Posted on 09/14/2014 10:38:53 AM PDT by Chi-townChief
When I was pulled over by police many years ago on a remote stretch of Illinois 171 at 1 a.m., I was the same age as Michael Brown.
Brown was the 18-year-old black teenager shot and killed Aug. 9 by officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking weeks of street protests against Ferguson police.
It was on another August night when my 21-year-old brother and I spent time at the Bluefront Lounge near Willow Springs, listening to our favorite country-and-western band.
Later, I drove us home in my brother’s 1962 Chevrolet Impala with the convertible top down, while he sang along with the radio in the passenger seat. When a squad car’s flashing lights splashed in my rear view, I pulled off the road adjacent to a forest preserve.
A second police car pulled in front and a third alongside, as six officers sprang out, waving flashlights and ordering us out of the car.
It was a novel experience to me, verging on adventure. I had not been speeding, was not impaired and figured that they thought we were someone else and shortly would realize their mistake.
My brother, on the other hand, was perturbed. He was in law school, and I could see the wheels turning. The tone of voice of one of the officers was strident.
“Hands on the hood!” he said.
My brother responded by citing a law. When the officer impatiently pushed him against the car, my brother called all of them a name — three words obscenely questioning their intelligence and sexual proclivities.
We were on a dark and lonely road, at the mercy of police with guns who had just been insulted. But the nearest officer rolled his eyes, shook his head and patted us down, none too gently. “Boys will be boys,” seemed to be their default reaction.
It turns out they stopped us because it was very late, and I seemed to be driving “too slow.” No ticket was issued. No arrests were made. We never felt threatened, even after my brother’s incendiary remark, because we were good kids and trusted that the police would realize it.
Did I mention that we were white?
Last month, police stopped Michael Brown for jaywalking. While all the facts are not yet in, Brown also apparently was perturbed. There was a possible exchange of remarks. A scuffle.
Then the officer shot and killed Brown because, he said, Brown hit him in the face and tried to grab his gun. But eyewitnesses counter that the officer shot him after Brown surrendered and raised his hands in the air.
Soon after, black residents of Ferguson, elsewhere in the St. Louis area and from all around the country began protests. Not just because they perceived that a crime had been committed by officer Wilson, but because, as many told reporters, they also have been profiled, abused and victimized by police.
And that the color of their skin disqualified them from the “boys will be boys” presumption and privilege.
Because black males commit violent crime at a higher rate than whites, according to a study by the Justice Department, police target law-abiding citizens if they happen to be black.
This, of course, is as unjust as it would be to profile innocent white males, based on the fact that mass killers such as Adam Lanza (Sandy Hook School) and James Holmes (Colorado movie theater) usually have been male, young and white.
The vast majority of young black males are earnest, ethical and nonviolent human beings. I wish it were not necessary to articulate this reality — like having to point out that birds have wings.
But even though blacks in America have made tremendous political and economic gains since the Civil Rights movement began, the fears and misconceptions of too many whites are little changed from the 1960s. White acquaintances and relatives still react with dubiousness or surprise when I recount positive interactions with black students in my 20 years as a Chicago Public Schools teacher.
And it will likely take many years, perhaps another generation or two, before that type of prejudgment and racial mistrust changes through education, integration and attrition. Until that happens, white police officers will continue, illegally, to treat black men differently from whites.
Meanwhile, a constitutionally viable remedy is needed to stop the injustice. Federal and state grants for law enforcement can be tied to initiatives that diversify local police departments such as Ferguson’s, which has 50 white officers and three black in a town whose population is nearly 70 percent black.
The more equally representative a police force is of its populace, the less likely that justice will be denied on the basis of color.
If the tragic death of Michael Brown leads to such change, there can be a positive outcome from the events in Ferguson after all.
David McGrath, a former resident of Evergreen Park and Oak Forest, is an emeritus professor of English at the College of DuPage. mcgrathd@dupage.edu
How DARE you try to confuse us with facts! What are you trying to do, incite a riot?
