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<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Sunday, October 09, 2005 1:20 PM</DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> Conflation of Race and Crime Hits Home</DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=arial,helvetica><FONT lang=0 face=Arial size=2 PTSIZE="10"
FAMILY="SANSSERIF">Conflation Of Race And Crime Hits Home <BR><BR>October 8
2005<BR><BR>My youngest son was arrested last year.<BR><BR>Police came to my
house looking for an armed robbery suspect,<BR>5-feet-8-inches with long hair.
They took my son, 6-foot-3 with short<BR>braids. They made my daughter, 14,
fresh from the shower and dressed for<BR>bed, lie facedown in wet grass and
handcuffed her. They took my grandson, 8,<BR>from the bed where he slept and
made him sit on the sidewalk beside her.<BR><BR>My son, should it need saying,
hadn't done a damn thing. In fact, I was<BR>talking to him long distance - I was
in New Orleans - at the time of the<BR>alleged crime. Still, he spent almost two
weeks in jail. The prosecutor<BR>asked for a high bail, citing the danger my son
supposedly posed.<BR><BR>A few weeks later, the prosecutor declined to press
charges, finally<BR>admitting there was no evidence. The alleged perpetrator of
the alleged<BR>crime, a young man who was staying with us, did go on trial.
There was no<BR>robbery, he said. The alleged victim had picked a fight with
him, lost, and<BR>concocted a tale. A surveillance video backed him up. The jury
returned an<BR>acquittal in a matter of hours.<BR><BR>But the damage was done.
The police took a picture of my son the night he<BR>was arrested. He is on his
knees, hands cuffed behind him, eyes fathomless<BR>and dead. I cannot see that
picture without feeling a part of me die.<BR><BR>So I take personally what
William Bennett said. For those who missed it,<BR>Bennett, former education
secretary and self-appointed arbiter of all things<BR>moral, said last week on
his radio program that if you wanted to reduce<BR>crime, "you could ... abort
every black baby in this country, and your crime<BR>rate would go down. That
would be an impossible, ridiculous and morally<BR>reprehensible thing to do, but
your crime rate would go down."<BR><BR>The comment has been widely denounced.
Bennett says critics are quoting him<BR>out of context, leaving out his
denunciation of the idea and the fact that<BR>he was criticizing a thesis that
holds that making abortion readily<BR>available to low-income women in the '70s
led the U.S. crime rate to drop in<BR>the '90s.<BR><BR>Fine. I get all that. But
see, my anger doesn't stem from any mistaken<BR>belief that Bennett wants to
practice eugenics on black mothers. No, what<BR>bothers me is his easy, almost
causal conflation of race and crime. Not<BR>class and crime, not culture and
crime, but race and crime. As if black,<BR>solely and of itself, equals
felony.<BR><BR>It's a conflation that comes too readily to too many. The results
of which<BR>can be read in studies like the one the Justice Department
co-sponsored in<BR>2000 that found that black offenders receive substantially
harsher treatment<BR>at every step along the way than white ones with similar
records.<BR><BR>They can also be read in that picture of my son, eyes lifeless
and dull with<BR>this realization of How Things Are.<BR><BR>I once asked a black
cop who was uninvolved in the case how his colleagues<BR>could have arrested a
6-foot-3 man while searching for a 5-foot-8 suspect.<BR>They were looking for a
black man, he said. Any black man would do.<BR><BR>So how do I explain that to
my son? Should I tell him to content himself<BR>with the fact that to some
people, all black men look alike, all look like<BR>criminals?<BR><BR>Actually I
don't have to explain it at all. A few months back, my son was<BR>stopped by
police and cited for driving with an obstructed windshield. The<BR>"obstruction"
was one of those air fresheners shaped like a Christmas tree.<BR><BR>So my son
gets it now. Treatment he once found surprising he now recognizes<BR>as the
price he pays for being. He understands what the world expects
of<BR>him.<BR><BR>I've watched that awful knowledge take root in three sons now.
In a few<BR>years, I will watch it take root in my grandson, who is in fifth
grade.<BR><BR>The conflation of black and crime may be easy for William Bennett,
but it<BR>never gets any easier for me.<BR><BR>Leonard Pitts Jr. is a syndicated
columnist in
Washington<BR><BR><BR><BR></DIV></DIV><BR><BR></FONT></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>