Welcome to the ‘Club’
By CHARLES M. BLOW
NYT
This week, the fog of racial profiling hung heavy over Harvard Square.
The arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., the eminent Harvard scholar, at his own home thrust the police’s treatment of minorities, particularly black men, back into the spotlight.
Whether one thinks race was a factor in this arrest may depend largely on the prism through which the conflicting accounts are viewed. For many black men, it’s through a prism stained by the fact that a negative, sometimes racially charged, encounter with a policeman is a far-too-common rite of passage.
A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted last July asked: “Have you ever felt you were stopped by the police just because of your race or ethnic background?” Sixty-six percent of black men said yes. Only 9 percent of white men said the same.
(More here.)
NYT
This week, the fog of racial profiling hung heavy over Harvard Square.
The arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., the eminent Harvard scholar, at his own home thrust the police’s treatment of minorities, particularly black men, back into the spotlight.
Whether one thinks race was a factor in this arrest may depend largely on the prism through which the conflicting accounts are viewed. For many black men, it’s through a prism stained by the fact that a negative, sometimes racially charged, encounter with a policeman is a far-too-common rite of passage.
A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted last July asked: “Have you ever felt you were stopped by the police just because of your race or ethnic background?” Sixty-six percent of black men said yes. Only 9 percent of white men said the same.
(More here.)
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