RACISM DISGUISES ITSELF AS THE NATURAL ORDER

White racism is elusive: a complicated set of half-formed ideas, pervasive
moods, involuntary visceral responses. Yet in each era of American history,
racism has taken on an institutional embodiment that both demonstrated its
continued vitality and provided a flash point for anti-racist action.

Until the Civil War, the flash point was slavery. And from the late 19th
century until the civil rights movement, it was legal segregation.

In our era, the flash point is law enforcement. Racial profiling and police
brutality are central to the experience of minorities in this country.
Perhaps the scariest and most revealing statistics bearing on race
relations in the U.S. concern incarceration rates.

According to a report released recently by the Justice Department, 791,600
of the 1,242,962 people in American state prisons in June 2000 were African
American men; 79% of state drug offenders came from racial minorities.

I wonder whether anyone believes that 79% of the people who use or traffic
in drugs in this country come from racial minorities. We've created a
gulag, or system of concentration camps, into which we lob African American
men.

Slavery and segregation appeared to many white people to be the natural
order of things rather than evil practices in which they themselves were
implicated. And so it remains with white people today: We believe that if
one out of eight African American men between the ages of 20 and 34 are in
prison, it's because, for whatever reason, African American men are far
more likely than anyone else to be criminals.

The truth is, we have no way at all to assess that claim and thus no good
reason to believe that it's accurate. The U.S. criminal justice system
manufactures its own ersatz confirmation. That most people who are arrested
or incarcerated are African American is taken to prove that most criminals
are African American.

Indeed, if someone says that they were mugged or that their house was
robbed, most white people instantly picture an African American man as the
criminal. When an African American man approaches us on the street, we
cower. More than being a realistic assessment of risk, this is an index of
our involuntary and largely unconscious racism.

Police officers and judges share this attitude and are far more likely to
see a criminal on the highway or in the courtroom when they see an African
American man. No concerted policy of racial profiling is necessary in order
to achieve the continual harassment of African American men: White people
have all the racial profiling we need in our own little heads.

It's not necessary to believe that you are a racist in order to believe
that African American culture is a drug-addled, criminal culture, just as
you didn't have to believe yourself to be a racist in order to support
slavery or segregation. All you have to believe is that you're in touch
with reality. But then the reality you're in touch with has been
manufactured by a pervasively racist social structure.

The function of drug laws in this country is not, by and large, to prevent
drug abuse or to reduce costs in public health; it is to provide the
occasion for making criminals out of people who are primarily concerned
with a momentary alteration of consciousness.

That someone is a "criminal" is not a natural fact; it is a category
created by the laws themselves and their enforcement. And too often being a
criminal in this country means only that one is an African American man.

That is not to say that there is no hope. As the movements against slavery
and segregation showed, even white people can eventually be made to see the
truth.

Crispin Sartwell Is the Author of "Act Like You Know: African-american
Autobiography and White Identity" (University of Chicago Press, 1998)