Myth of the racist cabbie - rational discrimination versus racism

National Review, Oct 9, 1995 by Dinesh D'Souza

These facts suggest how hollow it sounds to accuse cabdrivers of "prejudice" and "stereotypes." While we can be sure that racist taxidrivers would discriminate, not all taxidrivers who discriminate are racist.

MICHELLE Joo, an Asian-American shopkeeper in Washington, D.C., acknowledges that she discriminates based on race. When deciding whether to let people into her jewelry and cosmetics store, she tells the Washington Post, "I look at the face." She won't open the door "if he looks ugly, if he's holding a bottle in a paper bag, if he's dirty.... If some guy looks kind, I let him in." Young black men are kept out if they seem rowdy, Miss Joo says. Usually they react by banging on her glass windows. One may say that Michelle Joo has no fixed policy of keeping blacks out. Nor does she have a quota about the number she will admit. Rather, she seems to be a prudent statistician. She employs race as one factor, but not the only factor, in her decision-making. As a means to ensure her security and business survival, she is practicing what may be termed rational discrimination.

Thousands of other store owners in major cities make similar decisions every day. So do countless women -- black, white, Hispanic, and Asian -- who come across black males in circumstances they consider not entirely safe. Regardless of their general attitudes about civil rights, they do what they feel is necessary in each particular case. Shopkeepers scurry to the front of the store where they can monitor the exit. Female pedestrians may clutch their purse more tightly or cross the street if approached by one or more young black men. Sometimes people snap the locks on their car doors as African-American youths walk by.

The psychological toll of such reactions is high. If you are black, columnist William Raspberry says, it is unusual to find yourself treated as an individual, and to receive the kind of consideration that whites expect. In The Rage of a Privileged Class, Ellis Cose describes a typical justification for black rage: "Why am I constantly treated as if I were a drug addict, a thief, or a thug?" Many who echo these sentiments also question the basis for group judgments about blacks. Legal scholar Charles Ogletree argues that "99 per cent of black people don't commit crimes."

Blacks make up approximately 12 per cent of the nation's population. Yet according to Uniform Crime Reports, published annually by the FBI, blacks account for 39 per cent of those arrested for aggravated assault, 42 per cent of those arrested for weapons possession, 43 per cent of those arrested for rape, 55 per cent of those arrested for murder, and 61 per cent of those arrested for robbery. Even discounting for the possibility of some racial bias in criminal arrests, it seems clear that the average black person is between three and six times as likely to be arrested for a crime as the average white person.

Young black males are arrested and convicted of crimes at an astonishingly high rate. According to the Sentencing Project, a liberal advocacy group, about 25 per cent of young black men in America are in prison, on probation, or on parole on any given day. For whites, the figure is 6 per cent. In major cities, the figures for young black men are even higher.