Suspicion Nation Read online

  The racial discrepancy is stark and especially outrageous for juveniles. For first-time child offenders, African Americans are six times as likely as whites to be sentenced to prison for identical crimes. African-American youth are significantly more likely to be arrested, more likely to be tried in adult court, and more likely to be sent to adult state prison, where they meet other criminals; rarely receive counseling, educational, or vocational training; and then enter the pipeline, primed for a lifetime of nearly impossible burdens once they’re released. Nowhere is this more unjust than in the area of drug prosecutions, as we’ve seen, with its appallingly unequal enforcement against African Americans. It’s even worse for black youth, who are ten times as likely to be prosecuted for drug possession, though they are less likely to use and abuse drugs than white youth, according to a 2011 large-scale Duke University study.156

  There is no justification for these numbers. There is no way to sugar-coat what’s happening here: blatant race discrimination against African-American children—in an outfit that has “justice” in its title and stone-engraved words about liberty and equality over many of its entryways, statues of a blindfolded lady justice gracing its hallways.

  Take a close look at any stage of our criminal justice system, and the research documenting racial bias jumps out. Even defense attorneys, who one presumes represent many black defendants, can be ignorant to the extent of the injustice. Right after the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case, Zimmerman defense attorney Mark O’Mara threw out a whopper of a reverse-racism claim. He said157 that his client “never would have been charged with a crime” if he were black.

  In what country is O’Mara living? Certainly not the United States, where clear and persistent discrimination against African Americans in our criminal justice system is ubiquitous and well documented.

  Racial bias extends from jury selection all the way to the end of the line, to life and death decisions in capital cases. It’s long been known that the race of the victim is the most important factor in determining whether or not a convicted American murderer gets the death penalty, a sentence we reserve for a small percentage of killers—the “worst of the worst.” Consistent with our undervaluing of black lives, one who takes the life of a white victim is at least four times more likely158 to receive a death sentence than one who takes the life of an African-American victim. In a study159 from the state of Georgia that was used for the basis of a race discrimination claim that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, a defendant who had killed a white victim there was sixteen times more likely to get the death penalty.

  From beginning to end, African Americans fare worse in our criminal justice system, as implicit racial biases subject them to more scrutiny, more charges, more incarceration. It’s a Catch-22: caught up in more sweeps, sentenced to longer terms, black behavior is more likely to be criminalized, and then blacks are more likely to be seen as criminals. More police are then sent to inner-city neighborhoods, more blacks are arrested, and the vicious cycle continues.

  “Whites Commit Crimes but Blacks Are Criminals”

  UNDERLYING MUCH OF that subconscious racial bias is the most enduring, corrosive racial stereotype in America: the black-as-criminal mindset. Historian David Levering Lewis summarizes it: “Whites commit crimes but blacks are criminals.”160 While whites can and do commit a great deal of minor and major crimes, the race as a whole is never tainted by those acts. But when blacks violate the law, all members of the race are considered suspect. I used to anchor a show on Court TV, and when we heard about a new arrest for some horrific crime, my African-American co-host would whisper, “Please don’t let him be black.” It would never enter my mind to wish that a bad guy not be white, because no matter how sick the crime, other members of the white race are not impugned.

  Remember Zimmerman’s false syllogism? A few blacks committed burglary, Trayvon was black, therefore Trayvon was a criminal. Similar logic is used daily in the assumptions police and citizens make about African Americans, especially young males.

  The black-man-as-criminal stereotype runs deep. The archetype is so prevalent that the majority of whites and African Americans agreed with the statement “blacks are aggressive or violent” in a national survey.161 In support of these findings, other research indicates that the public generally associates violent street crime with African Americans. Other nationwide research has shown that the public perceives that blacks are involved in a greater percentage of violent crime than official statistics indicate they actually are.162

  Notice how the reasoning about race runs right to insulting conclusions (blacks are criminals), but never to positives, which would be equally (il)logical. No one thinks:

  1.Barack Obama is our president, and he’s African-American.

  2.That kid walking down the street is African-American.

  3.He’s probably a future president!

  The standard assumption that criminals are black and blacks are criminals is so prevalent that in one study, 60 percent of viewers who viewed a crime story with no picture of the perpetrator falsely recalled seeing one, and of those, 70 percent believed he was African-American.163 When we think about crime, we “see black,” even when it’s not present at all.

  Where did this insulting stereotype come from? The black-as-criminal image has been with us at least since the nineteenth century, when explicit racism portrayed African-American slaves’ essential nature as ignorant and savage, in need of the “civilizing” influence of the white man. At that time, little black crime actually occurred, as slaves’ lives were rigorously controlled, and they could be and often were swiftly put to death for perceived offenses against the slave owners, who acted as judge, jury, and executioner. As Chief Justice Roger B. Taney said in the famous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford164 decision about the Founding Fathers’ mindset in drafting the Constitution:

  Blacks had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it.

