Re “The Good, Racist People,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates (column, March 7), about the actor Forest Whitaker, who was stopped and frisked last month in a Manhattan deli by an employee:
Mr. Coates carefully turns our attention to what sociologists call covert racism, including its now accepted but unspoken form of quiet racism. Ignored and often unnoticed by good people, quiet racism occupies a comfortable part of America culture.
An academic search committee decides not to hire a minority candidate because “he may not be a good fit” or “she may not reach our students.” A family decides on the selection of home health care help. A white police officer must quickly decide to make an arrest, issue a summons or not. These examples and thousands like them, far beyond public view, perpetuate racism and entrench it in the culture.
All good people making important, life-defining decisions. Quiet racism.
RAYMOND D’ANGELO
Brooklyn, March 7, 2013
The writer is a professor of sociology at St. Joseph’s College and the co-author of “Taking Sides: Clashing Views in Race and Ethnicity.”
To the Editor:
A big part of the problem is how we frame the possibility of shoplifting. We often posit a model in which only certain types of people steal, and we give extra scrutiny to those people. This is a recipe for racial, class, gender and age discrimination.
There are two other models that we rarely consider: scrutinizing everyone or scrutinizing no one. Both offer the sort of equal treatment that I, a black woman who has been given extra scrutiny in stores her whole life, crave.
Both are expensive, either in prophylactic measures or shoplifting losses. But so what? Merchants can do what businesses routinely do: shift the cost of treating everyone the same to consumers. I, for one, would happily pay more to feel as if I were being treated like everyone else.
LOLITA BUCKNER INNISS
Clinton, N.Y., March 7, 2013
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