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White is white, black is black -- And the twain shall never meet?

B. S. Raghavan

In the US

CINCINNATI, an important city of Ohio in the US, and the eighth most segregated in the country, was recently rocked by three days of arson and violence following the shooting of an unarmed black youth of 17. Wanted for 12 traffic violations and with two warrants for running away from the police pending against him, he was chased and surrounded by 12 police officers. A white police officer, mistakenly assuming that the boy was reaching for a gun, shot him dead. This is the latest tragedy in a series of s imilar incidents all over the country resulting from the inherent suspicion and hostility governing relations between the police forces and the Afro-Americans in the US.

In 1992, the video tape showing a black truck driver, Rodney King, being pushed down, kicked and beaten mercilessly by four white officials created a sensation. I was in New York on the day the Rodney King case accused were acquitted by a preponderantly white jury; a pall of deathly silence fell over the entire city and, indeed, over the entire country since all offices were ordered to be closed and transport brought to a standstill fearing the worst. Ultimately, the FBI had to take a roundabout route o f bringing the accused to book for federal offences. A year ago, an unarmed black youth in New York standing on the balcony of his home was shot dead for no reason other than that he did not respond to a white police officer's demand to disclose his iden tity.

It is not just racist cops who think that black men are suspect, especially when they are dressed and behave in an offbeat fashion. Jesse Jackson, the prominent black godman, once confessed how he was mortally scared if he heard footsteps behind him in a dark street in a black-dominated locality and how he invariably heaved a sigh of relief when the person turned out to be a white. The loud exhibitionist tendencies of some young black persons, the statistics of crimes pointing mostly to their involvemen t and distortions of family values, such as a high percentage of unwed mothers, have further accentuated the prejudice.

Targeting by race

Its most detested manifestation is in what is known as ``racial profiling'' _ the police almost exclusively targeting the Afro-Americans, all the way from ticketing for speeding and parking offences to effecting arrests for crimes. No State is free from this taint, although New Jersey is notorious as heading the list.

For Cincinnati itself, it is the fourth such death of Afro-Americans at the hands of the police since November 15, and black fatality in the last six years. Deaths have occurred in the most gruesome manner in some cases: By asphyxiation when a number of cops tried to subdue the victim and by being shot nine times through a car window. There have been no such incident involving whites running foul of the law in a city where they form 57 per cent of the population. More than 150 complaints from black citi zens about police brutalities have remained unattended. Not a single police officer had ever been convicted, leave alone punished, for these killings, and even the eyewash of lesser disciplinary actions, after years of proceedings, are overturned by appe llate bodies.

The Cincinnati riots should not be viewed in isolation, but in the totality of conditions and circumstances in which Afro-Americans live and the perceptions associated with them. So, let us stand back a little and try to see it in perspective.

Racial volcano

Americans describe their country as a melting pot which has brought about a fusion of identities of people of diverse origins, countries, races and cultures to build the harmonious society that the US is today. Without in anyway questioning the sincerity with which that claim is made, it is truer to call the society a dormant racial volcano which erupts from time to time. The embers and the lava are never too far below the surface.

The Afro-Americans bristle with memories of the times not too long ago when a kind of apartheid forced them to lead a ruthlessly segregated existence; they were consigned to separate places in parks, buses, trains and restaurants; co-racial educational i nstitutions were inconceivable; they could not be seen in public in the company of white women; they were excluded from white collar jobs; and savage incidents of lynching were common.

Notwithstanding the resonating statement in the Declaration of Independence that all men were equal and equally entitled to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, there was one segment of the population that these ringing words passed by until as late a s the mid-20th century: Afro-Americans. It was not that only white supremacists flaunted towards them an attitude of condescension at best and contempt at worst; it was by and large taken by the white population in general to be in keeping with the spiri t of the times.