  In contrast, white slavers, who should have been the real criminals, imprisoned African Americans on their plantations, forcing them to live short, harsh lives in extreme poverty, working without any compensation, constantly subjecting them to beatings and threats of violence. Female slaves were often raped by white male slave owners. Well into the twentieth century, lynchings of blacks in the southern United States were not only common but were social events where white families would bring the children and a picnic lunch and would take pictures of the hanging to be made into commemorative postcards. On average, an African-American man, woman, or child was hanged, generally by a white mob, once a week, every week, between 1882 and 1930, as police actively participated or stood by and condoned the murders. Lynchings continued until the 1950s, as thousands of black Americans were hanged for offenses like “disputing with a white man.” (A much smaller number of whites were lynched165 as well, often for taking the side of a black person.)

  Though the United States was founded as a slave nation, with the subjugation of African Americans written into our Constitution, and though our history brims with centuries of repulsive acts of viciousness perpetrated by whites against millions of African Americans, no white-as-criminal trope ever took hold. This can only be attributed to the triumph of propaganda over reality. From the Reconstruction Era onward, academics churned out pseudoscientific papers linking blackness with criminality, “studies” which were then championed by journalists and even reformers as the basis for the view that blacks were innately inferior. Decreased funding to African-American schools and neighborhoods was justified on this ground, as were many forms of discrimination.166

  What about more recently? Most of us see our history of slavery, Jim Crow, and lynchings as shameful and repellent, yet we still believe the black-as-criminal attitude is justified based on current crime fears. Is it?

&nb
sp; It depends on what we choose to fear. How about serial killers? What criminal is more terrifying than a madman killing again and again, escaping the law? America’s most notorious serial killers, striking fear as their body counts mount, have almost always turned out to be white, and gruesome beyond imagining. Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, terrorized his city in the 1960s, sexually assaulting and murdering thirteen women. David Berkowitz, New York City’s “Son of Sam,” killed six and wounded seven in the late 1970s, terrifying the city until his apprehension. Ted Bundy, who called himself “the most coldhearted son of a bitch you’ll ever meet,” confessed to thirty murders in the 1970s. He was on the loose, killing women in Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado for years before he was apprehended. Chicago serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who dressed as a clown and performed at children’s hospitals, murdered thirty-three teenaged boys and young men in the 1970s, burying twenty-seven in the crawl space under his house. He described his sexual release in committing murder as “the ultimate thrill.” Gary Ridgway, Washington State’s Green River Killer, was convicted of killing forty-eight girls and young women but admitted to ninety murders during the 1980s and 1990s. He returned to the corpses he left along the river to have sexual intercourse with them. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, killed three and terrorized many others, sending mail bombs with his antitechnology screeds to universities and airports for seventeen years, until 1995. Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee Cannibal, raped, murdered, and dismembered seventeen men and boys over thirteen years, until 1991. Dennis Rader, known as BTK for his signature “bind, torture, and kill” modus operandi, killed ten in Wichita, Kansas, and was on the loose for decades until his 2005 apprehension.

  Though each of these men was white, striking again and again in towns and cities across the United States, garnering intense media coverage of their crimes and captures, no fear of white men emerged. Their murders were considered individual acts for which they alone were responsible.

  Prominent American organized crime families have long been run by white men like John Gotti, widely reputed to be responsible for at least thirty murders, including executions he ordered of members of his own crime family whom he suspected of being informants. James “Whitey” Bulger killed at least eleven of his organized crime associates and did not face justice until he was eighty-four years old. He was sentenced to life in prison in late 2013. The judge sentencing him pronounced, “The scope, callousness, and depravity of [his] crimes are almost unfathomable.” Yet none of us looks at white men with concern that they are mob bosses.

  Rampage killers are often in the news. Nearly everyone who has murdered a large number of people in one criminal event has been white. American bomber Timothy McVeigh took 168 lives at the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, many of them preschoolers at day care, in the worst incident of domestic terrorism until 9/11. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the Columbine High School killers, shot thirteen of their fellow high school students, then took their own lives in 1999. Adam Lanza killed his mother, then a classroom full of six-and seven-year-olds and six school personnel before killing himself at Newtown Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012. Earlier that year, James Holmes shot twelve moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado. All these men are white, as is the case for virtually all shooters on the long and growing list of mass killings in America. (The major exception is not an African American but Korean student Seung-Hui Cho, who committed the worst mass shooting in our history, killing thirty-three people at Virginia Tech University before turning his gun on himself in 2007.) Yet even though these shocking events generate round-the-clock media attention for days or weeks afterward, that level of attention does not scare anyone away from white men.

