“Radioactive Stuff”: The Bravery Of President Obama’s Trayvon Martin Speech
The political risks in the President speaking at length about Trayvon Martin and his feelings about the continuing challenges of being a black man in modern America were innumerable.
This is radioactive stuff. It doesn’t matter that he’ll never again be up for election. Obama still has years left in office and a hyperpartisan political environment to navigate. He’s become something of an invisible-hand President, often working back channels, because if he sticks a flag in the ground and demands action, congressional Republicans will then see greater incentive in defeating it. There was no policy proposal attached, but race remains such a key part of American political life that speaking about it so bluntly and at the same time with great nuance could widen the already vast political chasm. Validating black pain, asserting that profiling is real and saying that history is not an excuse but an honest part of why we are in the place we’re in are dangerous stuff when one party depends on a multiracial coalition and the other is almost entirely white and the demographic trends of America show whites becoming a minority within a few decades.
It was a treacherous speech politically because for one part of the divide the answer to black pain is: get over it, as Representative Andy Harris recently said. Racism is in the past, white privilege is a myth, profiling is a ghost: Doesn’t Obama’s election prove we’re beyond all that? The President knows better. He asked, in his 19-minute address, that black pain be acknowledged, that internalized bias be taken seriously, that history be understood as not done with us yet.
The assertion that blacks are hallucinating or making excuses or lying when we talk about the many very real ways white privilege and racial bias and the lingering impact of history impact our lives is painful. It adds insult to injury to attack all assertions of racism and deny its continued impact or existence. The right acts as though decades of rejection of the vast majority of the black electorate is evidence of some sort of plantation thinking rather than the inevitable response to the southern strategy and policies and rhetoric blacks find insulting. What do you mean “Stand your ground” or voter ID or immigration reform or the entitlement debate has racial tones? You’re injecting race! Playing the race card! It is like signal jamming: attack the transmission because you cannot win an argument that admits its existence. To these folks, George Zimmerman is a victim (several essays have spoken of all this as the lynching of Zimmerman). To them, race had nothing to do with this trial and now Obama has become the Race Baiter in Chief. Now he can be attacked on entirely new ground: as an apologist for black victimhood or a shameless stoker of racial division or maybe a neo–Black Panther.
Politically speaking, Obama took that risk because the spiritual or moral risk of saying nothing was too great. To have the microphone and the intellect and the personal experience and a community of citizens in pain — to have all that and say nothing would be a dereliction of duty. It would mean that the black President had somehow been cowed into not speaking deeply about blackness at a moment of national strife because it was, what, too controversial? Perhaps Zimmerman’s acquittal was the only verdict possible given the paucity of evidence and the jury instructions shaped by “Stand your ground” which give so much leeway to self-defenders who feel afraid even if, as the judge instructed, “the danger is not real.”
But Obama knew we cannot understand the pain many feel around this verdict by narrowing the lens and seeing this as an isolated incident, isolated from American history, isolated from American racial norms. We are in pain now because once again we’ve been told black bodies are worth less and we are not full Americans, and fear of black bodies is reasonable and it’s our problem to manage. Obama delicately touched on all that so there’s deep, cathartic power in the President reaching down from his perch to say, I could have been Trayvon, any of us could. And perhaps unsaid though, not unheard, is this: He could’ve been me. No one would’ve thought Barry from the Choom Gang would become President. Who’s to know what Trayvon would’ve become? I am optimistic about the brother’s imaginary future even as I admit that institutional racism would’ve been an anchor weighing him down. But I’m growing more cynical about my country. Even as a boy lies dead and a President says, I too have been profiled, part of the nation still speaks of race as a flimsy playing card they rebuke. Forgive me for wondering if Obama was right when he said we’re moving forward.
By: Toure, Time Magazine, July 22, 2013
“Fear Now A License To Kill”: To Those On The Right, People Are Not Racists If They Harm Someone Based On Fear Instead Of Hate
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, or so say conservatives who use the absolute sovereignty of outlook to justify a belief in such perverse ideas as global warming is a hoax, that Saddam Hussein really did have weapons of mass destruction and that President Obama is a foreign born secret Muslim.
It now appears everyone is also entitled to their own fears, which they are at liberty to act upon after George Zimmerman was cleared of all charges for acting on his when he singled out a Skittles and soda-packing Trayvon Martin as a threat to public safety and then tragically shot him dead in the confrontation that followed.
