07/18/2018
The Truth About Racism/Profiling Minorities
• Calling 911 means different things to white and black people.)
• White people keep calling the cops on black people for no reason. That’s dangerous.
• Some white people are calling the police for really minor things
• White and black people have very different perceptions of police
By Left: (Twitter)
Toxic-White-people feels like it is LITERALLY against the law for Black and Brown folks to disobey their request. They immediately jump into citizen arrest mode, playing the role of a deputy doing too much, using their whiteness and its proximity to police protection as a weapon.
** Six police cars forced 10 Black college students to walk back to IHOP after being falsely accused of not paying **
If we would rehash all the calls and complaints that whites have made regarding so-call suspicious behavior by Black men, women, and children we would see a pattern of white policing of Blacks by many whites due to the message and tone of the current white house administration and Commander And Chief. Now more than ever whites are calling 911 for police to intervene, play referee and judge on the silliest and disrespectful reasoning that has embarrassed, shamed and even cost many whites their jobs. This belief of being patriotic and fulfilling civic duties to the community is all smoke and mirrors and not actually peeling back the layers of hate, bigotry and evilness of those who believe they are right for calling out Blacks, demanding police to investigate Blacks who they feel are suspicious or they just feel uncomfortable because of a Black person or group in their presence. From kicking Blacks out of a public pool to a coffee shop for not ordering anything while they, as Black businessmen waited for a colleague, made national headlines. It is hard not to shake your head at those who call police on Black kids selling bottled water in their community to save up enough money for a trip to Disneyland (but a little white girl selling lemonade without a permit arouse no suspicion or threat to white America) or a young 12 year old entrepreneur mowing lawns in the surrounding communities only to be addressed by officers for cutting the next door neighbor’s lawn by mistake. And how can we forget the young paperboy being questioned for delivering papers in his community? White people have been policing black behavior for a long time. If they think someone black seems out of place, they know they can say something to the property manager, a store supervisor or the police, sociologists who study race say. Many black people in these situations don't bother to complain publicly. They say they're unlikely to be believed or their concerns will be dismissed. And they don't want to escalate the situation and end up in jail or worse. What's different now is that callers are no longer hiding behind their phones, Rawls says. "They are getting into people’s faces,” she said. "They are feeling emboldened."
People often think of racism as major acts of aggression, but sociologists say smaller scale acts, sometimes referred to as microaggressions, are more common. They can include everything from disapproving looks to chastising remarks for perceived infractions of racial etiquette, social norms dating back to slavery days and Jim Crow laws on racial segregation that dictated how black people should behave in public and interact with white people.
America has a legacy of racism going back hundreds of years, so what’s giving people a new license to confront blacks and other minorities in public spaces? The way white people caught in these videos on social media lay claim to public places amount to individual acts of gentrification, sending the message: This is my space and you can only behave here the way I say you can, Yancy says.
Now footage captured on smartphones and spread instantly on social media is shining the spotlight on how black people are singled out "simply because they are black," says George Yancy, a professor of philosophy at Emory University and author of "Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America." And that, says Yancy, is new. The awareness growing through viral social media posts is a start, but technology has its limits and alone can't curb racism or microaggressions, sociologists say.
"Black people experience policing every day, even if it's just a look or a gaze," he says. "What social media is doing is magnifying the elephant in the room in such a way as to reveal to white people the reality that black people experience all the time."
We have seen Whites lose their job like the CVS manager who claimed a Black woman was using a fake coupon, Even the CEO of Papa John Pizza recently resigned for racial verbiage. For many this appears to be a growing trend of profiling but in truth White people have a long and dangerous history of calling the police on black people for simply going about their daily lives, says Anne Rawls, a sociology professor at Bentley University, who has studied this phenomenon for decades and has dubbed it "citizen callers." She and Meghan Hollis, a criminal justice professor at Texas State University, estimate that 80% of policing involves responding to citizen calls for service. Rawls recalls one police dispatcher rattled by a phone call from someone reporting six black kids for simply walking into a sandwich shop together. “If I don’t dispatch a car and something happens, we're liable, so I have to dispatch a car,” she says the dispatcher told her at the time.
Sometimes the police officer warns callers they could be charged with making a false police report if it happens again. Other times they go through the motions of responding and then move on, Rawls and Hollis said.
Lasting change won't come from Facebook or Twitter, but from mobilizing all races to fight injustice together, Bonilla-Silva said.
“I am not saying we shouldn’t complain on social media. I am not saying we shouldn't demand apologies, demand resignations and demand that some people be fired,” he said. “But I'm saying is, if that's all we do, we will probably not succeed in achieving equality."
