DISCRIMINATION'S LINGERING STING

Minorities Tell Of Profiling, Other Bias

More than half of all black men report that they have been the victims
of racial profiling by police, according to a survey by The Washington
Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University.
Overall, nearly 4 in 10 blacks -- 37 percent -- said they had been
unfairly stopped by police because they were black, including 52
percent of all black men and 25 percent of all black women. Blacks are
not the only Americans who say they have been the targets of racial or
ethnic profiling by law enforcement. One in five Latino and Asian men
reported they had been the victims of racially motivated police stops.
But racial profiling is only one of many examples of intolerance that
minorities say they continue to confront.

More than a third of all blacks interviewed said they had been
rejected for a job or failed to win a promotion because of their race.
One in five Latinos and Asians also said they had been discriminated
against in the workplace because of their race or ethnicity.
Overwhelming majorities of blacks, Latinos and Asians also report they
occasionally experience at least one of the following expressions of
prejudice: poor service in stores or restaurants, disparaging
comments, and encounters with people who clearly are frightened or
suspicious of them because of their race or ethnicity. "These are
precisely the kinds of incidents that contribute to what is coming to
be called black middle-class rage -- the steady occurrence of slights
and put-downs you know in your gut are tied to race but that rarely
take the form of blatant racism," said Lawrence Bobo, a professor of
Afro-American studies and sociology at Harvard University. "No one
uses the N-word. There is not a flat denial of service.

It is insidious, recurrent, lesser treatment." A much smaller
proportion of whites also say they have been victims of
discrimination: One out of every three reported that they sometimes
face racial slurs, bad service or disrespectful behavior. Claims and
counterclaims about the prevalence of racial profiling have been made
for years.

But there have been few reliable attempts to estimate the degree to
which blacks, Latinos and Asians believe they have been victims of the
practice.

And no national data exist that firmly document the pervasiveness of
the practice, making it impossible to compare perceptions with actual
incidence. For this survey, the latest in a series of polls on public
policy issues conducted by The Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family
Foundation and Harvard University researchers, 1,709 randomly selected
adults were interviewed by telephone from March 8 through April 22.
The sample included 315 Hispanics, 323 blacks and 254 Asians. The
margin of sampling error for the overall results is plus or minus 3
percentage points.

It is plus or minus 6 points for blacks, 7 points for Latinos and 9
points for Asians. Widely publicized incidents around the country have
drawn attention to the targeting of minorities by police, a practice
some police officials have tried to justify by arguing that minorities
are more likely to commit crimes.

President Bush told Congress in February that "it is wrong, and we
must end it." Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) and Rep. John Conyers Jr.
(D-Mich.) recently introduced companion bills in the Senate and the
House that would withhold funding from agencies that engage in racial
profiling. And suddenly, from New Jersey to California, victims of
unwarranted police stops and harassment are telling their stories and,
for the first time, are being heard. Kinte Cutino, 24, a house painter
in New Haven, Conn., said he was riding his bike when a police officer
pulled him over. "He asked where I was headed, and I told him. He
searched me, and didn't find anything and then he let me go." Cutino
shrugged off the encounter. "They will stop you in certain areas, and
if you're black, most likely you will get stopped," he said. "You
can't do anything about it. That's just the way it is." Tommy Thorne
would seem to be an unlikely target of police attention.

Thorne, 62, is a retired Army lieutenant colonel who recently retired
as director of an engineering company in Portland, Ore. But last year,
he and his wife were driving through the Mojave Desert on a vacation
trip to Las Vegas. When he pulled his Cadillac Eldorado out of a gas
station, "a police car was on my bumper; he was real close.

When I turned, he turned; when I changed lanes, he changed
lanes.

He kept following me. "Finally I pulled over and waited five
minutes.

And he stopped.

When I pulled off, he followed me again and then came barreling up
alongside me and started pulling ahead of me, and backing off, and
pulling ahead." Thorne said the officer's intimidating behavior
continued for several more miles, and then the officer backed off. "He
never pulled me over or issued a summons.

It just irritated me. And there was nothing I could do about it. I
think he saw a black guy in the desert and thought I was a drug dealer.

Who knows?

But I guess if you're black and male, at some point it's going to
happen to you." Steve Jaime, a guest services manager at a suburban
Chicago hotel, recalled the night that he and some friends were coming
home from the Taste of Chicago food festival when the police stopped
their car in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. Without
explanation, the officers ordered them out of their car. "That's when
the police officer put a gun to my head while he was checking me out,"
said Jaime, who is Mexican American. Then the officers abruptly told
Jaime and his friends to go. "They were pissed off about something and
they took it out on us, because we were Hispanic." The survey found
that other forms of racial intolerance are commonplace. More than 8 in
10 blacks and two-thirds of all Latinos and Asians say they
occasionally experience at least one of these four intolerant acts:
poor service, racial slurs, fearful or defensive behavior, and lack of
respect.

