is another column in the aftermath of the non-indictment by the St. Louis County Grand Jury in the shooting death of Michael Brown. He begins
One thing the grand jury decision in Ferguson, Mo., has sent back to the surface is just how difficult it is to have cross-racial discussions about crime and punishment in this country. That is largely because, perceptually and experientially, we live in vastly different worlds, worlds in which phrases like “bad choices,” “personal responsibility” and “tailspin of culture” must battle for primacy with “structural inequity,” “systemic bias” and “culture of oppression.”
It is worth reading
the entire column, which is chock full of statistics that are relevant - Blow often digs up data that helps us understand a particular issue, and this column is no exception.
For example:
A September report by the Sentencing Project found that “white Americans overestimate the proportion of crime committed by people of color, and associate people of color with criminality.” For some crimes, the overestimation was “by 20-30 percent.”
As Blow notes of this data:
If we continue to think that crime is up, data be damned, and we associate people of color with that crime, of course our concepts of guilt, innocence, veracity and compassion in encounters between police and people of color will be affected.
Please keep reading.
I am not going to go through the entire column, mainly because you should read it, not just for the data, but also what Blow does after offering data, as I have demonstrated just above the fold.
You will learn that census tracts with 40% or more people in poverty climbed by 3/4 in the period 2008-2012. That of course is the period of the Great Recession and its aftermath, which affected poor people, particularly poor people of color, much more so that the ordinary White families.
Police forces tends to be much more disproportionally white that the communities that police, in part because people of color are reluctant to join those forces,
in part, because of a cycle of mistrust and abuse of power.
Why? Well consider this:
The Times/CBS poll found that 45 percent of African-Americans, compared with just 7 percent of whites, believed they had experienced a specific instance of discrimination by the police because of their race. Thirty-one percent of whites even acknowledge that police in most neighborhoods are more likely to use deadly force against a black person.
Regulars here are well aware of the sentencing disparities between powdered cocaine (favored by wealthier whites) and "crack" cocaine (chosen more by poor people of color) and of the characterization of the latter as being drug crazed - words that should remind us of the mischaracterization of Michael Brown, a large young man of color, by Darren Wilson, a large white police officer. Why is it heavy users of white cocaine are not characterized as drug crazed?
Blow reminds us that the rate of arrests of young blacks for drug offenses is much higher than that of young whites, even though drug usage is similar between the races.
This, too contributes to the sense of mistrust that is also a part of the conflict between predominantly White police forces and communities heavily populated by Blacks.
"Crime and Punishment" - the title of a powerful Russian novel of the 19th Century.
But some crimes are more heavily punished than others.
Let's ignore for this discussion the lack of punishment for the financial crimes that contributed to a 3/4 increase in census tracts with over 40% population in poverty.
Let's only talk about arrests and punishments for similar crimes, such as drugs.
Then read Blow's final paragraph:
This conversation is hard because we are yelling across a canyon of disparity. Maybe the first thing to do is to work on filling the canyon, leveling the field — that will help bridge the gap.
The question is, should that mean we arrest more whites to level the playing field? Or perhaps we should recognize that most young drug offenders, regardless of skin color, represent no further threat to society at large and treat them all equally, through programs of diversion and treatment, without permanently labeling them as criminal, denying them access to federal programs including funding for education, denying them other civil rights such as voting or licenses for a variety of occupations.
Or must we admit that the lack of truth of the words "All men are created equal" at the time they were penned by Jefferson are just as true for people of color today as they were in 1776, despite the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments?
Must we honestly recognize that we still do NOT have equal protection of the law, certainly not against the actions of law enforcement in far too many of our states.
Yet again Charles Blow challenges our thinking.
Read the entire column.
Pass it on.