Within the African American community I would like to suggest that racial profiling by the local police authorities amounts to our domestic terrorism. When one of our and the world’s prominent and respected authorities was subjected to “Racial Profiling” as have been so many other “brothers” it became a public scandal, as it should have been. I, from love, trying to engender more or a better understanding of another perspective, my black one, wrote to the Chief of Police for Cambridge, Mass.

I Dared to Be Heard

POLICE RACIAL PROFILING

July 24, 2009

 Chief of Police

Cambridge, Mass. Police Dept

Cambridge, Mass.

Dear Chief,

             I am a 62 year old African American woman who would like to possibly assist you in better understanding the conflict you are currently responding to. I suggest that both your officer and Dr. Gates are correct in their assessment of the incident as seen through two totally different sets of eyes based on two totally different set of experiences. I suggest to you that every African American family living in the United States of America is personally familiar with the racial profiling of some family member. So we are hyper sensitive to it, by necessity. The fact that you teach classes on racial profiling suggests your awareness of its existence. With the recent racial incident in Pennsylvania that involved our kids most Black Americans are angry right now and have been re-sensitized to racism. Your officers need to realize that whenever there is a racial incident anywhere in this country we all get our defenses up, by necessity.

            Your officer who encountered Dr. Gates who was routinely doing his job encountered a weary Black man returning from a 20 hour plane trip to China where he was representing this country and his institution, Harvard University. When he got home, exhausted, he couldn’t find his keys. ******* it!  He is now angry as well as tired. He gets in and hears the doorbell ring. He answers and is confronted by a police officer who wants him to identify himself, tired and angry, as the homeowner. What else can go wrong? He gets belligerent but produces the ID. The officer still does not leave but challenges him further. Why? To the officer he is following procedure because the man is belligerent and the burglar might still be in the house. To Dr. Gates the now “white” police officer is challenging his credibility, his manhood, and his race, and does so incredulously in his own home that he has earned and is paying for (by pulling himself up by his bootstraps) with his years of study and hard work as a professor at Harvard University. He feels that he is being threatened as a Black man in his own home. What is safe and what is sacred in America for a Black man? He is arrested. Why, because to him he challenged “white” authority, “didn’t know his place.” The officer feels he is justified because Dr. Gates challenged, belligerently, “authority.” Dr. Gates may have well been even more sensitive than normal because he may have been deciding how he would respond, as a world renowned expert in racial relations, to the Philadelphia Pool incident and now here in his own home, in his mind, he has faced the same thing.

We are all sensitive and on high alert! That is something you all need to know in your responses. We once again expect to be racial zed and have to be prepared. Racial incidents are not local events for us it is a threat to all of us, anywhere and everywhere. I am not certain that that is something a white police officer can teach in a racial profiling class because he has never had to be “on Guard” at all times. We are always on high alert like a soldier in a war zone, looking over his shoulder and expecting the worse. Our history of abuse is still with us and there are too many incidents of its continuance for us to let our guard down. The racial attacks on President Obama remind us if we slip and forget. Perhaps Dr. Gates could co- teach such a class.

I am just trying to offer another set of eyes to a picture that white America cannot possibly be familiar with or naturally sensitive to. My own son at 17 was stopped two blocks from our home in Los Angeles, California, by a police officer. Our home was in the neighborhood where the ex-mayor Tom Bradley lived. The officer approached the car and apologized for stopping him. He explained that a car like ours was reported stolen but once he saw our plates he realized it wasn’t the car. Before he left the car another police car drove up to see what the problem was. The officer said there was none. The other, uninvolved, police officer told my son to get out of the car so they could search it. They made him sit on the curb handcuffed as they did so. They released him with no ticket as he had committed no crime. They also released him embarrassed, shamed, frightened, hating white police officers, and militant. That left me pissed, distrustful and resentful.  I no longer contribute to any charitable police fund. Was that racial profiling?

Hoping to educate

 Please leave comments as to what else we can do to prevent this from happening again.

Solutions?

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