Racism Disguises Itself as the Natural Order

By CRISPIN SARTWELL

White racism is elusive: a complicated set of half-formed ideas, pervasive moods, involuntary visceral responses. Yet in each era of American history, racism has taken on an institutional embodiment that both demonstrated its continued vitality and provided a flash point for anti-racist action.

Until the Civil War, the flash point was slavery. And from the late 19th century until the civil rights movement, it was legal segregation.

In our era, the flash point is law enforcement. Racial profiling and police brutality are central to the experience of minorities in this country. Perhaps the scariest and most revealing statistics bearing on race relations in the U.S. concern incarceration rates.

According to a report released recently by the Justice Department, 791,600 of the 1,242,962 people in American state prisons in June 2000 were African American men; 79% of state drug offenders came from racial minorities.

I wonder whether anyone believes that 79% of the people who use or traffic in drugs in this country come from racial minorities. We've created a gulag, or system of concentration camps, into which we lob African American men.

Slavery and segregation appeared to many white people to be the natural order of things rather than evil practices in which they themselves were implicated. And so it remains with white people today: We believe that if one out of eight African American men between the ages of 20 and 34 are in prison, it's because, for whatever reason, African American men are far more likely than anyone else to be criminals.

The truth is, we have no way at all to assess that claim and thus no good reason to believe that it's accurate. The U.S. criminal justice system manufactures its own ersatz confirmation. That most people who are arrested or incarcerated are African American is taken to prove that most criminals are African American.

Indeed, if someone says that they were mugged or that their house was robbed, most white people instantly picture an African American man as the criminal. When an African American man approaches us on the street, we cower. More than being a realistic assessment of risk, this is an index of our involuntary and largely unconscious racism.

Police officers and judges share this attitude and are far more likely to see a criminal on the highway or in the courtroom when they see an African American man. No concerted policy of racial profiling is necessary in order to achieve the continual harassment of African American men: White people have all the racial profiling we need in our own little heads.

It's not necessary to believe that you are a racist in order to believe that African American culture is a drug-addled, criminal culture, just as you didn't have to believe yourself to be a racist in order to support slavery or segregation. All you have to believe is that you're in touch with reality. But then the reality you're in touch with has been manufactured by a pervasively racist social structure.

The function of drug laws in this country is not, by and large, to prevent drug abuse or to reduce costs in public health; it is to provide the occasion for making criminals out of people who are primarily concerned with a momentary alteration of consciousness.

That someone is a "criminal" is not a natural fact; it is a category created by the laws themselves and their enforcement. And too often being a criminal in this country means only that one is an African American man.

That is not to say that there is no hope. As the movements against slavery and segregation showed, even white people can eventually be made to see the truth.

Crispin Sartwell is the author of "Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiography and White Identity" (University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Copyright © 2001 Los Angeles Times