched in calm, dispassionate,
even academic jargon; but they remain fundamentally no more legitimate than
the claims of racists past. From overt white supremacists to respected
social scientists and political commentators, the soft-pedaling of racist
law enforcement is a growing cottage industry: one rooted in deceptive
statistics, slippery logic, and telling indifference to the victims of such
practices.

As demonstrated convincingly in David Harris?s new book Profiles in
Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work (New Press, 2002), racial
profiling is neither ethically acceptable nor logical as a law enforcement
tool. But try telling that to the practice?s apologists.

According to racial separatist Jared Taylor of American Renaissance?a
relatively highbrow white supremacist organization?black crime rates are so
disproportionate relative to those of whites that it is perfectly acceptable
for police to profile African Americans in the hopes of uncovering criminal
activity. His group?s report ?The Color of Crime?? which has been touted by
mainstream conservatives like Walter Williams?purports to demonstrate just
how dangerous blacks are, what with murder, robbery, and assault rates that
are considerably higher than the rates for whites. That these higher crime
rates are the result of economic conditions disproportionately faced by
people of color Taylor does not dispute in the report. But he insists that
the reasons for the disparities hardly matter. All that need be known is
that one group is statistically more dangerous than the other and avoiding
those persons or stopping them for searches is not evidence of racism, but
rather the result of rational calculations by citizens and police.

Although in simple numerical terms, whites commit three times more violent
crimes each year than blacks, and whites are five to six times more likely
to be attacked by another white person than by a black person, to Taylor,
this is irrelevant. As he has explained about these white criminals: ?They
may be boobs, but they?re our boobs.?

Likewise, Heather MacDonald of the conservative Manhattan Institute has
written that racial profiling is a ?myth.? Police, according to
MacDonald?whose treatment of the subject was trumpeted in a column by George
Will last year?merely play the odds, knowing ?from experience? that blacks
are likely to be the ones carrying drugs.

Michael Levin, a professor of philosophy at the City College of New York,
argues it is rational for whites to fear young black men since one in four
are either in prison, on probation, or on parole on any given day. According
to Levin, the assumption that one in four black males encountered are
therefore likely to be dangerous is logical and hardly indicates racism.
Levin has also said that blacks should be treated as adults earlier by the
justice system because they mature faster and trials should be shorter for
blacks because they have a ?shorter time horizon.?

Conservative commentator Dinesh D?Souza says that ?rational discrimination
against young black men can be fully eradicated only by getting rid of
destructive conduct by the group that forms the basis for statistically
valid group distinctions. It is difficult to compel people to admire groups
many of whose members do not act admirably.?

Even when the profiling turns deadly, conservatives show little concern.
Writing about Amadou Diallo, recipient of 19 bullets (out of 41 fired) from
the NYPD Street Crimes Unit, columnist Mona Charen explained that he died
for the sins of his black brethren, whose criminal proclivities gave the
officers good reason to suspect that he was up to no good.

Putting aside the obvious racial hostility that forms the core of many if
not all of these statements, racial profiling cannot be justified on the
basis of general crime rate data showing that blacks commit a
disproportionate amount of certain crimes, relative to their numbers in the
population. Before making this point clear, it is worth clarifying what is
meant by racial profiling.

Racial profiling means one of two things. First, the over-application of an
incident-specific criminal description in a way that results in the
stopping, searching, and harassment of people based solely or mostly on skin
color alone. An example would be the decision by police in one upstate New
York college town a few years ago to question every black male in the local
university after an elderly white woman claimed to have been raped by a
black man (turns out he was white).

So while there is nothing wrong with stopping black men who are 6?2", 200
pounds, driving Ford Escorts, if the perp in a particular local crime is
known to be 6?2", 200 pounds, and driving a Ford Escort, but when that
description is used to randomly stop black men, even who aren?t 6?2", aren?t
close to 200 pounds, and who are driving totally different cars, then that
becomes a problem.

The second and more common form of racial profiling is the disproportionate
stopping, searching, frisking, and harassment of people of color in the
hopes of uncovering a crime, even when there is no crime already in evidence
for which a particular description might be available. In other words:
stopping black folks or Latinos and searching for drugs.

This is why general crime rates are irrelevant to the profiling issue.
Police generally don?t randomly stop and search people in the hopes of
turning up last night?s convenience store hold-up man. They tend to have
more specific information to go on in those cases. As such, the fact that
blacks commit a higher share of some crimes (robbery, murder, assault) than
their population numbers is of no consequence to the issue of whether
profiling them is legitimate. The ?crime? for which people of color are
being profiled mostly is drug possession. In that case, people of color are
not a disproportionate number of violators and police do not find such
contraband disproportionately on people of color.

All available evidence indicates that whites are equally or more likely to
use (and thus possess at any given time) illegal narcotics. This is
especially true for young adults and teenagers, in which categories whites
are disproportionate among users.

Although black youth and young adults are more likely than white youth to
have been approached by someone offering to give them or sell them drugs
during the past month, they are less likely to have actually used drugs in
the last 30 days. Among adults, data from California is instructive:
although whites over the age of 30 are only 36 percent of the state?s
population, they comprise 60 percent of all heavy drug users in the state.