By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
Which ethnic subset of American teens is most likely to become substance abusers and thus possessors of illegal drugs, alcohol, or tobacco?
a. Caucasians; b. Hispanics; c. African-Americans.
If you answered “c” you are wrong and probably Caucasian. Large-scale national surveys like the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R) find that African-Americans are significantly less likely to have substance use disorders than their White counterparts. Yet African-America teens are more commonly targeted, arrested, and convicted of substance abuse crimes than Caucasians. This is particularly curious because as the majority population (African-Americans make up just 13.6% of the US population) Caucasians form the overwhelming majority of substance abusers. Are the cops blind? Or just blinded by color?
The DOJ defines racial profiling as
any police-initiated action that relies on the race, ethnicity or national origin rather than the behavior of an individual or information that leads the police to a particular individual who has been identified as being, or having been, engaged in criminal activity
Recently, Attorney General Eric Holder stated that ending racial profiling
was a “priority” for the Obama administration and that profiling was “simply not good law enforcement.” Sadly, that priority has not been accomplished.
Racial profiling usually rears its ugly head in the context of police-initiated traffic stops based on the belief of some officers that minority kids are more likely to possess contraband like drugs and alcohol. But numerous studies have determined that minorities are “no more likely to be found with drugs, and when minorities are targeted by racial profiling, one strong indication is a low ‘hit rate’ of contraband finds.”
Traffic stops are not the only place where racial profiling is rampant despite a similar “low hit rate.” The ACLU reports that:
Moreover, an exclusive focus on traffic stops fails to reveal racial disparities in stops, searches and arrests of women of color pedestrians, particularly in the context of profiling women of color as street-level “drug mules.” While this practice at the nation’s airports is well documented by a 2000 General Accounting Office study, it also extends into streets and homes across the country.Additionally, racial profiling of women of color as drug users has permeated delivery rooms across the nation, where pregnant women fitting the “profile” of drug users – young, poor, and Black – are drug-tested and sometimes subject to criminal charges.
There has been some push-back against the discriminatory practice of racial profiling, but it has been limited. The “low hit rate” was an important factor (along with persistent complaints from minorities) in the modification of the US Customs Service’s protocols in conducting searches based on racial profiling. “The Service adopted reforms designed to eliminate racial, ethnic and gender bias in their search activity, while instituting stronger supervisor oversight for searches.”
The results were telling as depicted on this graph provided by the foremost experts on racial profiling, Lamberth Consulting:
Using more objective criteria to search, the Service posted a three-fold increase in “hits” in contrast to the older and more insidious method of racial profiling.
Following the US Customs experience, numerous states have collected data from their law enforcement officers to see if racial profiling was a problem in their jurisdiction. A 2003 study in “liberal” Minnesota is indicative,and the results are discouraging:
Blacks are 214% more likely to be stopped and 155% more likely searched than expected, but during discretionary searches contraband was 35% less likely to be found. For Latinos, the corresponding figures were +95%, +73% and -47%, again showing that Latinos are more frequently stopped and searched, but much less likely found with contraband. For whites, the corresponding statistics were -13%, -37%, and +37%, confirming discriminatory policing, as whites were less likely to be stopped, less likely to be searched, but much more likely found with contraband when searched.
Given the utter and statistically demonstrated disutility of racial profiling in law enforcement, why is it still a problem today? The answers lies deep in our DNA and our psychological reliance on tribal mentality when reacting to the “other.”
At the turn of the Century, many Caucasians stereotyped African-Americans as dirty and contaminated. This perception led to the infamous “Jim Crow” laws which segregated restrooms, restaurants, and even swimming facilities. According to the mentality of the time, it was “just common sense.” The AMA even got into the act saying that African-Americans were carriers of disease, “a social menace whose collective superstitions, ignorance, and carefree demeanour stood as a stubborn affront to modern notions of hygiene…” (Wailoo, 2006).