Two-thirds of all blacks and nearly half of all Latinos and Asians say
they experience two or more of these forms of intolerance from time to
time. Sometimes these ugly moments provoke anger, as when a waiter in
an expensive steakhouse asked Earl Arredondo, a 30-year-old Latino
from Harlingen, Tex., if he could afford the $32 rib-eye steak he had
just ordered and later dismissively asked him if he knew "what
calamari is." And sometimes they provoke fear, as when a carload of
drunken whites pulled to a stop alongside Martha Matsuoka, an Asian
American who lives in Los Angeles. Then they threw beer bottles at her
and demanded that she "go home" and "buy American." "I understand
these kinds of things rationally, but personally I was stunned," said
Matsuoka, 39, a graduate student at the University of California at
Los Angeles. "It was so real. On a personal level, my mother was upset.

She said she had hoped that I would never have to experience anything
like that." The prejudice reflected in these incidents is clear.

In other instances, perceptions may not reflect reality: An honest
error or an unintended slight may be misconstrued as an act of racial
intolerance. But Harvard's Bobo cautions that it would be dangerous to
dismiss the bulk of these claims as misperceptions or
misunderstandings. "These feelings of victimization are not arrived at
easily, or because they are pleasant feelings to hold," he said. "We
have to regard them as indicators of a very real social phenomenon.
For example, blacks complained for years that they were being targeted
by police and were ignored.

Only finally, when a cannon-load of data was shot across the bow, did
people begin to say, 'Oh, yeah, I guess it's going on.' " Blacks
confront far more discrimination than either Latinos or Asians, the
survey found.

And black men report facing prejudice more often than black
women.

Nearly half -- 46 percent -- of all blacks said they had experienced
discrimination in the past 10 years, including 55 percent of black men
and 40 percent of black women. Two years ago, Ali Barr, a television
engineer in Atlanta, said he was in Baltimore on business and went to
a jazz bar and restaurant with friends to get something to eat. "It
was a white bar, but it featured a black jazz band," Barr said. "But
from the moment we walked in, we could feel the hostility.

All the patrons were white.

The waitress comes over and tells us we couldn't sit in the section we
were in. She said it was closed until later in the evening. "But there
were only 10 people in the bar, so we moved to the other section and
we asked for coffee.

She came back and slammed the coffee down and came back with the
manager.

The manager said we were not welcome here and that our money wouldn't
be accepted. "The manager pointed to a sign saying that management
reserved the right to serve who they wanted.

We were asked to leave.

All we wanted was something to eat. We were totally discriminated
against.

That will always be my memory of downtown Baltimore." Four in 10
Latinos and Asians reported that they, too, had been discriminated
against in the past 10 years. Laticia Villegas, 27, owns a children's
clothing store in Fort Worth. She recently tried to write a check at a
supermarket. The white clerk refused to let her borrow or even touch
her pen. Villegas fished around in her purse and wrote the check. "It
is culture shock," Villegas said. "I've never been discriminated
against until I moved to Dallas [from San Antonio]. I was offended and
surprised; I didn't expect it. I'm not used to being treated this way.
I thought we got past this, but we haven't, and I know my [1-year-old]
daughter will have to grow up experiencing these kinds of things
because she does not have blond hair and blue eyes." About 1 in 5
whites -- 18 percent -- also report being the victims of
discrimination in the past 10 years.

Ten percent said they had been denied a promotion because of their
race or ethnicity, 14 percent said they had received poor service
because of their race, and an equal proportion reported having been
called names or insulted. Rose Evans, 26, of Aurora, Colo., said she
has frequently been the target of racially prejudiced comments from
Latinos and blacks. Evans grew up West Denver, a predominantly Mexican
American and Asian neighborhood where "I was picked on quite a bit.
You know, 'stupid white girl' and worse things in Spanish. But my
stepdad is Mexican American, and I learned to let it roll off of me."
Earlier this year, her 9-year-old daughter confronted prejudice. "A
group of little black girls at school were picking on her a lot,
calling her 'honky' and stuff.

She would come home from school crying.

I told her to ignore them, they were just ignorant people." But the
bullying continued, and Evans requested a meeting with school
officials and the mother of the girl who had been particularly vicious
to her daughter. "The mother became very hostile and started calling
me 'white trash' and 'honky' and other stuff," Evans said. "I told her
children aren't born ignorant, they are taught it, and I saw where her
daughter got it from." Assistant director of polling Claudia Deane
contributed to this report.