Even Now, There’s Risk in ‘Driving While Black’

The experience of being mistaken for a criminal is almost a rite of passage for African-American men. Security guards shadow us in stores. Troopers pull us over for the crime of “driving while black.” Nighttime pedestrians cower by us on the streets.

And black men who work as undercover cops are occasionally shot to death by white colleagues, as happened to a young officer named Omar Edwards last month in New York City.

We have often been seen as paranoid for attributing these things to bias. But the racial stereotypes that link blackness and crime have recently become a hot topic in social science.

These pervasive and often unconscious biases affect social transactions of all kinds. They drive voting behavior. They make it likely that black defendants will receive longer sentences than whites for comparable crimes. They wreak havoc with the job possibilities of young black men. And they give the lie to the idea that the Unites States is becoming a “postracial” country.

The psychologists Gordon Allport and Leo Postman showed more than half a century ago that preconceptions about race distorted human judgment and sometimes caused people to recall things that had never happened. Their best-known study mimicked the parlor game “telephone.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/opinion/15mon4.html?th&emc=th

ESPECIALLY now rather than even now as cops and other bastions of white power or white men with power flex to make sure "they" realize nothing has changed

i'm getting old now, and 30 years ago i thought change was a-blowing in the wind, but the only one blowing/getting blowed today is the reactionary right, with all their goddam racism and hate and creepy dishonesty. And our fella lefties don't seem to help much either (recalling the execution last year of 'Tooker'(?) by calif guv arnie swartzhog, and the outrage on DU at suggestions Tooker's criminality/anger was maybe based upon his lack of a politically correct colour scheme etc) the big question is: why did god (ok God, dammit) stack the deck for the evil bloodsucking stooge-ocracy? Why? WHY? WHY! i mean, we WON the civil war, and dubia dubia two, right, but hitler's moneyman, prescit bush, who also took part in treasonous coup against FDR in 1933(?) still prospered, see 2k/2k4 elections, and generations of pure terror turned the south into jim crow country, skin crawlingly so- JFK was MURDERED in part because he was 100 percent the black voter's choice! IF fukking god's a racist, then ....hurray for global warming/climate change:) media corruption and a lie-based histry