Racial Profiling is Institutionalized Racism

On the night of February 4th 1999, Amadou Diallo, an unarmed and innocent African immigrant, was gunned down in a hail of 41 bullets while standing in the vestibule of his own apartment building in the Bronx. The officers responsible for Diallo's death were part of New York Police Department's "elite" Street Crime Unit. The plain-clothes officers approached Diallo and pulled their weapons. When Diallo, probably believing they were thieves, pulled out his wallet, the "elite" officers opened a barrage of 41 bullets on the unarmed black man.

Witnesses and forensic evidence suggest that the officers fired a second round of shots after a brief pause and that Diallo's frame absorbed a majority of the bullets after having hit the ground. These facts clearly show that Diallo's human and civil rights were violated that night, and that these four white police officers are guilty of murder. However, they were acquitted of all charges.

Thousands of people protested both the initial indemnity and the acquittal over a year later. This included a collective of Stanford students, who on March 10th, 2000 coordinated a two-hundred-person rally in protest of the Diallo verdict and all other acts of police brutality. Over one thousand Stanford community members signed petitions to the U.S. Dept. of Justice demanding a new federal trial.

Ultimately, the problems of police brutality and racial profiling may be alleviated by race-sensitive police training, requiring officers to be from the neighborhoods they police, and most importantly, decentralizing the police department. This would include holding police officers accountable to an effective community-elected review board that would take the place of ...

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...y, is the way that institutionalized racism operates in this country.

In order to be racist, then, one must have power over such institutions. Therefore, in amerikkka, minorities and people of color do not have the agency to commit acts of institutionalized racism. In this country, whites alone have the power to commit such acts on an institutionalized level. Furthermore, this system is based on maintaining skin privilege; so all white people, simply because of the color of their skin, benefit from this system at the expense of other races, and are therefore to a certain degree racist. This reality may be hard for many to swallow, but whites must be conscious of their active and passive participation in this country's institutionalized racism before they can attempt to effect any significant changes in the status quo.