BLACK PARENTS WARN KIDS OF DANGERS OF RACIAL PROFILING

The instructions Gwen Onumah-Onikoro gave to her youngest son, Kofi
Onumah, were quite clear:

If the police stop you, do exactly what they tell you. Answer their
questions politely with 'yes, sir,' or 'no, sir.' Don't get loud.
Don't give them any attitude. Don't run away even if you're scared. If
they tell you to get on the ground, do it. No questions asked.

When did she first tell him this?

"Oh, when he started riding his bike through the neighborhood," she
said.

Kofi, now 20, nodded. "Yeah, I guess I was about 7," he
said.

Though most law enforcement agencies deny they engage in racial
profiling, many blacks have long believed that they do. Consequently,
many black parents warn their children -- particularly boys and young
men -- about the potential danger in being stopped by the police when
they're driving, bicycling or just standing around on street corners.

Giving black children rules of behavior for dealing with law
enforcement is good parenting, several parents and mental health
specialists say. They liken it to such delicate, yet necessary,
conversations as talks about drug use or unprotected sex.

Others say the warnings can make children mistrustful of authority,
damage their self-esteem or encourage them to see race as an issue
when it isn't.

Several young people interviewed said that they are not mistrustful of
every police officer. Yet their own experiences have taught them that
being black means there's a good chance they'll be stopped by the
police, even if they haven't broken the law. They say that it's how
they handle the situation that will determine whether they will be let
go with a warning, hauled off to jail or just get away alive.

"There's a higher level of respect you have to give authority figures
so you can come out of the situation unscathed," said Kofi Onumah, who
has been stopped by Minneapolis police several times, starting when he
was in the ninth grade.

"You never know how a cop's day was or if he has it out for any ethnic
minority or if he's just trying to prove something. It depends on how
you deal with it on if you're gonna see another day."

Each generation

Though tales of "driving while black" have received media attention in
the past year, racial profiling has its roots in slave days when
blacks, even free blacks, had to carry papers proving their identity
or risk being apprehended by slave catchers.

"There is allusion to this in slave narratives, both oral and written,
from the 19th century," said John Wright, associate professor of
Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Minnesota and
former scholar-in-residence at the Schomberg Center for Research in
Black Culture in New York. "All you had to do was be black and you
could be stopped."

The practice of teaching children careful behavior has been passed
from generation to generation. Onumah-Onikoro, who is in her 40s, said
she remembers her mother warning her four brothers years ago.

"I remember my mother saying, 'You think I tell you these things and
won't let you go certain places because I'm trying to be strict, but
I'm trying to keep you alive.'"

So when Onumah-Onikoro had sons, she told them the same thing. So did
Cheryl Morgan-Spencer, a south Minneapolis mother of two sons, now in
their early 20s.

"If you have any sense, you start teaching your kids at an early age
how to deal with the cops," Morgan-Spencer said. "See, for a while our
boys, when they are around 5 and 6 years old, are cute and funny in
other people's eyes. But when they move on to 10 or 12 years old, they
stop being cute and start being a little hoodlum or thug in the eyes
of the cops."

In his book "Driving While Black: Highways, Shopping Malls, Taxicabs,
Sidewalks -- What to Do if You Are a Victim of Racial Profiling,"
author Kenneth Meeks lists steps a black person should take when
stopped. The list was compiled by a New York City police officer:

Turn on your interior dome light.

Put your hands on the steering wheel.

Take note of the time and date.

Always let them see your hands.

Listen to the officer.

Don't reach for an item without first telling the officer what you are
reaching for.

When to have the talk

Morgan-Spencer and Onumah-Onikoro gave their children similar
information early on. But the elementary school years are too soon for
this warning, said Dr. Alvin Poussaint, professor of psychiatry at
Harvard University, staff member of the Judge Baker Children's Center
in Boston and author of several books, including "Raising Black Children."

"You're telling a kid at an early age not to trust the system, and
that might bias them excessively toward police officers," he said.
"And it may inhibit them and make them anxious. You also don't want to
send the message that all the problems they have are racial."

Poussaint advises parents to give their children codes of conduct to
follow beginning at about age 13. By the time a child is old enough to
drive, he said, he or she should know driving-while-black "etiquette"
by rote.

"You wish you didn't have to say it, but you do," Poussaint said. "If
you don't say it, you're not doing your job as a parent."

Onumah-Onikoro did not issue the same warnings to her daughter because
she believes black women are not viewed as the same threat as black
males.

After a certain time of night, she will not let her sons run errands
for her. She figures police are less likely to stop an older black
woman behind the wheel of a shiny late-model Volvo than a young black
man.

Not all black parents give such explicit admonishments about dealing
with police to their children. If a child is not doing anything wrong,
then he or she should not have anything to fear, some parents reason.

"I don't think it's about how to deal with the cops so much as it's
about how to be a good citizen," said Dorisene Anderson, a south
Minneapolis parent, whose sons are 18 and 23.

Her sons have been stopped by the police and have always been let go
without incident; she attributes that largely to the way she reared
them. Although she has told her sons to be respectful if they are
stopped by the police, she said, she hasn't given them the message
that all police encounters could be dangerous because she doesn't want
her sons to get chips on their shoulders or develop a negative
attitude about law enforcement.

"They [the police] will see the type of person you are," Anderson
said. "It's all in the way you handle it."

Kids say they've learned ways to deal with such encounters, right down
to editing their appearance. For example, Onumah knows he will be
judged by the braids in his hair, the gold chain around his neck, the
oversized shorts and the of-the-minute athletic shoes. He said he
knows what people think when they see him. Drug dealer. They can't
tell by looking that he is making good grades as a pharmacy major at
Xavier University in New Orleans and that he is a golf instructor at
several greens.

Until recently, Larry Fitzgerald Jr., 17, wore a tight black scarf
over his dreadlocks. Fitzgerald is a star wide receiver at the Academy
of Holy Angels in Richfield and is being heavily recruited by colleges
across the country.

"If a police officer sees you with a rag on your head, the first thing
he's gonna think is 'gang banger, troublemaker,'" said Fitzgerald. "I
don't wear a rag anymore because I don't want to cause any unnecessary
attention to myself."

When Fitzgerald began to drive, his aunt gave him this advice: Don't
have too many of your friends in the car. If you do, and the police
stop you, then passengers on the left and right should put their hands
against their windows. The person in the middle should put his hands
on the car ceiling. The driver should keep his hands on the steering
wheel.

Does Fitzgerald think his white classmates have been warned this
way?

"Nah, they just complain about their curfew not being as late as their
other buddies," he said. "They don't worry about this stuff."

Earlier this summer, Onumah-Onikoro bought her youngest son a car -- a
Toyota Corolla, which he promptly fitted with tinted windows and a new
stereo. When he slides his slender 6-foot, 3-inch frame behind the
wheel and pulls out of the driveway, his mother begins to worry. If
the music is too loud, if he doesn't signal before a turn, if he
doesn't stop behind the pedestrian crossing line. ...

"You start worrying when they're born," she said. "Then they get a
little older and you start wondering will there ever be a day when you
can stop. And then you realize that day will never come."