After all, as Geraldo Rivera told the audience of Fox and Friends after the verdict was announced: “You dress like a thug, people are going to treat you like a thug.”
As a matter of fact, Rivera is quite sure that if any of the six women on the Florida jury that cleared Zimmerman of all charges were in the shooter’s shoes that dark and stormy night they, too, would have done exactly at Zimmerman did.
“I submit that if they were armed, they would have shot and killed Trayvon Martin a lot sooner than George Zimmerman did,” said Rivera referring to the jurors. “This is self-defense.”
I guess I’d better tell my son to get rid of all those hooded sweatshirts he has or else he, too, might fall victim to some gun-toting vigilante like George Zimmerman.
It’s not so much the verdict itself that is so shocking and so sad. Intellectually, I can understand the decision those six women on the jury came to when faced with the sketchy evidence presented and the constraints imposed on them by the limitations of Florida law.
I also wonder if prosecutors made a strategic mistake not going for a lesser charge (such as aggravated assault or reckless endangerment) given the lack of a credible eyewitness and the burden of proof over motive, which may then have left the jury no choice but to set Zimmerman free.
Still, I can’t help agreeing with Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson when he said the fact Zimmerman “recklessly initiated the tragic encounter was enough to establish, at a minimum, guilt of manslaughter.”
Zimmerman’s actions were what started the tragic train of events that resulted in the death of a human being in the first place, and he ought to pay some price for that. Such culpability is the theory that causes the driver of the getaway car to be charged with first degree murder alongside the shooter even though he didn’t pull the trigger that killed the bank guard.
But what I cannot abide, however, is the cynical gloating by the right wing that’s followed once the final verdict was read.
After Zimmerman was set free, the right wing media played its usual role, which was to denounce liberals for waging what they claimed was a racially-motivated “witch hunt” of Zimmerman while at the same time cynically exploiting and inciting the very same racial fears and resentments in their mostly white audience that almost certainly played a key role in Martin’s tragic death.
This is evident in the way efforts by the Department of Justice to ensure protests about the Zimmerman verdict remained peaceful have been portrayed in the right wing media as the government unfairly siding with the black Martin against the white Zimmerman throughout the trial, perpetuating the all too familiar Fox News narrative that the Obama administration is out to persecute white people for the benefit of minorities.
Racists, of course, are convinced there isn’t a racist bone in their body and they bitterly resent whenever anyone says different. But that is mostly because racists habitually define racism too narrowly, limiting bigotry to the rage or physical violence that emerges out of sheer malevolence.
But what about the fear that might reside in someone like a George Zimmerman, who would single out Martin and instinctively see him as a potential threat based on nothing more sinister than a racial stereotype – a prejudice.
To those on the right, people are not racists if they harm someone like Trayvon Martin based on fear instead of hate, even if that fear has racial origins. All of us have a right to defend ourselves from danger, says the right, even against the imaginary dangers of a young black boy walking home with nothing more lethal than candy and soda.
But according to Daily Beast, this fear of black people had been brewing inside George Zimmerman for some time. Over eight years, Zimmerman made at least 46 calls to the police department in Sanford before those two fateful calls on February 26, 2012, shortly before he confronted and then fatally shot Martin, said the Daily Beast.
All told, the police log of Zimmerman’s calls “paint a picture of an extremely vigilant neighbor,” the Daily Beast reports, whose calls “make him sound more like a curmudgeon than a vigilante” protecting the gated community where he lived and where he shot Martin.
But starting in 2011, the Daily Beast says Zimmerman’s calls began to focus on what he considered to be “suspicious” characters in the neighborhood – “almost all of whom were young black males.”
According to the log in the Daily Beast:
On April 22, 2011, Zimmerman called to report a black male about “7-9” years old, four feet tall, with a “skinny build” and short black hair. There is no indication in the police report of the reason for Zimmerman’s suspicion of the boy.
On Aug. 3 of last year, Zimmerman reported a black male who he believed was “involved in recent” burglaries in the neighborhood.
And on Oct. 1 he reported two black male suspects “20-30” years old, in a white Chevrolet Impala. He told police he did “not recognize” the men or their vehicle and that he was concerned because of the recent burglaries.
