Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 14, 1994 TAG: 9411150029
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREGORY P. KANE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
That was several days after the Union, S.C., woman first reported that her car had been stolen with her kids - strapped into their car seats - still inside. When I saw the sketch of the alleged carjacker I said to myself sarcastically, ``Yeah, right. A black man driving around in a stolen car with two little white boys in it would have been caught within 15 minutes. It's been almost a week and nobody's seen the man, the car or the boys. That woman killed those boys.''
Of course, now the mother has confessed to the murder of the boys.
Thinking Americans of all races probably doubted her story just as I did. I tip my hat to them. For those who believed her tale up until the time she confessed, I can only feel pity and ask a simple question:
How gullible are you, anyway?
Allow me to briefly explain how racial dynamics continue to work in the United States. Over the protests of conservatives - who insist that institutionalized white racism has been replaced by a more pernicious black racism - I must point out that black male drivers by themselves are routinely stopped by police. It's tradition. It's policy. It's practically downright American.
For young black men, getting stopped by the police is part of a rite of passage. I remember my first time. I was about 16 and enrolled in an Upward Bound program at Johns Hopkins University, which was designed to help prepare youngsters for college. The faculty of the program had given me a Hopkins athletic bag for a dubious academic award - staying awake in the music class - and I was walking up a street carrying it when two cops stopped me.
They wanted to know where I was going and where I had gotten the bag. After a brief explanation, they let me go. Both they and I knew they would never have bothered to stop me if I had been white.
The second incident happened when I was in college in Lancaster, Pa. I lived off campus and decided to jog through downtown Lancaster to school. Just where did I think I was, anyway? Canada?
I hadn't gone far when a cop stopped me. He let me go after he realized police were looking for a suspect about five years younger than me, not to mention I was running in the direction of the crime. I haven't jogged since.
About two years ago, I was talking with a group of black men about the subject of getting stopped by police. As we discussed our experiences, I said, ``Let's narrow this down. Has anybody here not been stopped by the police?''
Everyone had. Lest some of you think that getting rousted by the cops is reserved only for working-class or underclass types, I will cite the experience of the late Reginald Lewis, the Baltimore native who became one of the richest black men in America in 1989 when he purchased Beatrice International in a leveraged buyout. While changing a tire on his Mercedes in front of his brownstone apartment, two New York City officers walked up and had him ``assume the position'' - ordering him to put his hands on the hood of his car and spread his legs.
Lewis resisted the urge to tell the officers that he paid more in taxes than they made in salary. A wise choice, or else he may have become the richest black man to have had a ``Rodney King'' done on him.
Official police jargon for a black man suspected of a crime is ``number one male.'' I don't think we're called that because we're number one in the affections of police. I think we can also rule out that police subscribe to the Nation of Islam belief that the black man is the original man.
``Number one male'' probably stems from the idea that a black male is considered by police the most likely description of a suspect in any crime. Or in the case of those of Susan Smith's ilk, we're the first ones they think of blaming whenever they commit a crime. Smith's story is similar to that of Boston's Charles Stuart, who murdered his pregnant wife in 1989, shot himself in the stomach and blamed a fictional black suspect. The irony is that in both cases, even the police eventually saw through both stories.
There is a lesson to be learned here. The next time a Susan Smith or a Charles Stuart wants to commit a crime and invent an imaginary suspect, make him a white guy. As quiet as it's kept, some white men do commit crimes.
Gregory P. Kane is a reporter for The Baltimore Evening Sun, where this first appeared.
L.A. Times-Washington Post News Service
by CNB