On the Right - What About Negative Stereotypes?(Brief Article)

NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 20

For years and at different levels we've gotten fired up by the fear of creeping social estrangement. The "quest for community" was one great expression of this fear, and recent misgivings on the matter of bilingual education and the centrifugalization of America are often heard. One division of this social quandary is racial profiling, what it says, and what it does. John Derbyshire, writing in National Review, has brilliantly examined the question and its implications.

We're reminded that racial profiling went mainstage in a public debate between Vice President Gore and nomination challenger Bill Bradley. The scene, New York's Apollo Theatre, February 2000. The debate turned to the shooting of innocent African immigrant Amadou Diallo by New York City police. Sen. Bradley said, "I . . . think it reflects . . . racial profiling that seeps into the mind of someone so that he sees a wallet in the hand of a white man as a wallet, but a wallet in the hand of a black man as a gun." He promised that if he were nominated and elected, he would, by executive order, "eliminate racial profiling at the federal level."

How would one phrase such an executive order? How would it have applied in Chicago, in the matter of LaTanya Haggerty? She was shot dead in June 1999 by a Chicago policewoman who mistook her cell phone for a handgun. The policewoman was, like Ms. Haggerty, black.

Mr. Derbyshire says that it is true that there are negative stereotypes, but that these are acted upon because they can be correct, and useful. Stereotypes, in sociological research, are held up as "essential life ...