Whither Racism in the Land of the Free

He enrolled in my seminar on law and society as a graduate student.  Being in his 50s, he was an unusual enrollee, but his experiences could not have been more relevant to such a course.  He was a long-serving, full-time police officer in the oldest police department in the nation, the Boston Police Department, and he had patrolled some of the city’s highest crime rate districts.  He was also African American, serving in a city long troubled by racial animus.  This animus was especially evident in the 1970s hostilities around the effort to use busing to integrate students in the city’s public schools, and later appeared in the Charles Stuart murder case in 1989-90, in which Stuart–who was white–framed a black man for the murder of Stuart’s wife, whom he himself had killed.

I will call the police officer “Hal,” not his real name.  Because the seminar combined undergraduate students with graduate students, every week I asked the grad students to come to my office after class to further discuss the day’s assigned topics with me.  Walking to my office after one seminar meeting, Hal offered that he really loved the reading we had been discussing in class.  The reading by an eminent sociologist of law had argued convincingly that, everywhere and always, law enforcement has come down more punitively on members of lower status groups than on those of higher status groups, even if the offenses were the same.

As we entered the office I asked Hal why he loved the reading.  He answered, “Because (the author) is right,” he replied.  That alone was very interesting to hear from an experienced police officer.  But I wanted to delve further, so I presented Hal with a scenario.  I said, “So if you confronted a young black male who had committed a minor crime (a misdemeanor), and later a young white male who had done the same thing, would you be more likely to arrest the black male and take him in, and more likely to take the white male home to his parents or give him a warning and let him go?”  And Hal said, “Yes.”  I asked why so, and he replied, “Because that is what the community wants.”

Racism in America is complex.  It comes in a number of different types and in a spectrum of strengths.  It ranges from the visceral hates and fears that motivate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists, to the sort embedded in Hal’s experiences in policing Boston’s streets.  From racial hate crime murders to polite avoidance in public gatherings to awkward conversations.  From conscious antipathy to subconscious biases.  From denigrating racial “others” to holding against oneself one’s perceived racial flaws.

And long past the civil rights advances in the U.S. in the 1960s–and despite our individual claims to the contrary–racism resides in virtually all of us, from the likes of segregationist former Governor of Alabama and presidential candidate, George Wallace, to the African American civil rights activist and presidential candidate, the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

It resides in our prejudices and in our institutions.

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Personal Prejudice

This is the sort of racism embodied in such statements as, “He is a racist,” or “That is a racist thing to say.”  For most Americans, especially since the Civil Rights gains of the 20th century, it is an unwanted smear on their characters and is typically quickly denied.  To be called a racist is to be labeled as someone less knowing . . . less fair-minded . . . less tolerant . . . less informed . . . even less modern.  A sort of throwback to an earlier, ignorant era.

Racial prejudice of this sort is not inborn.  It is learned through our interactions with others.  Sometimes it is taught directly by family and friends, and children grow up with fear of, disregard and even loathing for races other than their own.  And these children often become adults who are self-consciously segregationist, such as with white supremacist groups.

More often today, however, we are diffusely and subtly socialized by our culture to racialized stereotypes and outlooks.  “They” are prone to crime, are prone to welfare dependence, are prone to violence.  On the positive side of evaluations, “they” are prone to achievement in science and math, are prone to athletic or musical excellence, are prone to academic and/or monetary success.  Note that even these “positive” stereotypes can be–and are–deployed in demeaning ways for groups not our own.

These stereotypes are rooted in patterns of behavior, but patterns that are poorly understood and wildly overgeneralized to all members of a racial, ethnic or religious group.  For example, most African Americans do not commit serious crimes; neither do most white Americans.  Among known offenders, most serious crimes are committed by whites in the U.S.  Still, racist assumptions often creep into our thought, even in the least likely of persons.  A prominent American once described taking a walk one night in an unfamiliar part of a city other than his own, and suddenly hearing footsteps behind him on the lonely street.  He turned around, and to his surprise found himself relieved to see that the man was white.  He was the Reverend Jesse Jackson.  And he had just discovered his unconscious bias.

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Systemic Racism

Also sometimes referred to as institutional racism, systemic racism is a phrase that has come into wide use especially since the killing in May of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis.  Its meaning is not obvious.  A phrase that points us in the right direction is “racism without racists.”  But this is inaccurate, since–as I’ve said–we can expect that remarkably few of us are free of personal prejudice.  It is more accurate to say that our institutions, from government to business to education to social organizations, produce racist outcomes without racist intentions or racial conciousness on the part of those making decisions.  Racism is built into our society.