Yet despite this obvious insult African-Americans were commonly employed in Causation homes as cleaning ladies, cooks, nannies, and maids. Africa-Americans were “clean enough” to cook the food for Caucasian tables but not clean enough to sit down to eat with them. But what was the truth about the culture? As psychologist, Monnica Williams of the University of Louisville, explains, the truth was far different:
Even today, despite lower per capita incomes, Black Americans spend more on laundry and cleaning supplies than their White counterparts, even after adjusting for differences in average annual spending. African-American women engage in increased hygiene practices and report more cleaning and grooming behaviors. In fact, a greater emphasis on cleaning behaviors appears to be a cultural norm for African-Americans.
But why are Caucasians so ready to accept stereotypical notions of African-American traits that have no basis in fact and which are evidently disregarded in personal dealings such as hiring decisions for domestic workers?
Let’s look at the commonly held Caucasian perception that African-American males are more likely to be hostile to Caucasians than the other way around. This perception featured mightily in two recent posts here on Res Ipsa Loquitur. The first is the case of Trayvon Martin and the second the beating of the Caucasian tourist in Baltimore. What does the research tell us about this perception?
In 1996, researchers Mark Chen , John Bargh, and Laura Burrows looked at the unconscious reactions of 41 Caucasian college students to subliminal photographs of African-Americans. The study consisted of a long computer generated test depicting a box containing a random number of colored circles (from 4-25) . The students were tasked with quickly identifying whether the box contained an odd or even number of circles. A new box was shown every 2-3 seconds. After about 130 trials, an error message was displayed indicating that the students’ answers had not been saved and the test would have to be retaken. A researcher would then enter the testing room and fiddle with the computer, declaring the error message was wrong and the data were actually stored. Prior to each of the 130 trials a subliminal photograph of a young African-American male or Caucasian male was flashed.
The reactions of the students were videotaped and the students completed two surveys, the Racial Ambivalence Scale (Katz & Hass, 1988) and the Modern Racism Scale ( McConahay, 1986). Both are designed to test the takers level of racism.
The results were surprising. The testing demonstrated that when Caucasian students were presented with even a subliminal picture of an African-American, they responded toward another Caucasian student in a more hostile manner, generating more hostility in the other student. The researchers described the results this way:
The presented results show that these behavioral responses become automatically linked to representations of social situations just as previous research found perceptual trait constructs, stereotypes, and attitudes to become automatically activated.
The upshot is that racial profiling is both a conscious and unconscious reaction to the “other.”
In a similar study, Dr. Monnica Williams found comparable results in a test of racial anxiety. Here’s how she described the test:
Using a diverse group of undergraduate evaluators, we individually assessed Black and White participants for anxiety and affect. I was expecting to find that Black participants would be more anxious when assessed by a White interviewer, due to concerns about being negatively stereotyped. I was completely unprepared for what I found. Black participants were fine with their White evaluator, but White participants showed significantly higher levels of negative affect when assessed by a Black evaluator. In other words, working with a Black person made the White person unhappy, grumpy, and annoyed. I imagine it didn’t help that the Black person was in the counter-stereotypical position of evaluating the White person, upsetting the unspoken but expected power differential dictated by the pathological stereotype.
How then can we overcome the moral and legal challenge presented by our own ingrained attitudes? First it’s important to remember that racial stereotyping is a reaction and not a trait. Like most emotional reactions it can be managed and mitigated with cool, calm reason. Second, racial profiling must be declared a societal anathema. It doesn’t work and it is decidedly undesirable in a society predicated on the value of every citizen to participate fully. Finally, we need to acknowledge the adverse consequences that racial profiling has wrought. Does anyone seriously contend that had George Zimmerman met a 17 -year-old Caucasian male adorned in a sweat shirt and carrying candy, the same result would have occurred? Like many, Zimmerman was influenced by his ingrained reaction to conclude that Trayvon was “an asshole,” and a “punk” — in essence, “the other.” That reaction may not have been his fault in the sense of a conscious choice, but failing to recognize that shortcoming and acting aggressively to pursue the teen was, and may send him to the penitentiary for life.
