SYSTEMIC RACISM TRUMPS VIOLENCE

A 13-year-old girl was jumped in Cleveland on May Day. Charges have
now been filed against her alleged assailants -- all 18 of them.

According to authorities quoted in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the
girl's heritage was the catalyst for the beating. She's white and
apparently, some kids in Cleveland have a bizarre tradition that May 1
is Beat Up A White Kid Day.

I'm not making this up. The unnamed girl is recuperating, and her
accused attackers -- 12 girls, six boys, all black or Latino between
the ages of 9 and 15 -- are facing charges of felonious assault,
aggravated riot and ethnic intimidation.

I hope no one uses racial oppression to defend the 13-year-old's
alleged attackers. It would be an affront to decency, logic and, not
coincidentally, black and Latino people if anyone sought to justify
this event on the basis of some past racial transgression, real or
imagined.

What happened in Cleveland was an act of hatred. It offers visceral
proof that this contagion is not limited to white folks.

My purpose in bringing it up, though, is not to belabor that obvious
point. Rather, it's to make another point. But first we must turn to
the Texas town of Tulia. There, to great media attention, 13 convicted
drug dealers were released this month after grave questions had been
raised about the investigation that landed them in prison.

In 1999, 46 people -- published reports say 39 of them are black,
seven white but with ties to the black community -- were arrested
after a one-man sting operation conducted by an itinerant lawman named
Thomas Coleman. For his work, he was named Texas' narcotics officer of
the year.

But Coleman was more Barney Fife than Joe Friday.

He kept no notes of his alleged drug buys, unless you count those he
says he scribbled on his legs. He had no videotape, no fingerprint
evidence, no witnesses, no corroboration to indicate that he bought
cocaine from whom he said he had. And no drugs were ever found.

Yet the jurors, almost all of them white, sent 38 people -- 36 of them
black -- to prison for terms ranging up to 90 years.

It turns out, though, that Coleman had a shady past. Arrested in 1998
on charges of theft. Reportedly stole more than 100 gallons of gas
from county pumps and once skipped town on $7,000 worth of credit
debt, for which he later made restitution. Perhaps most telling, he
was given to referring to black people by noxious epithets.

Called before an appeals court in March to defend his
"investigation," Coleman was reportedly vague and evasive, leading a
judge to name him "the most devious, non-responsive witness this
court has witnessed in 25 years." He was indicted on a charge of perjury.

Yet it was on his word that a diabetic hog farmer who lived in a shack
with a dirt yard was imprisoned as a drug kingpin.

I'm often challenged by white readers to explain what I mean when I
use the term "systemic racism." For the record, I mean the
difference between a group of idiot kids who allegedly beat up some
poor white girl and a system that throws away black life like tissue
paper. I mean the difference between converting prejudice into policy
and converting it into petty violence. I mean this, right here.

No, we cannot condone what happened in Tulia or Cleveland. But neither
can we pretend the effects are the same.

And if my fear for Cleveland is that race will be used to mitigate
accountability, my fear for Tulia is that its lesson will go right
over our collective head.

Consider: Multiple studies prove to anyone who cares to look that
every major system in this country -- judicial, educational, medical,
financial -- is weighted against black people. Yet people are
debating whether this debacle means Coleman was racist, or Tulia was
or Texas was.

Somehow, they never considered the likelihood that seems most
obvious. Maybe it happened because America is.