In my previous column, I took the position that Black men tend to bear the brunt of many of society’s frustrations and are often targeted in a negative manner. Well, in response to my column, I received a few e-mails and phone calls from people from various backgrounds. My supporters said they were glad someone finally opened up a rational dialogue on such a controversial topic. Detractors said my article sounded like that of a typical paranoid Black man who reverts to playing the race card in an effort to avoid hard truths.
My critics also argued that Black men tend to be more criminally inclined than other groups of people and, more often than not, are guilty of such transgressions. I was offended by such bigoted statements and engaged in a round of e-mail comments and telephone conversations that were professional, yet tense.
Given that so many people seem to harbor strong opinions on this issue, I decided to do some serious ruminating. Afterward, I came to the conclusion that I was correct in my assertions. I employed various local and national examples of racial mis-profiling to bolster my case. As a modern postmodern civil rights child, who came of age in the early 1980s, I was spared the racially influenced practice of lynchings, Jim Crow and other forms of humiliation and degradations that visited a large segment of the Black populace for decades. However, I am aware that more than often, Black men bore the brunt of these inhumane atrocities. Their possible innocence was never considered. They were convicted in the court of public opinion.
Moreover, I am old enough to remember recent encounters where Black men were falsely targeted as criminals. In the fall of 1994, Susan Smith of South Carolina drowned her two children at the bottom of a lake in Union, S.C. Smith went on national television tearfully describing a 20-something Black man with a ski mask who drove off with her children. This case reminded me of the 1989 Boston-based Charles Stuart saga. Stuart was a 29-year-old who killed his pregnant wife, shot himself in the abdomen, frantically dialed 911 and gave police a description of the “raspy-voiced” Black man who committed the crime. When the smoke cleared, the public learned Stuart and Smith were the sadistic, deviant culprits of their own crimes.