What do you think?
Sources: PsychologyToday; Journal of Personality & Social Psychology; CafeConLecheRepublicans.com
~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
Malisha,
Thanks for the report from reality.
And I won’t be the lawyer, as I am not nor a wanna-be one, and say that that was only hearsay. I am sure, no names, that there are others who can also by hearsay, report from the reality of “better schools” and the excluded class who are NOT subject to “negative” effects of profiling. May they enjoy it and hope they continue to work as vigorously as you do for those not so fortunate.
PS If all attorneys were required to read your list of client admonitions aloud to theirs, I wonder what the positive effects on our justice system would be
in the long term?.
MM,
‘The millions seemed to flow their way
And stuck to them like paste
They spent what others raised for them
With no thought for the waste
Since someone else’s money had
The sweetest sort of taste
‘
———————–
Oh my!
so well and truly said.
‘Other Peoples Money’ , other peoples lives, other people’s everythings collapse a common hive…
Michael Murry,
I abandon the thread, to return reading later, to comment positively on your two posts.
Am so glad that you brought up the obvious concealed motives behind “profiling”. To show proof of my realization, I can offer the oppression now used in TSA searchs. A grossly falling tool, it obviously denies us our self-esteem, and classes us as being suspected terrorists, and not to be relied on—-as many “whites” have perhaps previously felt as part of their expectations. TSA people, of course, can recognize the markers of the one percent, and quickly slip them by. All part of training to become more oppressed and watched.
That you introduced Orwell’s gem was a chance taking, which I enjoyed and found enlightening. Would that there was an equally acute observation of how the same “socialogical basing of personality” works here in the USA.
Could you find one, it might find impact here at the blog.
I say chance-taking as those not pre-inclined to the message have many ways to discount and disparage Orwell and his relevance.
We in Sweden have the same problem of accepting “foreign” studies. But at least a study is then often made here which confirms the hyposthesis applies even here.
Please keep up the good work.
Mike S,
Drive safe, those open roads are good for the soul and can be relaxing and soothing……. Lead intro for canned heat…….. On the road again…….
idealist707 1, April 15, 2012 at 8:57 am
Talk about the “road not taken”. However the road about Death Star did prove worthwhile. But arriving here late, my posts will not (perhaps) be read.
As someone recently said to me: “Talking to myself is important, even while imagining someone else I am addressing……” (rough citation)
But I do hope they will be read..
=============================================
I thought that Mark hit the nail on the head when he said:
This is a social malady, as I said up-thread.
Children emulate their parents, and it is well known in psychological circles that substantial quantities of the populace “see” the government through many of the same subconscious circuits that they “see” parents with.
Talk about the “road not taken”. However the road about Death Star did prove worthwhile. But arriving here late, my posts will not (perhaps) be read.
As someone recently said to me: “Talking to myself is important, even while imagining someone else I am addressing……” (rough citation)
But I do hope they will be read..
Hearsay of the dog and hearsay of the corporation. Citizens United says a corporation is a person. Rule 801 of the Federal Rules of Evidence defines a statement as a statement of a person or conduct of a person. Hence, we are faced, as here with racial profiling, of evidence of the dog or statments purportedly of the dog or statements of Nickelodium coming into evidence through the “handler”.
OroLee made the comment above about a corporation being a person.
Good point. No dog wants to be misrepresented or misquoted in court by some cop and no corporation wants to be misquoted by some corporation handler in court. When they train Chico to bark at any hispanic person and then say that Chico is saying that they are carrying mariuana in their VW Bus then the speaker is a big fat lying cop –or what we dogs call a pig. Racial profiling gets its rump up in court so to speak because of hearsay of the dog. We want our day in court and believe that the Confrontation Clause gives a defendant the right to have us there to tell the truth. We will need a Dogalogue machine, not some K-9 pig to translate for us. No problem. If your government can talk to dolphines trolling around the waters of Iran to find out where the bad guys are, your government can clue you in on how to understand us dogs. But when some cop gets on the stand and says that he was “alerted” to the drugs carried in the VW Bus by the Mexicans, he is a big fat liar.
