[livius drusus]

Originally Posted by beyelzu

blacks commit a disproportionate amount of crime, and I am perfectly willing to accept that it is almost certianly because of economic reasons.

You don't actually know that, though. All you know is that black people are arrested and convicted for a disproportionate amount of crime. Given the classist and racist mechanics of the drug war - the emphasis on street busts, the constant patrolling of "at risk" neighborhoods while completely ignoring toney neighborhoods despite the large number of rich white people doing expensive drugs - there's no way of knowing if the disproportion reflects a genuine difference in criminal behavior.

and while I probably cant speak for others, I rarely feal uncomfortable in any environment. I think that certain cultural identifiers are probably what people key off of more than simply skin color. The hiphop look if you will. I just dont think that people are going to fear a middle age black man in a suit.

Do you have any evidence of that? Off the top of my head I would say statistics like those uncovered in the 1996 New Jersey racial profiling case that black drivers were 5 times more likely to be pulled over by state troppers than white people contradict the baggy jeans principle. You can't tell how someone is dressed when they're driving by you, but you can tell what color their skin is.

Incidentally, there is also no study at all to indicate that minority drivers commit a disproportionate number of traffic violations, and yet the Interim Report of the State Police Review Team Regarding Allegations of Racial Profiling found that 77.2% of consent searches involved black or Latino motorists. Consent searches, mind you, which means the troopers asked permission before searching and which not surprisingly means more often than not they don't find shit.

Here's a document with a collection of links on state profiling studies. I don't think you'll find that rap or couture have a thing to with it.

I think the mixture of gangsta rap with its glorification of crime and violence, the fact that blacks are more likely to commit crime and the fact that many black youth's embrace the thug look is as much responsible for the stereotyping as the evil white man.

You disappoint me, beyelzu. I never created any such "evil white man" chimera and I don't appreciate having my point (or Tim Wise's point) caricatured. If you have nothing to say about the article, fine, but your post doesn't even begin to rebut its arguments which are no more grounded in the instrinsic depravity of white people than they are that of black people.