Pubdate: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 Source: Washington Post (DC) Copyright: 2001 The Washington Post Company Contact: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491 Author: Richard Morin and Michael H Cottman Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/racial.htm (Racial Issues) DISCRIMINATION'S LINGERING STING Minorities Tell Of Profiling, Other Bias More than half of all black men report that they have been the victims of racial profiling by police, according to a survey by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University. Overall, nearly 4 in 10 blacks -- 37 percent -- said they had been unfairly stopped by police because they were black, including 52 percent of all black men and 25 percent of all black women. Blacks are not the only Americans who say they have been the targets of racial or ethnic profiling by law enforcement. One in five Latino and Asian men reported they had been the victims of racially motivated police stops. But racial profiling is only one of many examples of intolerance that minorities say they continue to confront. More than a third of all blacks interviewed said they had been rejected for a job or failed to win a promotion because of their race. One in five Latinos and Asians also said they had been discriminated against in the workplace because of their race or ethnicity. Overwhelming majorities of blacks, Latinos and Asians also report they occasionally experience at least one of the following expressions of prejudice: poor service in stores or restaurants, disparaging comments, and encounters with people who clearly are frightened or suspicious of them because of their race or ethnicity. "These are precisely the kinds of incidents that contribute to what is coming to be called black middle-class rage -- the steady occurrence of slights and put-downs you know in your gut are tied to race but that rarely take the form of blatant racism," said Lawrence Bobo, a professor of Afro-American studies and sociology at Harvard University. "No one uses the N-word. There is not a flat denial of service. It is insidious, recurrent, lesser treatment." A much smaller proportion of whites also say they have been victims of discrimination: One out of every three reported that they sometimes face racial slurs, bad service or disrespectful behavior. Claims and counterclaims about the prevalence of racial profiling have been made for years. But there have been few reliable attempts to estimate the degree to which blacks, Latinos and Asians believe they have been victims of the practice. And no national data exist that firmly document the pervasiveness of the practice, making it impossible to compare perceptions with actual incidence. For this survey, the latest in a series of polls on public policy issues conducted by The Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University researchers, 1,709 randomly selected adults were interviewed by telephone from March 8 through April 22. The sample included 315 Hispanics, 323 blacks and 254 Asians. The margin of sampling error for the overall results is plus or minus 3 percentage points. It is plus or minus 6 points for blacks, 7 points for Latinos and 9 points for Asians. Widely publicized incidents around the country have drawn attention to the targeting of minorities by police, a practice some police officials have tried to justify by arguing that minorities are more likely to commit crimes. President Bush told Congress in February that "it is wrong, and we must end it." Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) and Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) recently introduced companion bills in the Senate and the House that would withhold funding from agencies that engage in racial profiling. And suddenly, from New Jersey to California, victims of unwarranted police stops and harassment are telling their stories and, for the first time, are being heard. Kinte Cutino, 24, a house painter in New Haven, Conn., said he was riding his bike when a police officer pulled him over. "He asked where I was headed, and I told him. He searched me, and didn't find anything and then he let me go." Cutino shrugged off the encounter. "They will stop you in certain areas, and if you're black, most likely you will get stopped," he said. "You can't do anything about it. That's just the way it is." Tommy Thorne would seem to be an unlikely target of police attention. Thorne, 62, is a retired Army lieutenant colonel who recently retired as director of an engineering company in Portland, Ore. But last year, he and his wife were driving through the Mojave Desert on a vacation trip to Las Vegas. When he pulled his Cadillac Eldorado out of a gas station, "a police car was on my bumper; he was real close. When I turned, he turned; when I changed lanes, he changed lanes. He kept following me. "Finally I pulled over and waited five minutes. And he stopped. When I pulled off, he followed me again and then came barreling up alongside me and started pulling ahead of me, and backing off, and pulling ahead." Thorne said the officer's intimidating behavior continued for several more miles, and then the officer backed off. "He never pulled me over or issued a summons. It just irritated me. And there was nothing I could do about it. I think he saw a black guy in the desert and thought I was a drug dealer. Who knows? But I guess if you're black and male, at some point it's going to happen to you." Steve Jaime, a guest services manager at a suburban Chicago hotel, recalled the night that he and some friends were coming home from the Taste of Chicago food festival when the police stopped their car in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. Without explanation, the officers ordered them out of