Over and out. Tanks Oro.
Woff
Mike, glad you made it safely. I agree with Gene about the Zen of the open road and great distances. I hate city traffic for the same reason. And like you, those all day drives are no longer an option for me either.
Mike S:
Thanks for checking in.
MichaelM,: “You can discuss black and Muslim people in America under a microscope, but if you try to turn even an unfocused telescope in the general direction of white people and their own precarious predicament, the corporate powers who control both of America’s right-wing parties will spare no effort or expense to discredit and silence you.”
—-
I haven’t read Frank but he seems to be an insightful writer. Orwell I am a fan of. I am constantly amazed that a writings from a century ago and sometimes much, much longer can be not only relevant but seemingly written yesterday. That distresses me. We, nationally and pan-racially are not getting better or smarter but seem almost biologically predisposed to something akin to self-destruction as a group, a national culture. The same people pull the same tricks and we fall for it every time. Every time.
“With every mistake, we must surely be learning…” NO, we aren’t! What was merely poignant to a younger me when the Beatles first sang the line is now to me a full-blown tragedy, in the classic sense. We are seemingly flawed so deeply and organically that our failure is assured upon birth. And as you observe above, no discussion of our national malaise (to borrow from Carter) is even allowed. Not even the President has faith in the truth or the stomach for the discussion.
And for those who like their socio-anthropological analyses in verse, I covered this several years ago with another episode of Fernando Po, U.S.A., America’s post-literate retreat to Plato’s Cave entitled, Boobie Top-Down Class Warfare. Sometimes expository prose just doesn’t present enough of a writing challenge.
lottakatz
Thomas Frank, in his books What’s the Matter with Kansas? and One Market Under God, has some truly insightful observations to make about the “culture war” and “backlash” politics so cynically nurtured and expolited by America’s (now global) network of interlocking coporate elites. One of my favorites:
“The situation may be paradoxical but it is also universal. For decades Americans have experienced a populist uprisinig that only benefits the people it is supposed to be targeting. In Kansas, we merely see an extreme version of this mysterious situation. The angry workers, mighty in their numbers, are marching irresistibly against the arrogant. They are shaking their fists at the sons of privilege. They are laughing at the dainty affectations of the Leafwood toffs. They are massing at the gates of Mission Hills, hoisting the black flag, and while the millionaires tremble in their mansions, they are bellowing out their terrifying demands. ‘We are here,’ they scream, ‘to cut your taxes.'”
Another:
“Like a French Revolution in reverse … the sansculottes pour down the streets demanding more power for the aristocracy.”
For a moment during the 2008 Democratic party presidential primary, candidate Barack Obama spoke about how, when the middle class feels squeezed by economic uncertainty, its justifiably frightened members “cling to their religion and their guns.” I thought immediately that Senator Obama had either read Orwell’s classic Road to Wigan Pier, or Thomas Frank’s two books and would initiate a national dialogue bringing these phony culture war issues and the real economic crisis they cynically mask into explicit consciousness where the country could debate and deal with them. But no such luck. The Repubilcans and his primary opponent (New York Senator You-Know-Her) jumped all over him for daring to insult middle class white Americans by openly addressing and publicly analyzing what truly ails them. No such uproar greeted Senator Obama when he gave his famous speech on “race” which openly and frankly discussed the African American community and its historically underprivileged — to say the least — condition.
