Speeding while black it's.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

The late comedian Godfrey Cambridge used to complain that he just couldn't win for losing.

"If I'm running, the cops say I'm escaping," he said. "If I'm walking, they charge me with being defiant. If I'm lounging, they insist I'm a vagrant."

Now a North Carolina study of motorists undertaken last summer may add substance to Cambridge's complaint. This study, paid for by the state police, is studying whether a person's driving speed is directly related to his or her race.

Studies of the issue have become a craze in the law enforcement community. Such a study has been under consideration in New Jersey since at least 1997, and about 400 law enforcement agencies (compared to only five a few years ago) across the nation are now performing similar studies.

This whole question seems to lack a reasonable basis in fact. Will the study determine that the greater amount of melanin in the skin of blacks pushes them to exceed the highway speed limit? For the life of me, I can't imagine what the color of a person's skin could have to do with his or her speed of movement.

The data are to be released later this year, and some believe it should help determine whether blacks in North Carolina indeed do drive faster than whites. If the data are conclusive, it may be that police in that state are not engaging in racial profiling, but responding to the fact that minorities exceed the state's speed limits more often than other drivers.

Police in North Carolina, like those in other jurisdictions (including New Jersey), insist they do not engage in racial profiling but believe that minority motorists exceed speed limits to a greater extent than do white drivers. But nobody up until now has offered an explanation for this alleged behavior.