The conservative National Review is willing to concede Zimmerman showed “poor judgment” in tailing Martin despite urgent pleas from the 911 dispatcher to leave Martin alone.
But the magazine strongly denies Zimmerman displays any of the behavior of “a bullying white racist circa 1955” when it overlooks the obvious racial profiling that started the tragic sequence of events to begin with. In fact, the magazine’s editors doubt Zimmerman harbored any racial ill-will at all as they pontificate about how glad they are “that people in America are still tried in the courts rather than by left-wing protesters or by the media” who they say waged a “long campaign of defamation against him outside the courtroom.”
To the National Review and to most of Zimmerman’s defenders on the right the only fact that matters is that Martin hit Zimmerman during the altercation that occurred once Martin noticed Zimmerman was following him, and probably lashed out at what he perceived to be a threat.
This fact is all that is required to make this case “a simple matter of self-defense,” says the National Review, despite what it criticized as the “enormous firestorm and campaign of race-hustling political intimidation” waged against Zimmerman.
Zimmerman was innocent in the eyes of his defenders on the right because he honestly believed the Skittles-wielding Martin to be dangerous. And what made Martin dangerous to Zimmerman was the fact he was black and, in the racist view of Geraldo Rivera, because Martin wore the uniform of a “thug.”
If the verdict is not more shocking to more people perhaps it’s because, as the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson put it: “Our society considers young black men to be dangerous, interchangeable, expendable, guilty until proven innocent.”
That is the way many right wing conservatives like Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly do in fact see young black men as they feed on the racial fears of their audience that America “is a changing country; the demographics are changing; it’s not a traditional America anymore;” and the “white establishment” is the minority.
And they vent their familiar white racist outrage at liberals who would dare to punish someone like George Zimmerman for acting on those fears when he killed a 17 year-old boy who did nothing wrong but look “suspicious” to the man who shot him.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon Blog, July 16, 2013
“We Know Them From The Nightly News”: Washington Post Columnist Richard Cohen Is Terrified Of Black People
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote an offensive, poorly reasoned column about racial profiling. In 1986. And also this week. And once or twice or let’s say perhaps a dozen additional times in the interim. The occasion of this week’s installment of “Richard Cohen explains why black men should be treated as second-class citizens for the safety of us all, which is to say rich old white men” is the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin. Cohen is very sorry that Martin is dead due to Zimmerman incorrectly assuming him to be a criminal of some sort based solely on Martin’s demographic profile — in other words, Cohen is sorry that Martin is dead because of racial profiling — but on the other hand, Cohen argues, racial profiling is correct and necessary because black people are scary, at least when they wear certain things.
I don’t like what George Zimmerman did, and I hate that Trayvon Martin is dead. But I also can understand why Zimmerman was suspicious and why he thought Martin was wearing a uniform we all recognize. I don’t know whether Zimmerman is a racist. But I’m tired of politicians and others who have donned hoodies in solidarity with Martin and who essentially suggest that, for recognizing the reality of urban crime in the United States, I am a racist. The hoodie blinds them as much as it did Zimmerman.
A “uniform we all recognize.” “We all.” “We.” Richard Cohen speaks for us all. Or “us” “all.” That one incredibly dumb assertion, stated with perfect idiotic certainty in the first-person plural, is exactly the sort of thing that makes Richard Cohen America’s worst columnist on America’s worst opinion page.
In the world outside Cohen’s tiny boomer rich guy bubble, “a hoodie” is worn by … nearly all young people and plenty of not-so-young people. To call a hoodie part of a (universally recognized!) “uniform” of Dangerous Black Thuggishness makes about as much sense as invoking high-tops or baseball caps. It is the “uniform” of youth. But then, to Richard Cohen, youth plus blackness makes probable cause.
Throughout much of the column, Cohen, play-acting at being a brave speaker of uncomfortable truths, keeps claiming that no one in America is willing to broach the topic of Black Criminals.
Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males? This does not mean that raw racism has disappeared, and some judgments are not the product of invidious stereotyping. It does mean, though, that the public knows young black males commit a disproportionate amount of crime. In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects — almost all of them young men. We know them from the nightly news.
And, obviously, the nightly news has no ingrained bias in favor of fear-mongering and sensationalist coverage of crime.
