Books
BOOKS
“Challenging people to Shape a
better future now”
State-Sanctioned Racial Profiling: A Daily Assault
12 Angry Men: True Stories of Being a
Black Man in America Today
b ernie f oSter
Founder/Publisher
b obbie D ore f oSter
executive editor
Edited by Gregory S. Parks and Matthew
W. Hughey
Introduction by Lani Guinier
J errY f oSter account executive
l iSa l ovinG news editor
b rian S timSon reporter
D aviD k iDD graphic Designer
m oniCa J. f oSter
Seattle office Coordinator
J ulie k eefe & S uSan f rieD
Photographers
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by kam Williams
Special to The Skanner News
I
n “The Rage of a Privileged Class,” Ellis
Cose carefully chronicled the assortment
of frustrations experienced by educated
Blacks upon entering the corporate world. In
“12 Angry Men,” a dozen brothers are allowed
to give full vent to their feelings about anoth-
er indignity routinely suffered by the majority
of African-American males, namely, racial
profiling.
Unless you’ve been subjected to such un-
Constitutional treatment, you are unlikely to
be very sympa-
thetic. After all, it
is reasonable to
think that if some-
one’s not break-
ing the law, they
presumably
should have no
problem cooper-
ating with the
cops for what
ought to amount to a momentary inconven-
ience.
But I could write at length from personal
experience about the trauma inflicted on my
psyche by the time I was 25 by a
decade of being routinely
stopped and frisked by police
about once a month or so, and
always on the flimsiest of pre-
texts. Back then, the prison
industrial complex was undergo-
ing a mammoth growth spurt
thanks to the so-called “War on
Drugs,” which was really just a
rationale for feeding the corpo-
rate beast with the bodies of mil-
lions of non-violent, Black
offenders.
And judging by the accounts
related in “12 Angry Men: True
Stories of Being a Black Man in
America Today,” the situation hasn’t
improved much over the interim. Here, a 35
year-old family man recalls how he was
Here, a 35 year-old family man recalls
how he was recently strip-searched right
in front of his neighbors by NYPD
detectives who suspected him of
possessing narcotics
page 4 The Portland and Seattle Skanner January 19, 2011
recently strip-searched right in front of his
neighbors by NYPD detectives who suspected
him of possessing narcotics. When they didn’t
find any contraband, they left him to pull up
his own pants without as much as an apology.
Just as humiliating was
the ordeal of the “head of
the ACLU’s racial profiling
division who was himself
profiled at Boston’s Logan
Airport coming home from
a racial profiling confer-
ence.” Then there’s the case
of U.S. Congressman
Daniel K. Davis, who was
ostensibly guilty of driving
while Black after doing his
weekly radio show back in
his Illinois district one
evening.
When
Congressman
Davis had the temerity to
ask why he had been pulled over, the incensed
officer not only gave him a phantom ticket,
but inexplicably took away his driver’s license
for good measure. Despite his grey hair and
advanced age, Davis wasn’t exactly surprised
by the incident, since he says that, “Over the
years, I have been stopped by the Chicago
police so many times I couldn’t count them.”
The solution? Black Harvard Law School
graduate Bryonn Bain sarcastically proposes
the passage of a Black Man’s Bill of Rights,
10 tongue-in-cheek Amendments to the
Constitution. But the rest of this eye-opening
tome’s entries adopt a much more serious tone
to drive home ever so effectively the salient
point that state-sanctioned racial profiling
amounts to a painful assault on individual dig-
nity and a serious impediment to the collective
American Dream of a colorblind society.