You can discuss black and Muslim people in America under a microscope, but if you try to turn even an unfocused telescope in the general direction of white people and their own precarious predicament, the corporate powers who control both of America’s right-wing parties will spare no effort or expense to discredit and silence you. They’ve got their scapegoat-profiling wedge to divide the white middle class from the working poor of all colors and the rich white people have no intention of relinquishing it. Poor white victims of rich white people have only the color of their skin to make them feel “privileged,” and therefore “superior” to other downtrodden scapegoats. No one knows this better than the rich white people who buy the Republicans and rent the Democrats to do their dirty, divisive work for them.
The American beer brewer Adolph Coors (the first) loved to boast: “I can always hire half the working class to beat the other half into submission.” Yet as both George Orwell and Thomas Frank have observed, trying to get the oppressed and impoverished working classes to stop beating each other into submission — for the benefit of rich white people who order the beatings — will require a new level of mass consciousness and communication among the working and middle classes — an antidote to fascism (or neofeudalism) that the elite crony-corporate oligarchy will not countenance for a heartbeat. So the battle lines appear drawn for those who can see them.
Mike,
I’m 100% in agreement. There is nothing quite like the Zen stillness of an empty highway as the miles pass. May the rest of your journey be safe.
Malisha, thanks for sharing.
Excellent article and comments, just outstanding!
The subconscious factors at work (as well as their manipulation as
discussed by Michael M and Malish) goes far in answering a question
heard every election cycle, why do people vote against their own self interest?
Many of the Reddest states are the poorest states, have the worst infant mortality, highest unemployment, worst health, ad infinitum? They also have historically high rates of racism. The Caucasians in those states respond to the dog whistle “welfare queen” and have no idea that that they are the welfare queens being talked about. And they vote those profiles.
The appeal to race isn’t actually direct, The appeal isn’t to ‘vote against the blacks’, it’s an appeal that triggers a subconscious distancing from from their own needs by associating the needs themselves with the impulse to profile. They must then divorce themselves to their own needs, their best interest. That added layer of disassociation is probably not news to most people that read this blawg but this article helped greatly to clarify it for me.
While the article and comments deals with drugs as the most easily identifiable example of profiling, profiling reaches deep into every aspect of our society and psyche and can be used and manipulated on a very sophisticated level.
It actually puts Geraldo Rivera’s comments in a more favorable perspective. I may have been too quick to dismiss them. It isn’t because anybody wearing a hoodie is gansta’, black or otherwise. It’s because anybody wearing a hoodie is black based on the profile, the only linkage that matters, and that puts them at risk even if they are not of color. Geraldo’s emphasis was misplace but still in the ballpark.
🙂 yea, yea, you probably hashed all this out on other threads when I had a tenuous and intermittent IN connection but it’s nice being back for the stimulating postings and comments.
(Someone is coming to actually fix my ‘puter tomorrow, Hope I’m still online tomorrow night!)
Good to see you made it home, Mike.
Gene,
I’m still on the road. Can’t do those 24 hour drives anymore, but damn I love the open road.
Mark,
A fantastic post! So much revealed and so much to think about.
MM,
It’s really a shame you argue so poorly. Some of your analytical posts written in prose are quite well done, such as those above. Just as I’m not one for idle criticism, I’m not one for idle praise either, so take the compliment for what it is – a compliment. Unless, of course, you wish to misrepresent my statements and try to cudgel them with straw men again. That’s always amusing.
Michael Murry and Malisha, both. Thanks for perspectives.
Seems like, to me, the professor addresses some of these massive perversions in what is going on in this country from a solid, perhaps gentrified, viewpoint and action.
They don’t let those of us without the proper credentials into the chambers of power now, do they? So the professor tries to sneak in through the back door, with serious credentials and, it seems, a basic outrage.
