A Wasted Spotlight

The president tries to provide a ‘teachable moment’

By Michael W. McLean

The July 16th arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the subsequent national controversy thrust the issue of racial profiling into the spotlight and sparked a national conversation over a seemingly ever-present but usually dormant topic. National media, talking heads, and even the President of the United States had something to say. Now a month and a half after the incident, media attention has waned and the conversation has quieted, but the issue of racial profiling has not disappeared. Every day on the streets of America’s inner cities, in its suburbs, small towns, and rural country, racial profiling occurs. If the Gates incident should remind us of anything it is that every day real racial profiling occurs in action and thought across this country and around the world but never receives an ounce of the attention that Professor Gates received. Sadly, these cases of real racial profiling that happen to average people go without notice because the victims are not famous and well connected.

In the case of Professor Gates, the Harvard spotlight blinded the real issue and blew a nominal incident out of proportion and into an unnecessary national controversy. The victims of real profiling must have laughed as they watched the brouhaha surrounding Gates. Professor Gates was not racially profiled and the Gates incident was not racial profiling by any stretch of the imagination. It was disappointing to watch as journalists and politicians blew the story out of proportion. Days of 24-hour cable news coverage were devoted to Professor Gates, and the beer summit at the White House was covered with the same vigor as a meeting of the G8. The coverage demonstrated that the mainstream media cannot distinguish between news and sensationalism. But most disconcerting was the lack of attention paid to the larger issue of racial profiling in 21st-century America.

President Obama waded into the controversial waters by extemporaneously answering a question about Professor Gates at a press conference without full knowledge of the incident and only increased his involvement with a personal invitation to the White House for beers. Every day Americans of color are profiled and none of them receives invites to talk with the President; it seems as if you must be a Harvard professor to be invited to the White House. The President should have never gotten involved. The Gates arrest was a local issue and should have remained one. President Obama might be aided to look up the word “federalism” next time.

While the Gates arrest was not racially motivated, real racial profiling does exist in practice and in psyche in modern America and that is the topic that should have been addressed in the controversy. An ABC News poll following the arrest showed that a majority of African Americans say they have been racially profiled sometime in their lives. A recent study by Professor Ian Ayres of Yale found that blacks are nearly three times as likely to be stopped by the Los Angeles Police Department as whites. “These disparities are not justified by crime rates in different neighborhoods where people of color live,” Professor Ayres writes. “Nor do the disparities arise because more police are assigned to black or Latino neighborhoods.”

Racial profiling is not only a black-white issue. A 2004 Gallup Poll found that 63 percent of Latinos believe they are the victims of police discrimination. Additionally, 50 percent of whites believe the same of themselves. In Illinois, a state-sponsored study revealed that black and Hispanic motorists were more than twice as likely as white motorists to be subjected to consent searches by the police, yet white motorists were twice as likely to be found with contraband as a result of the searches. Racial profiling, prejudice, and discrimination are sins that transcend any one race.

Nor is racial profiling limited to law enforcement. The most worrisome profiling occurs in a person’s mind. Our personal prejudices cause us to judge or profile individuals many times without even recognizing what we are doing. Whether in airports or on the street our society is still guilty of profiling, intentional or otherwise.

It is important to note that racial relations in the United States have improved dramatically since the height of the civil rights movement and the days of the segregated South. No doubt racial profiling has decreased as society has worked to rid itself of old prejudices, but to the error of some conservatives, racial relations is not merely an issue of the past. Racism and racial profiling are present issues, and in our common pursuit “to create a more perfect Union” they are issues that must not be forgotten. If the arrest of a Harvard professor can shed attention on these real issues, then the entire spotlight may not have been wasted.