This post gets its title from a TV show a few years ago produced by Ice Cube. In the show, some very talented makeup people allow a white family and a black family to change places and live as each other for a few weeks. To me, the most interesting part of the show was when the black man and the white-man-in-black-makeup both experienced the same things: walking down the street and shopping in a store. In one case, a pedestrian walking towards them moves to the edge of the sidewalk to let them pass. The black man thought the pedestrian got out of their way because of race, and the white man thought the pedestrian got out of their way just because she was being a nice person and ceding the path to oncoming traffic. The black man thought they were being stereotyped by the pedestrian as violent, and he couldn’t believe that the white man couldn’t see this. The white man thought the black man was seeing things that simply weren’t there and told him that he was looking for problems that didn’t exist.

You can find some of this here (the whole clip is good, but this part starts at the 4:25 mark and the discussion gets really good at 6:00 in).

I thought of that show when I was watching ABC World News Tonight and they showed an interview with Attorney General Eric Holder. In the piece, the reporter first brought up the Prof. Gates controversy and said that while Holder would not take sides in the situation, he ”acknowledged that he too has been racially profiled.”

For the record, the woman who called 911 when she saw Skip Gates’ front door being broken into never mentioned that the person entering the home was black. She said she didn’t know the race of one of the men and the other one might have been Hispanic but she wasn’t sure. She even said that maybe they lived there and she wasn’t sure what was going on, but it looked weird and maybe the cops should check it out. Mind you, this was in the daytime in a neighborhood that had had a dozen or so daytime break-ins in the previous week, so neighbors were on the lookout for anything suspicious. In my opinion, for anybody to say that a police officer coming to the home and checking things out and asking for identification is racial profiling is absurd. What happened after that is still up for debate.

More to the point of this post, here’s what Holder said about his experience being “racially profiled”:

“I was a young college student driving from New York to Washington, stopped on a highway and told to open the trunk of my car. The police officer told me he wanted to search me for weapons. And I remember, as I got back in my car and continued on my journey, um, how humiliated I felt, um, how angry it got.”

It reminded me of an experience of mine. When I was in grad school in St. Louis, I’d come home at least once a year to visit my mom and stepdad in Phoenix and then on to visit my dad and brother in L.A. The drive from STL to PHX is a good 1,500 miles, and  Albuquerque is the halfway marker on a two-day drive. On one of my trips, I had gone from Phoenix to Albuquerque on day one and woke up early the next day to set out for St. Louis. The sun was rising in the east as I took off driving in that direction and it was not easy to see the road. I was tired and didn’t sleep well, as I had stayed in a Motel 6 (because I was a cheap grad student and had a dog, which every Motel 6 will take for no additional fee). So I was groggy when I set out, and the horrible Motel 6 coffee wasn’t helping any. About a half hour into the trip, I was pulled over by a state trooper. I was doing maybe 70 and the speed limit was 65. I was a bit surprised he pulled me over because I wasn’t going really that fast.

The cop was nice to me, even though Jake was barking at him (of course). He asked me to get out of the car. He asked if I had any marijuana in the car. I said no. He asked what was in the trunk. I said, “Clothes and dog food.” He asked if he could search the trunk. I said, “Absolutely.” While his partner searched the trunk, he talked to me about where I was headed and why. I told him I was going back to grad school and going to be an economics professor some day. He wished me luck in my efforts. After a few minutes, his partner came back and said the trunk was clean. He said I was free to go and told me to make sure not to drive too fast.

When I got back in the car, I thought for a minute or two and ultimately came to a conclusion as to why he pulled me over and searched my car for marijuana: it was my U.C. Berkeley license plate frame. He figured I went to Berkeley, so I must have weed in the car. He was fishing for something, and the fact that I was 5 miles over the speed limit (never enough to get you a ticket, but enough to let them cops pull you over) was his opening. I didn’t feel humiliated. I didn’t get angry. Sure, I was a little annoyed at having been pulled over, but mostly I was relieved that I didn’t get a ticket for speeding.

If I were a black man, I probably would have attributed being stopped and having my car searched for marijuana to my race, just as Eric Holder did in a similar situation, and been upset about it. But I’m not black and neither were the cops, so I attributed it to my U.C. Berkeley license plate. But maybe he just thought I was swerving a bit so he thought he’d check things out to make sure I was okay to drive. And when he pulled me over, maybe he saw that my eyes were a little red because I didn’t sleep well the night before. Who knows, other than the cop that stopped me? I don’t KNOW that it was the license plate frame, but that’s my best guess.

Our experiences color the way we perceive everything that happens to us. Race is still such a dominant factor in society that it’s impossible for people to NOT attribute some things to race. As part of the racial sensitivity program that faculty at SCSU are required to attend when hired, I was told by the people running the workshop that my being white meant that I was a racist –whether I was aware of it or not. I was told then (and reminded by one faculty member in an e-mail sent out today to faculty and staff who subscribe to our announce listserv) that even if you try to be colorblind and treat people equally regardless of race, that task is impossible. It’s apparently naive to think you can treat everybody equally. On the contrary, the person sending that e-mail and the workshop leaders said that the only way to achieve a post-racial society is to actively take race into account. It reminds me of Bush saying that he had to abandon capitalist principles in order to save capitalism — that explanation didn’t make much sense to me, and neither does this.

I wonder how many incidents of “racial profiling” or discrimination are simply a  matter of perception. If Eric Holder has been white and had been stopped by a black polic officer, would he have attributed it to his race? Would Eric Holder have been stopped at all if he were white?

We are told in a speech given by Eric Holder himself that, when it comes to race, America is a nation of cowards. He says that we are afraid to talk about race — and I would argue that it is with good reason. If you are white and talk about race in a way that offends anybody, you will quickly be labeled a racist by some. For example, when some Republican governors said they did not want to take some parts of the stimulus money, Representative James Clyburn (D-SC) said it insulted African-Americans. If you are black and talk about race, some white people will consider you as “injecting” race into a situation that had nothing to do with race. Some would say that’s exactly what Skip Gates has done here. But I hope my example shows that Gates’ life experiences affect the way he perceived that entire situation, so he attributes at least part of what happened to his being black. Did his being handcuffed have anything to do with his race? Only Sgt. Crowley knows. But I think the presumption of innocence, as it held for Skip Gates, should hold for Crowley as well.

I think it says a lot for our society when the worst insult you can hurl at someone is to call them a racist. It shows that we are a society that is conscious of race, that is trying to treat people equally, and that shuns those that would treat people of one race as less than people of another.  Sadly, this is abused by some, who label any discussion of race as “racism,” thereby stifling potentially worthwhile discussion about racial issues. I don’t know if we’ll ever get away from some of the racial issues we have, since our race influences the way we see things. I do know that we have come a long way in the last forty years, and I hope that forty years from now, a police stop will simply be a police stop — and race won’t matter for either the cop or the suspect.