Racial Profiling: Children Reflect Their Parents

The Time To Impart Lessons on Authority

These are not new lessons taught to black children sitting at the dinner table.

They are old lessons, repeated in an oral tradition for survival. Told by grandmothers with wrinkled hands, grandfathers who saw something way back when, worried mothers talking in hypotheticals.

They are lessons you don't want to teach a child because it could make him feel vulnerable, crack her innocence, pop this generation's colorblind bubble.

So you wait until it's absolutely necessary and relevant, and explain it like this:

If you are ever stopped by the police, be polite. Say: 'Yes, sir. No, sir.' Make no sudden movements. Do not try to run.

Why? they ask.

And that's when you tell them: You are a black child in America. There is a history here. So, baby, just be careful.

'I tell them if a police officer comes up to you, all you have to say is, 'Okay, officer. Yes, sir. Thank you.' Then move on. Don't say nothing smart,' says James Thompson, whose son is 15 and tall for his age. He goes to school in Bethesda, has white friends, spends his time skateboarding through the streets. He's a baby, really, living in a 'post-racial' world.

'That is one thing I'm scared of,' says Thompson, a proud man who does not like to feel scared. 'They don't know the danger that is out there. They don't know this happens all the time, but it just happened to happen to a prominent man.'

The arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. served as a lesson update for Dana Green, 40, whose sons are 13 and 18. 'If they could take a prominent, highly respected black man out in cuffs, then surely, my recent high school graduate, who has yet to master an articulate vocabulary and sometimes fails to wear a belt, he would certainly be carried out in a body bag,' says Green, an educator who lives in Bowie. 'I am telling them to comply first, appeal later. That's my motto in our house.'

For a lot of people -- black and white -- the incident in which Gates was arrested on his front porch after talking back to police prompted a 'teachable moment' to examine the intersection of race and justice, or perhaps misunderstandings between two men from different backgrounds in Cambridge, Mass. President Obama has invited both Gates and Sgt. James Crowley to the White House for a beer Thursday evening. Because talking things over just might be the best way to resolve incidents like these. Once a heated situation is defused and titles are pulled back, we find two individuals with stories to tell.

Outside the White House, away from the peace beer, people are carrying on their own conversations.

For some parents, the incident boiled down to four words: 'I told you so.'

'Black parents are using this as a case in point of what they have been saying all along,' says Ronald Walters, professor emeritus of politics at the University of Maryland. 'We live in a different era where kids are less racially conscious. A lot don't believe that stuff their parents talk about. They say, 'That is your era. Things are different now.' But parents have been trying to make the case racism hasn't gone away and they are likely to confront it, especially black males.'

Just two weeks ago, Walters had the same conversation with his 17-year-old nephew, who had stayed out too late. 'I picked him up at a Metro station,' Walters recalls. 'I was telling him, 'If you don't get hit in the head by a mugger, you are going to be stopped by the cops.' He said, 'Yeah, Daddy told me that.' '

Why that conversation?

'Because they are stopped by the police all the time,' Walters says. 'That is part of the rite of passage for a black male.'

Parents teach their children that police are good, too. Heroes sometimes. White parents, too, teach their children that they should be respectful around police -- because police deserve respect.

Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, says police are aware of the historical tension between police and minority communities. 'As an Irish American, I can tell you there was a long period of time when there was a tenuous relationship between Irishmen and police, and many were killed in New York,' he said. 'It is not unique. I understand it has been going on for a long time. That said, we're extraordinarily sensitive to it because we are so close to the issue. We are further along in our sensitivity to race relations than other segments of the population.'

He said officers are trained to take control of uncertain situations. 'People confronting police, young people, old people and people in between -- when finding themselves in this situation, when being questioned -- should remember that a police officer is the captain of the ship and be polite and cooperative.'

Ronald Hampton, executive director of the National Black Police Association, says, 'Every time these incidents happen, what

SOURCES:
The Washington Post / By DeNeen L. Brown