It’s never happened to me when I’m shopping by myself; I guess I have a pretty innocuous look about me. But add my 6′3 boyfriend to the equation, and its not unlikely for us to be followed around stores like we have “thief” tattooed on our foreheads. Years ago, a video store clerk trailed closely behind us for several minutes as we walked along the new releases wall until I finally turned around and half-yelled, “What do you want?” He said that he was just making himself available in case we had a question. I told him we wouldn’t be needing help, and he followed us anyway. We left without renting anything. The boyfriend, who is a lawyer, is always telling me to calm down; that I get too worked up over these things. It’s because he’s used to it. But the fact that he’s used to it bothers me even more — it happens to him that often. Just by virtue of being big and black and a man, his shopping experience is different than mine. But not all women can say the same about their individual experiences.

CONTINUED »

• Cassie confirmed her breakup with Diddy recently, even though there was never a confirmation that they were together. Although, it’s not like it wasn’t obvious. [NB]

• From the Real World to the House of Representatives. [C&D]

• There will be a woman, and a black woman at that, on a presidential ticket this year. She just has no chance in hell of winning, that’s all. [WAOD]

• Oh to be a celebrity who just gave birth… [TMZ]

• Brown people mustn’t look too suspicious when doing their personal banking. [RR]

Although it might seem like federal agents pretty much do this already, there are reports that the Justice Department is “considering” letting the FBI conduct investigate Americans based solely on racial, religious, and ethnic traits. Knowing the ideological makeup of the Justice Department, it’s easy to guess how things are going to turn out after the department brass is done “considering.”

Currently, FBI agents need specific reasons _ like evidence or allegations that a law probably has been violated _ to investigate U.S. citizens and legal residents. The new policy, law enforcement officials told The Associated Press, would let agents open preliminary terrorism investigations after mining public records and intelligence to build a profile of traits that, taken together, were deemed suspicious.

Among the factors that could make someone subject of an investigation is travel to regions of the world known for terrorist activity, access to weapons or military training, along with the person’s race or ethnicity.

CONTINUED »

Wherein you, the readers, talk amongst yourselves.

Many of you will be boarding airplanes over the next couple of days to take advantage of the three-day weekend — I’ll be headed to Natchitoches, Louisiana, the hometown of my grandparents, for a family reunion — and I’m curious. Do you ever feel like you get “special” attention from airport security based on your name or the color of your skin?

At left is Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who, in 1994, alleged that a black man carjacked her and kidnapped her two sons. After a nine-day manhunt that did little more than augment racial tensions in Smith’s community, the 23-year-old confessed to driving her car into a lake near her home, drowning her children inside.

Smith’s story immediately came to mind when I read the article “Omitting Race: Politically correct or good crime reporting?” on the Society of Professional Journalists Web site. The title says it all: Some people consider it dangerous for newspapers to avoid racial identifiers when reporting on crime stories. Their argument being, why wouldn’t you be as descriptive as possible when discussing loose criminals? Isn’t it the most responsible thing for a paper concerned with community safety to do?

Sally Lehrman, the author of the article, says no.

Even if all we care about is catching the criminal, identifying race in a news report could easily do more harm than help. In one well-known case in Oneonta, N.Y., an elderly white woman whose home was burglarized remembered little except that the intruder was a young black man with a cut on his hand. Police collected the names of black male students at the local state university and stopped 200 young African Americans in all, checking for cuts. In the end, they never arresting anyone. When police and the community are blinded by ideas about what a particular race looks like, whole groups suffer from suspicion and the actual culprit can escape.

What do you think?

BACKLASH An organization called 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement, along with New York State Senator Eric Adams, have decided that the inappropriate questioning of an off-duty NYPD officer, who happens to be the highest-ranking black officer in the NYPD, by two white cops is the last straw. They gathered at police headquarters to “express their outrage.” “When you have the head of the Community Affairs division stopped at gunpoint, what kind of community affairs do you have?” asked Adams. [NY1]

Oh, NYPD. What are we going to do with you. Right on the heels of a racial profiling lawsuit from a NY Post reporter (although his paper doesn’t believe racial profiling exists), the Sean Bell disaster, and a report questioning the racial imbalance of the police force’s stop-and-search technique, two white, plain-clothes officers are in deep trouble after ordering an off-duty black officer, who happens to be the highest-ranking black officer in the NYPD, out of his car. Needless to say, they didn’t recognize him.

CONTINUED »

Oh, irony. “On the same day that a New York Post editorial claimed racial profiling was not a growing problem, one of the Post’s own reporters filed suit against the city claiming to be a victim of such profiling.” [E&P]

It’s as if the paper’s departments don’t communicate with each other to fine tune their message; this would never happen at Fox News. (The editorial is here; the Post’s own story on the lawsuit, appearing today, is here.)