  Shocking cases of white women killing their own children occur regularly. In 1995, Susan Smith murdered her two sons, then told police an African-American man did it. (So prevalent is the black-as-criminal stereotype that racial hoaxes are common and often effective in distracting attention.) Andrea Yates drowned all five of her young children in 2001. In one of the highest profile cases of the last few years, Casey Anthony was tried (and acquitted) for the murder of her daughter Caylee. No one concludes white women are baby killers.

  Every American presidential assassin—the killers of Presidents Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy—has been white, as was the killer of JFK’s assassin, and the murderers of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Ronald Reagan’s attempted assassin was white, and so were all those who made attempts on the lives of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Gerald Ford (Ford’s two attempted killers diverged not on racial but on gender lines, as both were white women).

  In our nation’s history, so many of the sickest, most appalling crimes have been committed by whites. Yet no matter how sadistic the crime, no matter how young the victims, no matter how much fear is engendered in a community, no matter how much media attention and public discussion the crimes of whites engender, the race itself is never sullied. One does not look at a white man or woman and feel concern that pale skin enhances the likelihood that he or she is an assassin, a bomber, a murderer.

  It is the black-as-criminal stereotype that endures, sometimes buried, sometimes expressed in private to trusted confidants, and other times stated openly by those who do not fear being called racist. President Obama, in his remarks the week after the Zimmerman verdict, noted that African-American men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system, acknowledging the concerns about black criminals. He’d previously discussed his white grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who had sacrificed for him and helped to raise him, but who had confessed her anxieties about black men who passed her on the street. During the Zimmerman case, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen167 spoke for many when he openly wrote of his fear of African-American men. Even civil rights leader Jesse Jackson admits, “There is nothing more painful to me … than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”168

  Most everyone in the debate about the black-as-criminal stereotype accepts as fact that African-American males commit a grossly disproportionate amount of crime. On the right, this is generally used as evidence justifying anxiety about African Americans on the streets, in stores, or near white homes. On the left, root causes of crime are examined (failing schools, poverty, joblessness) in an effort to explain and reduce the numbers. But few scrutinize the numbers themselves to see who really is committing serious crimes in America, to determine based on reason and logic whether suspicions of African Americans actually make sense.

  Let’s look at run-of-the-mill crimes today. Who’s committing them? Who should be feared? Again, it depends on what categories of offenses we choose to fear. Whites are disproportionately arrested for some crimes, such as arson, driving under the influence,169 and vandalism.170 That is, even with the focus of police resources on black communities, whites are convicted of these offenses at numbers greater than their percentage of the population. Drunk driving is a real menace, killing over 10,000 Americans per year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data. Yet no one eyes a white driver next to him on the road and says, “Aha, light-skinned guy, he’s probably drunk, I’m calling the police.” The statistics don’t matter. Our perceptions do.

  How much crime overall is committed by African Americans? You’d be surprised at how difficult it is to strip away anxieties and emotions and arrive at the factual answer to this question. Most go quickly to FBI arrest or incarceration statistics, to see who has been convicted and sentenced for various offenses, broken down by race. But this data doesn’t include every state or even consistent reporting from one police department to the next. Nevertheless, this FBI data shows that African Americans, who comprise 13 percent of our population, represent 38 percent of inmates in state and federal prisons. That is, blacks are locked up at nearly three times their rate in population, a shockingly
high number. This statistic is often used in support of the black-as-criminal conclusion.

  But these numbers are almost entirely useless, because they are both over-and under-inclusive. They include a small number of people who may be innocent as well as a very large number of inmates incarcerated for nonviolent offenses, especially marijuana possession, which does not strike fear in the hearts of most people. Worse, these numbers are flawed because they do not reflect who’s committing the crime, merely who has been apprehended and locked up. They leave out all the burglars and rapists and killers who are still on the loose.

  And the statistics don’t take into account unequal policing. Many people are unaware of the huge disparity of law enforcement resources applied to majority-black urban neighborhoods in comparison to the relatively lax policing of white suburbs. Police departments send legions of officers to patrol inner-city neighborhoods with high concentrations of blacks, stopping, questioning, and frisking African Americans (and Hispanics), and where law enforcement has more eyes on a community, it finds more offenses. Once in the “sticky” criminal justice system, young men of color are likely to find themselves under correctional control, monitored, and watched for many years, even after release from incarceration. To make room for the skyrocketing number of Americans (disproportionately men of color) incarcerated in the last few decades, we’ve slashed and generally eliminated prison counseling, drug-treatment programs, education, and vocational programs. Once released, ex-cons are legally discriminated against by employers and are denied food stamps, access to public housing, school loans, professional licenses, and many other basic services. As a result, the United States has a high recidivism rate, as drug dealing and other criminal enterprises are the rare occupations that offer jobs to released former inmates. In inner-city neighborhoods, it’s easy to fall under correctional control, and once in, it’s tough to get out.