-- Alexis de Tocqueville, 1830

When it comes to matters of race, Americans' lack of appreciation for history is surpassed only by our capacity for denial.

Both were quite apparent in widespread reactions of surprise and disbelief over recent racial rioting in Cincinnati. Days of unrest followed the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man by a white police officer earlier this month. Many wondered how a race riot could occur in a major American city in the year 2001.

A better understanding of history (both Cincinnati's and the history of race riots in the United States) might have prompted a different question: Why, more than a quarter century after the Kerner Commission studied violent racial protests in eight U.S. cities, including Cincinnati, do black men continue to be brutalized and killed by police officers at much higher rates than any other group in the country?

The answers to both questions may lie in a growing national proclivity for avoiding even the discussion of race. But by shunning racial issues and ignoring history -- including fairly recent history -- we make America's most intractable problem that much more difficult to solve.

No one should have been shocked that Cincinnati blacks would have viewed the April 7 shooting of 19-year-old Timothy Thomas as solid evidence that the police do not protect them -- and proof that society at large is not taking their concerns about excessive police force seriously.

Previous shootings

The shooting was not the first such incident in Cincinnati in recent years. Though not all were committed by white police officers and not all of the black victims were unarmed, there have been 14 other fatal police shootings of black men in this Midwestern city since 1995. Four have happened since November.

Worse yet, the Thomas shooting allegedly occurred while he was running from an officer who was attempting to arrest him for 12 misdemeanor traffic citations and two warrants for running from officers. That record raised the hot-button issue of racial profiling by police. Was Thomas stopped all those times because he was a bad driver, or because he was black?

What should be shocking about the shooting is how little has changed since the most concentrated rash of race riots this century.

Indeed, the three days of rioting after Thomas' death were hauntingly similar to what happened in Cincinnati following the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968. One of the primary catalysts for those riots was police mistreatment.

``This wouldn't have happened if they had listened to us in those years back then,'' said Charles Wimms, a Cincinnati construction worker quoted recently in the New York Times. ``So now we have a new generation of young black men running the streets again to stir things up for what is right.''

Miami comparison

The same could have been said of race riots in the predominantly black Liberty City neighborhood of Miami, in 1989 after a young black man was shot by a Latino police officer or in Los Angeles after the acquittals of four white officers in the beating of black motorist Rodney King in 1992. As in Cincinnati, the riots in Miami and Los Angeles were sparked by the incidents in question, but fueled by years and years of perceived neglect and indifference.

In L.A., for example, many black residents complained that nothing had changed since the 1965 Watts riots there. The ignition for the Watts disturbances? A perceived act of excessive police force against a black motorist.

Even in the face of overwhelming historical precedent, American denial about the role that race or racism plays in these and similar events remains strong. Despite repeated warnings from civil rights leaders and black police officers in Cincinnati, the police department's official response was that the shootings must be considered individually rather than as a pattern.

More important from the perspective of black Cincinnatians is that no city police officer has ever been convicted of a killing. There has been only one reprimand. Not only are black people in Cincinnati and other cities angered that nothing seems to be done about alleged police brutality of blacks, they also are offended at what one black city councilwoman described in the New York Times as the ``automatic defensiveness'' of the police department when anyone raises the possibility of racially motivated misconduct.

But many Americans, particularly white Americans, are quick to deny race as the primary motive in almost any negative act against a person of color unless the person committing the act is wearing a white sheet. Police brutality cases are just a symptom of the illness. Denial is the more serious affliction.

Many white Americans took great umbrage at the statement by O.J. Simpson attorney Johnnie Cochran that ``race colors everything'' in American life, including the trial of his client. Many whites said that was all wrong: The trial, they insisted, was about celebrity.

But for African-Americans, the so-called ``trial of the century,'' was clearly about race because Simpson was accused of murdering a white woman and a white man. Had he been charged with the death of his first wife, a black woman, many blacks argued, the case would not have been so spectacular and surely would have been dropped after he was acquitted of criminal murder charges. (Simpson was later tried in a civil case and found guilty of violating the civil rights of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her companion, Ron Goldman.)

So eager are we to deny the existence of racism that many white Americans and even some black Americans now argue that race should not be a factor in any decisions regarding school and college admissions or hiring. That argument ignores clear evidence that institutional racism and discrimination continue to keep playing fields unfairly -- and illegally -- uneven across the nation.

There are even attempts to deny the existence of racial profiling. Last week, columnist George Will made much of an essay by a woman named Heather MacDonald entitled the ``Myth of Racial Profiling'' in which she attempts to cast doubt on the prevalence of racial profiling -- a practice that President Bush and Secretary of State John Ashcroft have acknowledged and vowed to end.

Systematic meanness

Part of the difficulty is that most white Americans are ``taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance'' upon whites, as a Wellesley College researcher named Peggy McIntosh wrote about white privilege in 1989. As a result, far too many Americans easily accept the fallacy that fighting racism and discrimination is no longer necessary.

The problem is not that reasonable people cannot disagree about what constitutes racial profiling or hold different opinions on other tough race issues. But to deny the existence of perhaps the one thing that still consistently frays the fabric of our society is to threaten the future of this country.

De Tocqueville's chilling prediction rings as true today as it did 170 years ago. How can we ever hope to solve the problem, if we don't discuss it? And how can we discuss it if we won't admit we have a problem?

As an American, when I hear such denial, often from otherwise intelligent people, I remember Thomas Jefferson's great fear that race relations could one day be our undoing. And, like Jefferson, I tremble for my country.

Sylvester Monroe is an assistant managing editor at the Mercury News. In 27 years as a correspondent at Newsweek and Time, he reported on several racial issues, including the Rodney King trials and Los Angeles riots.

© 2001 The Mercury News

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