Thus, for more than 100 years after Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the erstwhile slaves, regarded as a property and a commodity for purchase and sale, did not enjoy any civil rights. On the eve of World War II, a minuscule five per cent of Afro-Americans were in white-collar jobs, and six out of 10 African-American women were household servants, often toiling for 12 hours daily on subsistence wages.

The civil rights movement of the 1960s brought a ray of hope. In its wake came a number of legislative measures and rulings from the Supreme Court seeking to restore to the Afro-Americans a status of liberty, equality and fraternity as citizens and breth ren. The Afro-Americans became legally entitled to admission into educational institutions and workplaces not only on an equal footing with the whites, but currently enjoy the right of reservation much as the scheduled castes and tribes do in India under the policy of affirmative action. Segregation in any shape or form stands outlawed.

Separate and unequal

And yet, A Country of Strangers is what a best selling book calls the American polity as it is today. There has been no time that one recalls when Afro-Americans and whites have not remained in a state of face-off, nervous and t ense, ready to take offence at an unguarded word or action. I was in the US in 1966-67 when violent racial disorders swept across the country like prairie fire. I visited cities, such as Chicago, Los Angeles and Detroit, large parts of which had been reduced to ashes. I met many black leaders as also prominent white politicians such as Richard Daley (King Richard), Mayor of Chicago, and George Maddox, Governor of Georgia.

There can be no better portrayal of the plight in which I found the US then than the following pithy and poignant sentence in the report of Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders: ``Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal''. Based on this startling finding, the Commission predicted an era of violence, as the inevitable consequence of ever-blacker cities ringed by ever-expanding white suburbs.

That was in March 1968. The passage of another 13 years has done little to improve matters, as reflected by the pessimistic tone and tenor of the 1981 report of the US Commission on Civil Rights, set up to evaluate the progress made in implementing the l aws guaranteeing equal treatment of Afro-Americans. In short, far from there being an integration of Afro-Americans into the mainstream and their merging unrecognisably into the melting pot, their condition sticks out like a sore thumb.

There has, undoubtedly, been some advance in the condition of Afro-Americans under various heads since then as brought out by the latest Census figures. But it is a mottled, and, in some ways, disturbing picture (See Box).

Ask any black and he will tell you bluntly that race-based discrimination on all fronts is rampant. Nowhere is it working more callously and cruelly than in the police forces of different States. And if proper lessons are not learnt and the needed reform s are not undertaken to remove the fear and distrust between the two racial groups, the dormant volcano will keep erupting time and again as it did in the summer of 1968 all over the US and in the winter of 2001 in Ohio.

Profile of Afro-Americans in the US

* Out of a total population of 281.4 million, whites number 211.5 million and Afro-Americans 34.7 million or 12 per cent. Of the 102.9 million whites and 16.5 million Afro-Americans constituting the labour force, the percentage of unemployed Afro-Americans (9.0) is more than double that of the whites (4.0). * The poverty rate, which stands at 13 per cent of the total population, is 26 per cent for Afro-Americans or more than thrice that for whites (8 per cent). The total number of Americans below poverty line is 11 per cent of the population; here again, Afro-Americans formed 23.6 per cent, while the whites only 7 per cent.

* As the US Census Bureau ruefully reports: Afro-American men are less likely than white men to be employed in managerial and professional jobs and black married-couple families are less likely than their white counterparts to have an annual inc ome of $50,000 or more.

* The proportion of white men (32 per cent) employed in specialty occupations is almost twice that of black men (17 per cent). The Federal Glass Ceiling Commission's 1995 report reveals that only 0.6 per cent of professional managers in major comp anies were African American. Half (51 per cent) of the black married-couple families had an annual income of $50,000 or more, compared to 60 per cent of whites.

* A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that black entrepreneurs are twice as likely to be denied loans from banks than whites, even when they are creditworthy. On the contrary, there were no significant difference s in borrowing through credit cards presumably because of the unawareness of the applicants' race.

* Afro-Americans are only half as likely to be self-employed as whites, and those who do opt for the course are twice as likely to drop out.

(Source: US Census Report 2000.)