as reflected in Derrick Bell’s “permanence of racism” thesis. And just as the state stands behind the collection of the general taxes, Blacks often have good cause to view state representatives such as police and judicial officers as IRS agents for the Black Tax.
The Black Tax has little to do with the Mark Fuhrman-style racism that led to the false imprisonment of my dad, however. The injuries inflicted on Blacks by avowedly virulent racists are grievous and still widespread, but as I suggested earlier, most Americans today are not Mark Fuhrmans, and thus most racial discrimination today is not rooted in conscious animus. Instead, most of it stems either from unconscious mental reflexes or from a belief that Blacks commit a disproportionate number of crimes and therefore statistically pose a greater threat than non-Blacks. It is unconscious discrimination on the one hand and ostensibly rational discrimination on the other that impose the lion’s share of the Black Tax today.
The Black Tax comes in many varieties. Reports abound of Blacks being stopped and interrogated by police for walking or jogging through “White” neighborhoods. Police are often responding to calls from concerned neighbors. Although Fuhrman-style racism may lie behind such calls and stops, it is quite possible that these watchful callers and dutiful officers see themselves as responding reasonably to a person who seems to be “out of place”—nothing personal.
Likewise, it’s “nothing personal” when store security personnel shadow Blacks in department stores, “nothing personal” when clerks refuse to buzz Blacks into jewelry stores and glitzy Manhattan boutiques, and when White women balk at getting on empty elevators with Black (but not White) men. Nothing personal, moreover, in profile stops of Blacks by drug enforcement officers, nothing personal in the redlining of Black neighborhoods by everything from banks to pizza delivery services, and positively nothing personal in the mountain of empirical evidence of racial discrimination in the administration of justice. Without a doubt, the shibboleth of today’s apologists for the Black Tax is “nothing personal.”
A serendipitous illustration of the attitude of many Whites toward the Black Tax emerged from my mailbox just as I was writing this Introduction. I opened the mail to find the following letter responding to remarks I made in a local newspaper, The Pittsburgh Gazette, in which I described the third degree of Blacks by suburban cops and the special attention I receive from store security personnel when I doff my business suit and don some sweats and sneakers.
Dear Mr. Armour:
Re your ramblings in yesterday’s Post-Gazette, let me help you to understand.
If I saw blacks in my neighborhood I would be on the lookout, and for a good reason. In case your t.v. is broken, let me tell you what has been happening in western Pa., as well as the rest of the nation. Blacks, who represent about ten or eleven percent of the population are committing about seventy-five percent of the crime. And, they are committing about ninety five percent of the street crimes. Just turn on the tube at night and see where the crimes are being carried out and by who.
When was the last time you heard about a drive-by shooting in Upper St. Clair [a predominantly White Pittsburgh suburb]? When is the last time you heard of a gang related killing in Fox Chapel [a predominantly White Pittsburgh suburb]? I think you got my point.
Of course sales people are going to watch blacks in a store more closely than whites. … Blacks commit a disproportionate amount of shop lifting. Hell, why do you think the large grocery stores have all but abandoned the inner cities where the population is mostly black?
I heard Jesse Jackson say that if he hears foot steps behind him and turns around to see a white face instead of a black one, he is relieved. Does that make him a racist? Does that make me a racist if I say the same thing? No, what it does is make a statement of fact.
Once, I would like to hear a black say he understands why whites feel the way we do. Please clean up your own home before you try to tell us how to think.
Without mincing words, the author of this letter bluntly states the case for the Black Tax from the standpoint of many White tax collectors. Especially telling is the authority the author cites for his statistics on Black criminality—television. Were television my sole source of information on violent crime, I might share the author’s grim reckoning of relative racial crime rates. Thus I will investigate the role of the mass media in the perpetuation of the Black Tax. Sticking my head directly into the lion’s mouth, I will also assume that—despite demonstrable biases in police enforcement—Blacks do commit a disproportionate number of street crimes and ask whether such a statistic justifies acceptance of the Black Tax either in the administration of justice or in the everyday interactions of ordinary citizens.
Further, I will focus on the most insidious and seemingly intractable source of the Black Tax: unconscious discrimination. Unlike the purportedly rational discrimination rooted in statistics, this variant resides in the inner recesses of the human psyche. Drawing on empirical studies, we will see that unconscious racial discrimination influences the social judgments of all Americans and lies at the heart of “Negrophobia,” a posttraumatic stress disorder about Blacks that courts have actually permitted to play a role in formal legal proceedings.
Finally, not content to curse the gloom, I hope to light a candle. Specifically, I will frame a proactive strategy for helping individuals avoid imposing the Black Tax on African Americans. Using recent research in social and cognitive psychology, we will see how racially liberal people can combat unconscious discrimination by inhibiting their automatic negative responses to Blacks and replacing them with controlled, nonprejudiced ones. For this prejudice reduction strategy to work, individuals must consciously confront their own racial stereotypes. This is not easy. Courts, for example, are reluctant to allow attorneys to bring the issue of prejudice into the open at trial. Judges have barred attorneys who represent Blacks, gays, and other socially marginalized clients from encouraging jurors to confront their unconscious biases on the ground that such confrontations “play to the prejudices of the jury.” Without proactive efforts, however, this most cruelly regressive of America’s taxes will continue deepening this nation’s racial rift; with such efforts, there is hope of healing.
I must add one caveat. I am no Pollyanna about the prospects for promoting social justice through the courts and other state institutions; the predations of the Leviathan state are too well known for such unqualified optimism. Unless one is possessed by an irresistible urge to assume the shape of a pancake, only a quixotic fool would charge head-on into an oncoming juggernaut—take it from a reformed flapjack. Yet I maintain that this juridic juggernaut called the American justice system can be gainfully wielded in the service of justice—but only by grasping its inner logic and, as in judo, using its own momentum against it. On this point, I share the sentiments of the influential nineteenth-century activist who exhorted,“We must force the frozen circumstances to dance by playing to them their own melody.”
Chapter One
THE “REASONABLE RACIST”: A SLIPPERY OXYMORON
The “Reasonable Racist” asserts that, even if his belief that Blacks are “prone to violence” stems primarily from racism—that is, from a belief in the genetic predisposition of Blacks toward greater violence, from uncritical acceptance of the Black cultural stereotype, or from personal racial animus—he should be excused for considering the victim’s race before using force because most similarly situated Americans would have done so as well. In our criminal justice system, “blame is reserved for the (statistically) deviant,”1 asserts the Reasonable Racist. “Therefore,” he concludes, “an individual racist in a racist society cannot be condemned for an expression of human frailty as ubiquitous as racism.”
The Reasonable Racist’s position, though
