Mohan: Thanks for the story behind the oldest Bible from Kerala. Here is something that is of human interest.
You heard about DWI -Driving while intoxicated. DWB is Driving While Black (or Brown). BWB: is Breathing While Black. The story of Blackman Breathing and Walking in White neighborhood.
Humor in pathos
IN AMERICA / By BOB HERBERT
Breathing While Black
A federal appeals court says it's all right, but it's not all right.
Here's the lead paragraph from the New York Times story on a decision
last week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit:
"A federal appeals court ruled yesterday that police officers in Oneonta,
N.Y., did not violate the Constitution when they tried to stop every
black man in town in 1992 after a woman said she had been robbed in
her home by a young black man."
Got that? Every black man in town. This is New York, mind you, not
Mississippi.
After hearing that a black man had committed a crime, the cops went
after every black man they saw walking the streets. They dragooned
black men and boys (and at least one black woman!) who were trying
to use public transportation. They pulled over black guys riding in cars.
They went to the State University of New York at Oneonta and got a list
of all the black students in the school, and they went after them.
These were all innocent people. The cops never did find the alleged
assailant. But that didn't matter. Neither their rights as citizens nor their
humanity mattered.
These were black people, and whatever you do to them is all right. They
may have been masquerading as human beings, but Oneonta's men in
blue (assisted by the state police) could see right through that disguise.
The manhunt began early on the morning of Sept. 4, 1992, when a
77-year-old woman told police she had been attacked by a burglar. The
woman, who was white, said she never saw the man's face but could tell
from his arm and hand that he was black. She said she thought he was
young because he moved quickly. She said the man had a knife and had
cut himself on the hand while struggling with her. He then fled.
A canine unit tracked the scent of the alleged assailant for several
hundred yards before losing it. Investigators said the path of the scent
pointed toward the university campus. That's all the cops had to go on.
No problem. There weren't all that many black people in Oneonta. Of
the 14,000 full-time residents fewer than 500 are black. And only about
2 percent of the 7,500 students at the university are black. So the cops,
smart enough to know a black person when they see one, decided to
stop every black guy in the town to see if one of them had a cut on his
hand.
This went far beyond the problem of driving while black. People were
being stopped in Oneonta for breathing while black. Trust me, if some
poor guy had innocently cut his finger while slicing a tomato for dinner he
would have landed in jail.
The cops never did find their man, but they humiliated a lot of people in
the process. In last week's opinion, a three-judge panel of the Second
Circuit said: "We are not blind to the sense of frustration that was
doubtlessly felt by those questioned by the police during this
investigation."
But the panel ruled that this police sweep of blacks in Oneonta was
O.K., that it was constitutionally permissible, that it was not a violation of
the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment or the Fourth
Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable seizures. Never mind the
breathtaking totality of the sweep. Never mind that the cops were not
considering any other aspect of the so-called description except race.
Never mind that this would never happen to the white residents of
Oneonta. The court ruled that the stops were not racially discriminatory
because, in the court's view, the cops were acting on a description that
included more than just the color of the alleged assailant.
With this ruling, cops are free to harass any and all black people as long
as they have in hand a complaint that a black person has committed a
crime. If you are black, you are a suspect.
The ruling, which upheld a similar ruling by a lower court, grew out of a
lawsuit filed against the Oneonta cops and the state police by several of
the people caught up in the sweep. The case against the plaintiffs was
argued by lawyers from the office of State Attorney General Eliot
Spitzer, who had a statutory obligation to defend the state in the suit, but
who made it clear that he was uncomfortable with the outcome.
"I read the circuit opinion," he said yesterday. "And I said, 'You know
what? We won the case but it makes your skin crawl.' " |
