I hope John McWhorter doesn’t mind if I borrow liberally from his post responding to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr.–which really deserves to be read in its entirety. I do however, want to reproduce the anecdote McWhorter recounts at the end here:

I hadn’t realized that the car was a police car, and the officer quickly turned on the siren, made a screeching U-turn and pulled up to me on the other side of the street. The window rolled down, revealing a white man who would have been played by Danny Aiello if it had been a movie. “You always cross streets whenever you feel like it like that?” he sneered. “I’m sorry, officer,” I said; “I wasn’t thinking.” “Even in front of a police car?” he growled threateningly. My stomach jumped, and I realized that at that moment, despite being a tenured professor at an elite university, to this man I was a black street thug, a “youth.”

I simply cannot imagine him stopping like this if a white man of the same age in the same clothes with the same stubble had done the exact same thing; he was trawling through a neighborhood which, unfortunately, does sometimes harbor a certain amount of questionable behavior by young black men on that street at that time of night, and to him, the color of my skin rendered me a suspect.

I explained again as calmly as I could that I had meant no disrespect. I frankly suspect that the educated tone of my voice, so often an inconvenience in my life, was part of what made him pull off – “Not the type,” he was probably thinking. But if I had answered in a black-inflected voice with the subtle mannerisms that distinguish one as “street,” the encounter would quite possibly have gone on longer and maybe even gotten ugly. He pulled off, and left me shaken and violated.

This kind of thing–i.e. the larger “narrative”–is what informed Henry Louis Gates’ response to the police questioning him for breaking into his own house. It’s a real problem. There are things that would help us get past it, and training white officers in sensitivity is but one.

[…]

I maintain that racism is no longer the main problem for black America–but have always said that when racism rears its ugly head it must be stomped upon. In 2009, Obama acknowledged, black men’s encounters with the police (as well as some black women’s) are unlike enough to what whites encounter that attention must still be paid.

I just don’t actually know any black American men of any economic class who don’t have at least one story like this.

— A. Serwer