I've been busy lately, and haven't had time to write much to the journal. I read in the news about the Harvard professor who is black and was arrested in his own home. But I guess the circus is going on for far too long, and I have to jog down some of my thoughts.
Perhaps a little disclaimer is in order. I'm an ethnic minority female. I work in a field (IT) where 95% of my colleagues are male. So, I should know (or feel) a bit about racial profiling and discrimination.
The curious thing about my background and my experience is that, I never experience any (racial profiling and discrimination of any kind) so far. Should I count myself lucky? Maybe. I do believe though, that a main reason for that lack of unpleasant experience is due in large part of how we make it.
Having attained professorship at Harvard, I would not doubt that this black gentleman is an upright, hardworking and intelligent man. So, if he puts himself in the shoe of the policemen who responded to 911 calls, or the shoe of his equally upright neighbors who mistook him and his drivers as burglars (when they tried to ply the locks of his front doors to get in), what would this professor have done? If it's indeed a genuine burglary attempt, would he have wanted the police to be forceful, and not be fooled by some con men who have gained entry into his home? I would think not.
It's certainly very true that, once he showed his driving license (with proof of his address) and ID, the police should leave him alone. But the police had arrested him not on burglary attempt, but on disorder conduct. That makes a world of difference to me. If the professor has dealt with it calmly, rather than jumping up and down about some policemen responding to his neighbors' report of sighting of burglary attempt, the cops would probably have gone out of the door in no time. But you know, if I put myself in the policemen's shoe, facing his yelling male, I would probably have handcuffed him too.
Does it really have mattered, that the professor's attire looks upright (slack and all)? If the policemen left him alone because he dressed nicely, would he cry foul too, that the discrimination too, because he looks to have money in his pocket?
The bottomline is, alot of the events like this, championed by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, look to me more like storm in a teacup. It's quite likely that I (and my credibility) would be attacked too, for not yelling for an apology from the police to this professor. Oftentimes, I came across minorities (alot of them black, unfortunately) are stuck in this mentality that they are subject to discrimination and profiling.
Sometimes when I walk in my neighborhood and I come across some young black males in extremely baggy pants, I would stand on guard a bit more. Every time I do that mental calculation though, I ask myself if I'm doing subconscious racial profiling. But when I look at the local newspapers, 80-90% of the robbery and burglary arrests were young black males. That leads me to wonder, should racial profiling be a police tool? Naturally, if the racial profiling becomes a "blanket" statement to target everyone in that racial group, that's discrimination. But I don't see the issue of heightened alert to some demographic groups that are more prone to crime. Naturally, that does not negate the fact that there are many more upright citizens in those demographic groups who should be left alone.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
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Oftentimes, I try not to read too much into tea leaves. Granted that that could quite likely leave out alot of historical backgrounds from an incident. The danger of doing that, is the question of how much history should one inject into a situation? Racial segregation, racial profiling, class struggle, power structure of authority and past police abuse, etc etc. Having said that, being minority (in terms of ethnicity and gender) myself, I honestly don't see too much ambiguity in the Gates incident. We have all perhaps become so very politically correct to even point out that that angry black man is jumping up and down for a not very good reason. As I said before, I would probably have done the same to this guy. One would have hoped that, with a black president who claims the mandate to bridge the racial gap, he's injecting himself in a seemingly innocuous situation, taking sides without enough facts. Does an automatic labeling of someone in authority as stupid have helped the black man's (Gates) case? Absolutely not. Would Obama have said anything, has Gates not been his personal friend? To me, not only does Obama practice covert reverse racial discrimination, but the smell of cronyism burns my nose.
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