An off-duty black fire fighter in Oakland recently informed the media he’d been racially harassed, with the white cops terrorizing his young boys, when he’d done nothing wrong.
Media was just gearing up.
Then cops released the bodycam video from two of the officers, proving beyond a doubt that nothing of the sort had happened.
Never mind.
Makes you wonder how many similar complaints would go away with actual evidence.
Get cams on all cops asap. Catches the bad ones, protects the good ones. Win/win for the people.
I never heard the resolution of that oakland case. Do you have a link?
Proven by the autopsy to be a lie. Yet the good professor continues to perpetuate the lie - in order to make his case.
The statistics from a variety of sources show the black Americans are the least likely ethnic group to obey traffic laws. They get pulled over more because they commit far more traffic offenses than any other group. A recent study from New Jersey proved as much.
I knew a white co-worker many years ago who said when he was young he got himself a muscle car. It might have been a Dodge Charger with mag wheels. He got rid of it because he said he was constantly being stopped by cops, all white, who were looking for any reason to bust him.
Oh look, a white, race-baiting, brazenly lying, historical revisionist Leftist professor teaching other whites to hate themselves in order to promote politically correct voting for socialist Democrats in order to continue their collectivist destruction of American freedoms.
What a surprise.
I doubt he and his white brother punched the officer in the face, tried to take his weapon, or tried to run. See, I’m thinking that’s probably the difference.
How about a followup, Perfesser, about “the color of crime”?
Yeah......that always leaves them speechless
Another self hating white lib heard from. Apparently he thinks that 2 guys walking in the middle of the street obstructing traffic should NOT be interferred with (if they are black). That mouthing off to a cop is the same as assaulting one, and that the accounts of biased eyewitnesses has more credibility than forensic evidence to the contrary.
“I drove through an all black neighborhood the other day,”
Drive through tonight and post your results tomorrow ...
Ding, ding, ding - we have a thread winnah!
Once I ran into a line in the argument that was patently untrue I quit reading. But I do have an observation: Try it today, bud. Get your distinguished honky brother the lawyer, put on suits of a quality to represent your honky professional attainments, get your selves stopped by THREE squad cars....AND MOUTH OFF TO THEM. Go ahead, honky, try it.
There’s competition between media venues to use “voices of authority” such as Professor McGrath to see who is going to out with the best copy convincing fellow travelers that both the Florida and Missouri incidents were “racial incidents”.
In both cases we’re being told the “unarmed” attackers of authority are the “victims”. Because they were subsequently killed over a struggle of a weapon they didn’t own nor were authortized to have.
It seems it’s necessary to do this because we must have racial discord. What are the reasons for creating racial division by the regimes propaganda which has by its silence condoned looting, and created the climate resulting in racial attacks ending in murders of whites,hispanics and asians. ? And winds up portraying a black society that lacks a moral compass and has no basic values of right and wrong
The regime won’t have to explain its corruption, malfeasance,and constitutional abuse...because the blacks will riot.... That’s how socialist/ communists work.The charge as to why this is going on?. It is clear: To prevent investigations into this inept.
Guys like McGrath may claim they’re defenders of the race by repeating the victim mantra manipulating instead of revealing the facts, are sharks on a feeding frenzy.
“I drove through an all black neighborhood the other day, and I saw lots of bars on windows and doors.
They must be there to keep the white policemen out.”
Honestly, after traveling for years, I can estimate the percentage of melanin enhancement in any given neighborhood without seeing a single human being. If the gas station quickie mart has bullet proof glass, the town has a large concentration of melanin.
With the warm feelings towards young black males this “professor” has, I wonder if he lives on the south side of Chicago to be near those young black males?
I drive the interstates around Atlanta every day. I will swear on 10 Bibles that young black women are the fastest drivers on the road closely followed by young white women. Young black males are the most reckless.
Ive just moved up here near Atlanta and have already noticed that the black drivers, especially the younger ones,drive like whites aren’t even there. Cut us off, don’t let us merge, etc
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