The racialization of crime—the tendency to “impute crime to color,” to use Frederick Douglass’s words—did not wither away as the country became increasingly removed from slavery. Proof that crime continues to be imputed to color resides in the many evocations of “racial profiling” in our time. That it is possible to be targeted by the police for no other reason than the color of one’s skin is not mere speculation. Police departments in major urban areas have admitted the existence of formal procedures designed to maximize the numbers of African-Americans and Latinos arrested—even in the
...more