A longstanding and familiar example is standardized testing for intelligence and achievement.  Standardized testing of this sort was birthed in the early 20th century when assumptions of white racial superiority infected even the sciences.  But this form of testing eventually became unmoored from these assumptions, which had become discredited, and evolved into testing perceived as neutral for the assessment of intellectual capabilities.

But they are far from neutral tests of academic aptitudes.  As the large and lucrative test-preparation industry demonstrates, as much as anything else standardized testing measures test-taking skills, which can be taught to significantly improve students’ scores.  But test-prep courses cost money, and private tutors are much more expensive.  Thus they are commonly out of reach for poor families, which disproportionately include families of color.  Such tests have also been culturally biased, written on the basis of the experiences and practices of the dominant white culture rather than including those of minority cultures, again contributing to lower scores among many minority test-takers.  Because these testing programs are used to sort people into course tracks, colleges and graduate schools, they disproportionately exclude many minorities from these opportunities and life chances.  Individual racists are not needed to produce these biased results.  They are built into our social arrangements.

So is the response of the African American Boston Police Officer Hal that I described above.  Recall that he attributed to “community” expectations the greater likelihood that he would arrest a young black male than a young white male for the same minor crime.  We can appreciate the social facts in the U.S. that likely underlie his sense of these expectations.  That black males disproportionately commit serious street crimes–although the majority of these crimes are committed by whites.  That owing to poor neighborhood schools and African Americans’ higher rates of truancy and dropping out of school, as well as of suspension and expulsion from school, and greater rates of growing up on single-parent households, black teenagers experience less supervision from adults than do white teenagers, hence are more vulnerable to getting into “trouble.”  That owing to those same poor and underfunded schools, the disappearance in cities of semi-skilled jobs, and continued racial discrimination in employers’ hiring practices for jobs that remain, African Americans are disproportionately disconnected from society’s mainstream institutions that protect against the temptations of crime.  That being convicted and punished for minor crimes at a young age creates a greater likelihood of being later arrested and incarcerated for more serious crimes.  All of these patterns are legacies of generations of discrimination against African Americans that is ongoing.

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Research suggests that Hal is far from alone in his willingness to arrest African American males for offenses for which he would be less likely to arrest white males.  Police profiling of African American males is especially noteworthy.  A study published this May of 95 million traffic stops by police in the U.S. found that black people were much more likely to be stopped than white people, and more likely to be searched when stopped, even though they were less likely than whites to be found with illegal drugs.  Importantly, the study found that the disparity between the stops of black and white drivers was reduced at night, when the race of drivers is more difficult to detect. Similarly, another study published this year found “stark racial disparities” in arrests for marijuana possession between 2010 and 2018 in the U.S.  Even though blacks and whites use marijuana at similar rates, blacks were more than 3.5 times more likely to be arrested for possession than were whites.  These racial disparities were found virtually everywhere in the nation: in urban and rural areas, wealthy and poor neighborhoods, and in areas with large and small black populations.

Sugggestive, too, are racial disparities in arrests for less serious crimes for which police have most discretion in whether or not to make arrests: misdemeanors.  A 2018 study found that for such crimes as simple assault, theft, vandalism, drug possession and disorderly conduct, the black arrest rate was at least twice as high as that for whites.  Given the lack of trust between urban black neighborhoods and the police, a gap fed by such racially-tinged policies as stop-and-frisk, we should expect more conflict in interactions between officers and suspects in those neighborhoods, even in the case of minor crimes.  Such interpersonal conflict increases the likelihood of arrest.

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Overall, then, we might say that the deadening combination of discrimination and poverty sets the trap of denial and failure for many African Americans in the U.S.  And that the American Criminal Justice System springs the trap, reinforcing the blocked opportunities and alienation that constitute systemic racism.

In the end, personal prejudice and systemic racism–while quite different manifestations of racism–are interwoven.  They reinforce each other.  Jesse Jackson was relieved to find a white man behind him on that dark city street for the same general reasons that Hal is more likely to arrest a young black male than a young white male for the same less serious crimes.  Like many of our own, their prejudices were developed–even subconsciously–by institutionalized systems of discriminatory behavior.  While our society needs to rigorously protect against the hate and violence perpetrated by outwardly racist groups and persons, it also must take up the even more difficult task of ridding our legitimate institutions of their roles in perpetrating and perpetuating racism in America.