That statistic is the only one in the column. Left out are numbers indicating current crime rates, the historical trend of crime rates, the probability of any given person, or any given wealthy white person, becoming a victim of violent crime, the percentage of crimes committed by black men in Sanford, Fla., or really any number at all that would’ve provided more enlightening context than “number of black shooting suspects in New York City.” Political scientist Jamie Chandler says, “Cohen should be embarrassed by his innumeracy,” but Cohen does not embarrass easily.
If he did, he might remember the lesson of his 1986 Washington Post Magazine column justifying racist treatment of black men. In it he defended shopkeepers who deny black men entrance into their stores. “As for me,” he wrote, “I’m with the store owners, although I was not at first. It took Bernhard Goetz, of all people, to expose my sloppy thinking.” Bernhard Goetz was a man who shot four young black men on a New York City subway car after he became frightened that they were going to rob him. (It was never actually proven that they were going to rob him.) Because this column ran in a newly relaunched Washington Post Magazine featuring a cover story on a young black rapper accused of murder, black Washingtonians protested, and eventually earned an apology from Post executive editor Ben Bradlee.
They did not receive an apology, at least not right away, from Cohen, who instead wrote a newspaper column headlined “‘Accused of Racism,’” in which Cohen complained of being accused of racism. In this column he defended cabdrivers who refuse to pick up black people. (Two years later, as Tom Scocca reports, Cohen acknowledged that his critics were “mostly right.” He acknowledged this after he went to Atlanta and met rich black people.)
That lesson, apparently, was short-lived. In an interview with Politico about this week’s column, Cohen explained how racial profiling isn’t inherently racist, because everyone does it:
“Now, a menace in another part of the country could be a white guy wearing a wife-beater under-shirt. Or, if you’re a black guy in the South and you come around the corner and you see a member of the Klu Klux Klan.”
This is Richard Cohen defending his position — that “young black males” dressed in “hoodies” deserve to be targeted not just by the police but by armed idiot civilians pretending to be the police — by invoking the Klan. For Richard Cohen, a young black person dressed in not just politically neutral but also omnipresent attire is basically the equivalent of a guy dressed in the actual official uniform of a terrorist organization dedicated to the violent establishment and maintenance of white supremacy. Richard Cohen just has a pathological fear of black men, and he wants not just to espouse and justify this view, but also to be allowed to do so without anyone calling him racist.
Richard Cohen is obsessed with the notion that no one in America is ever brave enough to talk about race, or at least brave enough to talk about it in the way he would like to talk about it, bearing in mind that he probably doesn’t actually read anyone outside his immediate professional sphere, or anyone below the age of 50, or probably women or writers of color. “In the meantime, the least we can do is talk honestly about the problem,” he says in this week’s column. (“The problem” is the black male crime wave.) “Crime where it intersects with race is given the silent treatment,” he says. He complains that instead of addressing the fears of white people like Richard Cohen head-on, Barack Obama has instead sold out his own grandmother for being racist, a malicious misreading of his 2008 Philadelphia speech that is common among right-wingers complaining of reverse racism. (Cohen does not add, as FAIR’s Peter Hart notes, that in the same speech, Barack Obama did explicitly say that “wish[ing] away the resentments of white Americans” as “misguided or even racist” is unfair, because “they are grounded in legitimate concerns.” It’s not clear that Cohen bothered to read the speech before quoting the bit about the grandma.)
It could be argued that politicians and public officials everywhere are addressing the fears of Richard Cohen, and they are doing so by locking a breathtaking number of young black men in prison, in addition to regularly stopping and harassing them on the streets of large American cities. But Cohen doesn’t concern himself with that. What he wants is for politicians — liberal politicians, preferably black ones — to tell him that it is OK to be scared of black people.
Here is Cohen in 2012, sort of defending stop-and-frisk, and again invoking the story of Trayvon Martin as an opportunity to discuss America’s single most pressing racial issue, people calling Richard Cohen racist:
As with the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, race is not only a complicating and highly emotional factor but one that does not always get discussed in an open manner. A suffocating silence blankets these incidents. Accusations of racism are hurled at those who so much as mention the abysmal homicide statistics — about half of all murders are committed by blacks, who represent just 12.6 percent of the population — and they come, more often than not, from liberals who advocate candor in (almost) all things. Others reply as if there are not basic questions of civil rights and civil liberties at stake.
