Where racism is still alive and well

My ferret friend took issue with my post on racism a few days back, but to his credit, he misunderstood part of what I was saying. Basically, I wasn't saying it's racist to show black folks committing crimes (although I'd be happy to show him some interesting statistics from media studies showing how news broadcasts disproportionately feature black folks committing crime instead of whites. Nor was I arguing that just because more people of color are arrested does that a priori mean we are all racists.

The Disproportionate Minority Contact issue in the juvenile justice (and criminal justice) system means that people of color are in the system in numbers beyond what we would expect from their presence in the general population. Many statistical studies have shown that, controlling for actual crime rates (on self-reports and in comparison studies), people of color are arrested, tried, incarcerated, etc. in numbers disproportionate to their proportion of the population. That means that even if blacks or hispanics or vietnamese folks actually committed more crime than whites, they still are arrested and incarcerated more than whites are.

The point is not that we should stop catching people of color who commit crime, but that we shouldn't be overlooking the white folks who do drugs at up to six times the rate of black folks or who commit white collar crime at similarly disproportionate rates and never get caught. (end of rant)

A quick note on the Katrina disaster: there are a number of news stories that demonstrate how the federal response was less organized and useful than it was for past hurricane disasters (i.e. Andrew). However, I don't think it's right to jump to accusing federal agencies and the President of racism just because the disaster response was bungled. After all, there are plenty of alternative explanations, such as Mr. Brown of FEMA being an unqualified nepotistic appointee, President Bush playing guitar and eating cake for two days after New Orleans was swamped, or the large number of National Guard stationed overseas in our new front in the war on terror.