their car. "That's when the police officer put a gun to my head while he was checking me out," said Jaime, who is Mexican American. Then the officers abruptly told Jaime and his friends to go. "They were pissed off about something and they took it out on us, because we were Hispanic." The survey found that other forms of racial intolerance are commonplace. More than 8 in 10 blacks and two-thirds of all Latinos and Asians say they occasionally experience at least one of these four intolerant acts: poor service, racial slurs, fearful or defensive behavior, and lack of respect. Two-thirds of all blacks and nearly half of all Latinos and Asians say they experience two or more of these forms of intolerance from time to time. Sometimes these ugly moments provoke anger, as when a waiter in an expensive steakhouse asked Earl Arredondo, a 30-year-old Latino from Harlingen, Tex., if he could afford the $32 rib-eye steak he had just ordered and later dismissively asked him if he knew "what calamari is." And sometimes they provoke fear, as when a carload of drunken whites pulled to a stop alongside Martha Matsuoka, an Asian American who lives in Los Angeles. Then they threw beer bottles at her and demanded that she "go home" and "buy American." "I understand these kinds of things rationally, but personally I was stunned," said Matsuoka, 39, a graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles. "It was so real. On a personal level, my mother was upset. She said she had hoped that I would never have to experience anything like that." The prejudice reflected in these incidents is clear. In other instances, perceptions may not reflect reality: An honest error or an unintended slight may be misconstrued as an act of racial intolerance. But Harvard's Bobo cautions that it would be dangerous to dismiss the bulk of these claims as misperceptions or misunderstandings. "These feelings of victimization are not arrived at easily, or because they are pleasant feelings to hold," he said. "We have to regard them as indicators of a very real social phenomenon. For example, blacks complained for years that they were being targeted by police and were ignored. Only finally, when a cannon-load of data was shot across the bow, did people begin to say, 'Oh, yeah, I guess it's going on.' " Blacks confront far more discrimination than either Latinos or Asians, the survey found. And black men report facing prejudice more often than black women. Nearly half -- 46 percent -- of all blacks said they had experienced discrimination in the past 10 years, including 55 percent of black men and 40 percent of black women. Two years ago, Ali Barr, a television engineer in Atlanta, said he was in Baltimore on business and went to a jazz bar and restaurant with friends to get something to eat. "It was a white bar, but it featured a black jazz band," Barr said. "But from the moment we walked in, we could feel the hostility. All the patrons were white. The waitress comes over and tells us we couldn't sit in the section we were in. She said it was closed until later in the evening. "But there were only 10 people in the bar, so we moved to the other section and we asked for coffee. She came back and slammed the coffee down and came back with the manager. The manager said we were not welcome here and that our money wouldn't be accepted. "The manager pointed to a sign saying that management reserved the right to serve who they wanted. We were asked to leave. All we wanted was something to eat. We were totally discriminated against. That will always be my memory of downtown Baltimore." Four in 10 Latinos and Asians reported that they, too, had been discriminated against in the past 10 years. Laticia Villegas, 27, owns a children's clothing store in Fort Worth. She recently tried to write a check at a supermarket. The white clerk refused to let her borrow or even touch her pen. Villegas fished around in her purse and wrote the check. "It is culture shock," Villegas said. "I've never been discriminated against until I moved to Dallas [from San Antonio]. I was offended and surprised; I didn't expect it. I'm not used to being treated this way. I thought we got past this, but we haven't, and I know my [1-year-old] daughter will have to grow up experiencing these kinds of things because she does not have blond hair and blue eyes." About 1 in 5 whites -- 18 percent -- also report being the victims of discrimination in the past 10 years. Ten percent said they had been denied a promotion because of their race or ethnicity, 14 percent said they had received poor service because of their race, and an equal proportion reported having been called names or insulted. Rose Evans, 26, of Aurora, Colo., said she has frequently been the target of racially prejudiced comments from Latinos and blacks. Evans grew up West Denver, a predominantly Mexican American and Asian neighborhood where "I was picked on quite a bit. You know, 'stupid white girl' and worse things in Spanish. But my stepdad is Mexican American, and I learned to let it roll off of me." Earlier this year, her 9-year-old daughter confronted prejudice. "A group of little black girls at school were picking on her a lot, calling her 'honky' and stuff. She would come home from school crying. I told her to ignore them, they were just ignorant people." But the bullying continued, and Evans requested a meeting with school officials and the mother of the girl who had been particularly vicious to her daughter. "The mother became very hostile and started calling me 'white trash' and 'honky' and other stuff," Evans said. "I told her children aren't born ignorant, they are taught it, and I saw where her daughter got it from." Assistant director of polling Claudia Deane contributed to this report. - --- MAP posted-by: Andrew