White Man's Jewelry

"YOU OWN A jewelry store in a downtown neighborhood. Because you worry about robberies, admission is by buzzer...Someone arrives at your door. He is young. He is male. He is black. Do you buzz him in? Are you a racist if you don't?"

Pasted across the cover of the most recent issue of The New Republic, this so-called ethical dilemma has been making headlines nationwide ever since Washington Postcolumnist Richard Cohen wrote about the issue in early September. Apparently, many Washington jewelers have chosen not to admit young black men, and, according to Cohen, that's just fine. After all, these people commit an inordinately large percentage of robberies, and business is business. It's not racism, just common sense.

It now seems that Richard Cohen is not alone. Dipping into the "respectable" citizen pool at large, The New Republic asked a handful of people, some of them Black, how they would respond to the jewelers' dilemma. While not all of them were as unabashed as Cohen, most of them took the jewelers' side.

To say that these respondents are bigots of the worst kind is to do them too much justice. If they were unwilling to share bathrooms and water fountains, at least their intentions would be unmistakable. But by making the dilemma an issue of statistics instead of race, they hope to appear respectable, even liberal.

Despite this valiant attempt, the respondents are not able to escape the normative issues at hand. While Blacks commit more crime than whites, the difference between men and women, and between the young and the old, is much more significant. Why do we not hear of high-crime white neighborhoods where jewelers refuse to admit men or young people?

The answer is all too apparent. Whites would never do such a thing because they spend their lives interacting with other whites. Anyone who has friends who are white males, or children who are young whites, is incapable of simply dismissing these groups of people as potential criminals. But when blacks never enter one's circle of intimate relations, it's much easier to deny their individuality, to place them in the stereotypical box of potential muggers and murderers.

There is no better illustration of this point than the "National Crime Victim Survey" done by the Department of Justice, which indicates that 83 percent of the victims of Black robberies are Black themselves. Why, then, don't Blacks see another Black and automatically think crime?

Of course, this is not the first time that a minority has received unfair treatment with the help of a few statisticians. In 1867, insurance companies tried to end the sale of fire insurance to Jews after it was determined that the proportion of Jewish fires in insured buildings was much greater than that of Christian fires. I wonder what Richard Cohen would have said about that?

FAR MORE frightening than the particular offensive statements articulated by Cohen and his cohorts is the fact that his logic can be used to support almost any racist policy. Real estate agents can refuse to show Blacks apartments in white neighborhoods because property rates go down when they move in. School desegregation can be rejected because of the danger to white kids. Some people might even argue that search and seizure prohibitions should be relaxed for Blacks because of their high crime rates. After all, crime prevention is important, not individual rights.

Yet our entire legal system rests on the idea that individual rights are paramount. Every person is presumed innocent until proven guilty and every individual is treated as precisely that--an individual, not a member of a group. To deny this truth is to reject the fundamental democratic principle that the law was created to treat people equally.

That Cohen and his friends are willing to treat Blacks unequally not only violates the law, but does not bode well for the future of democratic society. Their views are symptomatic of a growing tendency to deny that Blacks are full-fledged citizens since they have failed to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and "make it" in white middle class society.

Blaming Blacks in such a fashion not only betrays an incredible ignorance of the history of Black oppression in America; it also decreases the chances of improving their lot in the near future. Cohen basically is telling Blacks, "Sure, I'll accept you, but not until you become educated, upstanding citizens. In the meantime, stay out of my jewelry stores, keep away from my apartment building, and don't hang out with my kids." This attitude is more than simply offensive. It prevents us from fighting the profound inequality that still permeates our society.