It never occurs to Cohen that perhaps accusations of racism hurled at Richard Cohen constitute the “open discussion” he is so desperate for.
Cohen is not always such a fan of “open” discussions, as we learned in 2006, when he built an entire column around the fact that he’d received a lot of emails criticizing and insulting him. In that column he described getting a lot of mean emails as being the target of “a digital lynch mob,” so, yes, this is definitely the right guy for an informed and constructive conversation on race in America.
As a man who still somewhat incoherently clings to the label of “liberal,” Cohen does acknowledge, in what amounts to an aside in this week’s column, that there are some complicating factors in his diagnosis of Black Criminality:
The problems of the black underclass are hardly new. They are surely the product of slavery, the subsequent Jim Crow era and the tenacious persistence of racism. They will be solved someday, but not probably with any existing programs. For want of a better word, the problem is cultural, and it will be solved when the culture, somehow, is changed.
Whoops, we created a huge impoverished underclass. There is probably nothing we can do for them now, and they scare me, so they should work on fixing their “culture.”
The problem actually is cultural. It’s the culture that created and still coddles Richard Cohens.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, July 17, 2013
“The Politics Around Dark Bodies”: The Whole System, Moral And Legal, Failed Trayvon Martin
In a way, the not-guilty verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman for his killing of Trayvon Martin was more powerful than a guilty verdict could ever have been. It was the perfect wrenching coda to a story that illustrates just how utterly and completely our system of justice — both moral and legal — failed Martin and his family.
This is not to dispute the jury’s finding — one can intellectually rationalize the decision — as much as it is to howl at the moon, to yearn for a brighter reality for the politics around dark bodies, to raise a voice and say, this case is a rallying call, not a death dirge.
The system began to fail Martin long before that night.
The system failed him when Florida’s self-defense laws were written, allowing an aggressor to claim self-defense in the middle of an altercation — and to use deadly force in that defense — with no culpability for his role in the events that led to that point.
The system failed him because of the disproportionate force that he and the neighborhood watchman could legally bring to the altercation — Zimmerman could legally carry a concealed firearm, while Martin, who was only 17, could not.
The system failed him when the neighborhood watchman grafted on stereotypes the moment he saw him, ascribing motive and behavior and intent and criminal history to a boy who was just walking home.
The system failed him when the bullet ripped through his chest, and the man who shot him said he mounted him and stretched his arms out wide, preventing him from even clutching the spot that hurt.
The system failed him in those moments just after he was shot when he was surely aware that he was about to die, but before life’s light fully passed from his body — and no one came to comfort him or try to save him.
The system failed him when the slapdash Sanford police did a horrible job of collecting and preserving evidence.
The system failed him when those officers apparently didn’t even value his dead body enough to adequately canvass the complex to make sure that no one was missing a teen.
The system failed him when he was labeled a John Doe and his lifeless body spent the night alone and unclaimed.
The system failed him when the man who the police found standing over the body of a dead teenager, a man who admitted to shooting him and still had the weapon, was taken in for questioning and then allowed to walk out of the precinct without an arrest or even a charge, to go home after taking a life and take to his bed.
The system failed him when it took more than 40 days and an outpouring of national outrage to get an arrest.
The system failed him when a strangely homogenous jury — who may well have been Zimmerman’s peers but were certainly not the peers of the teenager, who was in effect being tried in absentia — was seated.
The system failed him when the prosecution put on a case for the Martin family that many court-watchers found wanting.
The system failed him when the discussion about bias became so reductive as to be either-or rather than about situational fluidity and the possibility of varying responses to varying levels of perceived threat.
The system failed him when everyone in the courtroom raised racial bias in roundabout ways, but almost never directly — for example, when the defense held up a picture of a shirtless Martin and told the jurors that this was the person Zimmerman encountered the night he shot him. But in fact it was not the way Zimmerman had seen Martin. Consciously or subconsciously, the defense played on an old racial trope: asking the all-female jury — mostly white — to fear the image of the glistening black buck, as Zimmerman had.
This case is not about an extraordinary death of an extraordinary person. Unfortunately, in America, people are lost to gun violence every day. Many of them look like Martin and have parents who presumably grieve for them. This case is about extraordinary inequality in the presumption of innocence and the application of justice: why was Martin deemed suspicious and why was his killer allowed to go home?
