[MCP] Conflation of Race and Crime Hits Home

[John Lindsay]

Sent: Sunday, October 09, 2005 1:20 PM
Subject: Conflation of Race and Crime Hits Home

Conflation Of Race And Crime Hits Home 

October 8 2005

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-foot-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 damn 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 Bennett said. For those who missed it,
Bennett, former education secretary and self-appointed arbiter of all things
moral, said last week 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. 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 '70s led the U.S. crime rate to drop in
the '90s.

Fine. I get all that. But see, my anger doesn't stem from any mistaken
belief that 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 like 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. In a few
years, I will watch it take root in my grandson, who is in fifth grade.

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

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a syndicated columnist in Washington






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