Here’s another reason the statistics about drugs and addictions, crime and punishment, and even the studies used to come up with the statistics, do not adequately tell the story. My kid is “white” and after a troubled (not by drugs and alcohol) childhood, went to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA. He called me for advice about many things — much more than a run-of-the-mill kid his age would normally call his mom — but that was due to special circumstances. So I got a bird’s-eye view of what was going on in UVA among the first-year students (they don’t like the term “freshman”). Drugs and alcohol were all over the place. But the young white kids were not the least bit worried about “the law.” They weren’t scared of cops; they were not “paranoid” as the students in universities had been during the 60s; they were not afraid of knocks on doors or interference with their partying. He actually told me that older students had assured him that as long as you were a white UVA student, even if you were caught red-handed with drugs, there would only be a slap on the wrist and NO RECORD of anything so inconvenient as an arrest. He only heard these stories because he was so honest that he would actually ASK other kids why they felt secure when they did drugs at parties, why WEREN’T they worried about getting caught?
Then a really weird thing happened. At a frat party he found himself at, a guy was beating up his girlfriend while about 40 other students and even some non-students were present. My kid and two other young guys restrained the guy and protected the girlfriend twice, thinking the guy had calmed down or understood the error of his ways. The girlfriend remained at the party! Then the guy got “out of control” and began to beat her again with such energetic rage that it took THREE GUYS all their strength to pull him off, but he had done damage and she was crying hysterically and the guys restraining HIM were hurt in minor ways too (one fell and his bulk brought someone else down whose glass broke and cut a “bystander”) while a noncombattant phoned 911.
The cops would not come to the party but advised the caller that “they” should drive the belligerent guy to the hospital. At UVA Hospital in the Emergency Room, the guy again “lost it” and knocked over a crash cart, destroying property and causing “medical waste” issues. He was then professionally restrained by hospital security who apparently administered a sedative. Three more calls were made to police by the time the officers showed up. They interviewed my son first because he had driven the others in, while two guys held the raging “perp” down in the backseat.
The interview took about a half hour; ultimately no charges were brought against the kid, whose girlfriend made up with him afterwards, apparently. His blood alcohol had to be very high, according to the witnesses (I knew two of them, my kid and his best friend). In addition, he had been taking drugs (probably “X-stasy”). My kid hung around, probably more to find out what would happen than anything else.
Nothing happened. After a couple of hours, my kid had bonded pretty well with the police officer who had interviewed him. He says the last thing the cop (an “old-timer”) told him was, “Jeez, I wish the kids would go back to smoking pot. They’d get high, they’d sit around giggling and making up stupid stuff, and they’d never get like this. They weren’t interested in punching anybody’s lights out. Nobody would get banged up or anything.”
My kid also told me that one of the students in school with him got stopped with a “car full of drugs.” The kid had an Arabic name — from some minor branch of the Saudi Royal Family (my kid tutored him in Physics so he knew a lot about his background) and that kid did get arrested. Then apparently it cost his family a minor fortune (which they had, and parted with quickly) and all charges were dropped without a plea being entered. Kid got processed, went home, the car full of drugs was returned to him empty.
My point being that people are not even arrested and CHARGED, and there are not even any RECORDS, that can accurately detail what is really happening in this country with respect to drugs, alcohol, addiction, the commission of acts that could be identified as crimes if prosecuted, and etc. Had the giant public outcry not happened in the Trayvon Martin case, of course, the statistics with respect to white-on-black violent crime in Florida would not have a datum referring to the events on 2/26/2012 at all. So we do not KNOW what is happening in our country. We do not KNOW who is doing what to whom, or even, who is doing what and approximately how much? We do not know because, as I used to tell the mothers who found themselves in the custody courts:
Facts do not equal evidence
Evidence does not equal admissible evidence
The merits do not necessarily matter
Even identifiable legal error does not equal “reversible error”
“Harmless error” can define anything an appeals court wants
Precedent does not determine outcome
Process does not equal “due process”
“Due Process” can be defined, or undefined, at any time
Credibility is in the eye of the beholder
And all of this applies to all the studies, statistics, and conclusions that we either rely upon or argue against. The best advice is: If you’re out alone and you’re unarmed and someone like Zimmerman has you in his sites, good luck, and if you don’t have good luck, RIP.