Sometimes people just need a focal point. Sometimes that focal point becomes a breaking point.
The idea of universal suspicion without individual evidence is what Americans find abhorrent and what black men in America must constantly fight. It is pervasive in policing policies — like stop-and-frisk, and in this case neighborhood watch — regardless of the collateral damage done to the majority of innocents. It’s like burning down a house to rid it of mice.
As a parent, particularly a parent of black teenage boys, I am left with the question, “Now, what do I tell my boys?”
We used to say not to run in public because that might be seen as suspicious, like they’d stolen something. But according to Zimmerman, Martin drew his suspicion at least in part because he was walking too slowly.
So what do I tell my boys now? At what precise pace should a black man walk to avoid suspicion?
And can they ever stop walking away, or running away, and simply stand their ground? Can they become righteously indignant without being fatally wounded?
Is there anyplace safe enough, or any cargo innocent enough, for a black man in this country? Martin was where he was supposed to be — in a gated community — carrying candy and a canned drink.
The whole system failed Martin. What prevents it from failing my children, or yours?
I feel that I must tell my boys that, but I can’t. It’s stuck in my throat. It’s an impossibly heartbreaking conversation to have. So, I sit and watch in silence, and occasionally mouth the word, “breathe,” because I keep forgetting to.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, July 15, 2013
“How To Lie With Statistics”: Stoking White Fear With Bad Analysis
This week, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen published an inarticulate and very inept interpretation of the demography of shootings listed in the New York City Police Department’s 2012 Crime and Enforcement report. In his “Racism vs. Reality” piece, he argued that the post-Zimmerman discourse about racial profiling isn’t acknowledging that people are afraid of black men because black men commit more crime.
Cohen writes that blacks make up “a quarter of the population and commit 78 percent of the shootings in New York City.” He implies that the city’s “Stop & Frisk” program is justified: “If young black males are your shooters, then it ought to be young black males whom the police stop and frisk… It would be senseless for the police to be stopping Danish tourists in Times Square just to make the statistics look good.”
Cohen should be embarrassed by his innumeracy. He cherry-picked one piece of data and drew biased, grand generalizations, which serve no purpose other than to stoke “white fear” and reinforce a long running stereotype of the “Negro Savage,” a term used by white supremacists to assert that a slave was a docile creature, content in captivity, but as a freeman, a dangerous menace from the dark continent driven by base and barbaric instincts to rape and pillage white society. The Ku Klux Klan and others used this stereotype to justify lynching and other violence against blacks during the segregation era.
Today, this stereotype has morphed into the “Criminal Black Man.” The dangerous, inner-city, hoody-wearing, gun-toting, drug-dealing man who must be watched, stopped and frisked to ensure that proper society remains safe. It is a conception that has a long running, insidious and chilling effect on public policy. It shapes ineffective policing techniques and many other ineffective laws meant to lower crime rates. We need to go no further than Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s WOR radio interview last month to see how this plays out. He said, “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.”
Had Cohen read Darell Huff’s 1954 book, “How to Lie with Statistics,” or attended one of the National Press Club Institutes’ recent talks on data journalism, he would have realized his inferences are weak because he misinterpreted the statistics. He committed sampling bias and overgeneralization. Cohen looks at one facet of the NYPD report and superimposes it on the entire U.S. population of black men. He doesn’t consider any other angles that may blow a hole in his conclusions, such as: How many shootings ended in a guilty verdict? How many were justified? How many accidental? How many arrests ended in acquittal?
Or for that matter, how does this information relate to the fact that New York City’s crime rate is at its lowest since the 1950s, in light of the fact that it’s minority population has grown significantly since? Or at the very least, why are the police incapable of conducting race-neutral work. Rooting out potential criminals based on behavior and not race?
Cohen’s column would have contributed rather than detracted from this conversation had it discussed how these stereotypes inform public policy choices. Instead of fanning “white fear,” he would have helped loosen the emotional grip this trial now has on the national discourse, a stranglehold that is drawing lines in the sand, fueling recriminations and preventing a substantive, solutions-driven conversation about taming the real elephant in the room: Why do we consistently allow stereotypes to stymie our continual efforts to cultivate a fair, just, democratic American Society?
By: Jamie Chandler, U. S. News and World Report, July 16, 2013
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