CONTINUED »

ON DRIVING WHILE BLACK Six black motorists are receiving a $300,000 settlement from the state of Maryland after accusing state troopers of racial profiling. The state is ponying up another $100,000 to hire a consultant to examine racial profiling in the state. Umm, pay me the $100,000. I can tell you right now. You do it. A lot. But maybe not as badly as they do in South Carolina, where a newspaper report found that state troopers there, in addition to over-tasering blacks and hitting them with their squad cars, disproportionately stop and warn black drivers. South Carolina cops have some major race issues, but it’s not like this doesn’t happen everywhere.

The U.S. got served yesterday in Geneva during day one of the two day meeting held by the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. A panel of 18 unpaid members of the committee periodically review the progress of nations, like the U.S., that signed a U.N. pact to eliminate all forms of racism. Ha. Anyway, the panel, led by a Greek lawyer, nailed the U.S. delegation, which hasn’t gone before the panel in seven years, on racial profiling.

Linos-Alexander Sicilianos, who led the questioning, said there was overwhelming evidence of police brutality against African-Americans, Arabs and Muslims, Hispanics and other minority groups.

“You need to intensify your efforts at all levels to combat this very alarming phenomenon,” Sicilianos, a Greek lawyer on the panel, told the U.S. delegation.

Grace Chung Becker, a U.S. assistant attorney general, told the committee that U.S. law prohibits the use of excessive force by any law enforcement officer against any individual in the United States. The offenders can be punished under criminal law or the victims can bring a civil lawsuit, she said.

Of course! Becker also made sure to add that President Bush said racial profiling is bad. He also frowns upon nooses, in case you didn’t know. [AP]

• Rep. Julia Carson (D-Ind.) died this weekend of lung cancer. She was 69. [BS]

• Hillary Clinton won the Des Moines Register’s coveted endorsement over the weekend, while Barack Obama picked up the Boston Globe’s. [BN]

• Police forces in Philly’s mostly white suburbs aggressively enforce nuisance laws and have a high arrest rate for minor crimes. They say that targeting small crimes helps discourage larger ones. The Philadelphia Inquirer says that targeting small crimes helps arrest a disproportionately large number of black people. [CBS3]

• Mitt Romney said that when he found out in 1979 that the Mormon church had decided to allow blacks to be priests, he pulled over in his car and cried. I believe him. [FN]

• Gabrielle Union wants movies with black casts to stop being categorized across the board as “urban.” I concur. [CM]

• New Jersey cops? They don’t shoot much at white people. [NJ]

• Civil rights activists descended on Wall Street yesterday to raise awareness for the “economic tsunami” that is the home-loan foreclosure crisis. [Reuters]

• The U.S. has been cheating on it’s racism test, says the ACLU. [DNT]

• A group of nine juvenile and adult Australian males who raped a 10-year-old Aboriginal girl were given no jail time because, according to the female judge, the child probably wanted to have sex with them in the first place. [AP]

It’s rare that I get searched at airports. Maybe I just have an innocuous look about me, or maybe what the airports like to call “random” searches really are random (right). However, the last time I flew they chose both me and my sister for full searches, i.e. a guy rifles through your bag while a woman thoroughly investigates whether those mysterious wires sewn into your bra are weapons of mass destruction. But whatever, right? It’s in the name of Homeland Security. Basically. So it’s never bothered me much. But during my search a similar investigation was going on next to me, this time to a wheelchair-bound Spanish-speaking woman who was maybe about 90. She couldn’t hold her arms up very well as the airport security ran the metal detector over her, so they held onto her arms as she tried to pull them away. When they started rubbing their hands over her breasts and around her collar, I had to look away. The poor woman was so confused, visibly insulted, and shaky. The violation, not to mention the indignity, was incredible. And I thought, “there has to be some other way to do this.” Then I promptly forgot.

CONTINUED »

• Beanie Sigel has gotten out of criminal charges associated with his apparent reluctance to return or pay for a rented Nissan Altima. Phew! I was worried for a second, there. [AHH]

• A teacher in the UK investigates a four-year-old boy for racism. He’s embittered and filled with hate because the black kids get special treatment during nap time. [Telegraph]

• And while we’re discussing the UK, the head of Britain’s black policeman’s association is encouraging more racial profiling of black youth. [Metro]

• The struggle over skin tone among blacks rages on. But we’re black, so we knew that already. [CS-T]

• Barack Obama has former gay supporters hopping mad over his association with homosexuality foe and “reformed” gay Donnie McClurkin. [QT]