'SYSTEMIC RACISM' ON DISPLAY IN TEXAS

A 13-year-old girl was jumped in Cleveland last month. Last week, charges
were 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 girl is recuperating and her accused attackers
- - 12 girls, six boys, all black or Hispanic between the ages of 9 and 15 -
face charges of felonious assault, aggravated riot and ethnic intimidation.

It would be an affront to decency, logic, and, not coincidentally, to black
and Hispanic 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, should any be
required, that this contagion is not limited to white folks.

My purpose in bringing it up, though, is to make another point. But first
we must turn to the Texas town of Tulia, where 12 convicted drug dealers
were released last week after grave questions were 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 claims
to have scribbled on his legs. He had no videotape, no fingerprint
evidence, no witnesses, no corroboration of any kind other than his sworn
word, to indicate that he bought cocaine from whom he said he did. 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 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.

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 was.