Rude Awakening

From municipal buildings flying Confederate battle flags, to cops murdering young black men in cold blood, the resurgence of racism is open and unapologetic. We see it almost daily on the news as  violence and hate speech begets more of the same. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood and in my liberal white girl ignorance I thought I had an idea of what this exploding racism meant to black Americans.

Tonight, a simple encounter hit me square in the face with reality.

After an evening at the symphony, my husband and I were leisurely walking the deserted downtown streets when a voice behind us startled me. “Coming up on your right” the young man shouted. I turned to see two young black men on skateboards heading towards us. One was dressed in summer clothes, and the one who called out to us was in a red jacket, hood over his head, big grin on his face. I smiled back as he came up closer to us. As he passed us, friend in tow, he said “I just like to let people know I am coming…especially when I have my hoodie up. You never know who is packing around here and I don’t want any (pause) “misunderstandings.”  My reply was, “You’re fine. Don’t worry about having a “misunderstanding” with us.” He gave us a nod and he and his silent friend took off past us.

I watched their forms grow smaller as they made their way down the dimly lit street, my gaze attached to the boy’s hooded head.

I was suddenly overwhelmed with anger; blinding rage really. The feeling of injustice raised my blood pressure. The fact this kid felt he had to announce his presence to avoid being shot because he was young, black and had a hoodie on went from the abstract indignation to real anger.

I was angry at a society that shoots young black men in certain states of dress for imagined crimes they have committed or will commit. I was angry for the boy who felt he had to justify his presence in a country that is supposed to be free of such restrictions, and I was mad at myself, for having ever thought I might even remotely understand his life.  In that moment of clarity I understood that there would never be any way for me to completely understand what his existence is like. At that moment I was embarrassed to call myself a liberal because, in our quest for justice and equality for all, we have dared to believe we somehow know what it is to be one of the victims of bigotry and hatred. We have the nerve to assume that because we are outraged at the injustice that this allows us to magically understand the world young black men live in.

As his figure got smaller and smaller I had to fight the urge to run after him and apologize to him for the society he lives in, to apologize because he feels he needs to let white people know ahead of time “hey, I am not going to hurt you so don’t shoot me please”. It’s disgusting that I ever thought I had a clue, that because I am liberal and open minded, good hearted and all that crap that somehow that made me able to magically understand what others go through, be it a young black man in a hoodie or a single mother on welfare. How dare I? That is a mistake I will not make again. Thanks for the humble pie kid.

The Facts; Lets End The Argument

While looking for source material on the subject, I came across this article from USA Today by Alan Gomez. It is such a well written piece I decided to post it here, it is far better then anything I could write and he says pretty much what I wanted to say.(USA Today, Alan Gomez, July 16, 2015)

HOW VIOLENT ARE UNDOCUMENT IMMIGRANTS?

MIAMI — The war over illegal immigration in this country is too often waged via hyperbole.

Undocumented immigrants who are valedictorians of their high schools classes are held up against those who are members of brutal street gangs. Undocumented immigrants either help local economies flourish or bleed them dry. They're either hard-working, law-abiding members of society simply trying to improve their lot in life, or job-stealing opportunists who are holding Americans back.

After years of covering immigration, I've found only one absolute certainty: the truth always lies somewhere in the middle. And so is the case with the latest battle that started with Donald Trump's reaction to the murder of Kathryn Steinle, allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant in San Francisco.

Trump, the billionaire Republican presidential hopeful, has used that killing as proof that he has been right all along about undocumented immigrants, that they bring with them a level of criminality far higher than native-born Americans. Immigration advocates have fought back, arguing that this was an isolated instance far from representative of the entire population of 11 million undocumented immigrants.

So who's right? Let's look at their numbers.

Supporters of the Trump theory have been pointing to data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission that found undocumented immigrants account for disturbingly high levels of violent crime. While they represent just 3.5% of the U.S. population, undocumented immigrants represented 7% of federal prison sentences following convictions on charges of sexual abuse, 9% of murders, 12% of assaults and 30% of kidnappings in 2013.

Case closed, right? Far from it.

Only a tiny percentage of the nation’s violent crimes are handled by the federal court system. Yes, undocumented immigrants accounted for 9.2% of federal murder convictions in 2013, but that represents a grand total of eight murder cases. When you consider that the FBI estimates there were 14,196 murders in the U.S. in 2013, those few cases handled by the federal court system don’t quite register as a reliable sample set.

The same goes for the other violent crimes cited in those statistics. Add the fact that undocumented immigrants are far more likely to be caught up in the federal court system because of non-violent immigration violations, and the numbers shouldn't mean much.

But when updated data for 2014 were released last week, largely mirroring the previous year's figures, many pounced on them as proof of rampant crime by undocumented immigrants. Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., cited the data in a column last week, and the numbers received prominent coverage by conservative outlets such as Breitbart.

On the other side, many immigration advocates have been pointing to a report also released last week by the American Immigration Council. That study used different kinds of data that led to the same conclusion, that undocumented immigrants commit violent crimes at a far lower rate than native-born Americans.

First there's the big picture. From 1990 to 2013, the number of undocumented immigrants in the country tripled from 3.5 million to 11.2 million. Yet during that time, violent crime rates dropped 48% nationwide, according to the report. Since undocumented immigrants make up such a small percentage of the population, it's impossible to draw a straight conclusion from those numbers, so let's see what else they've got..

The authors also looked at incarceration rates for males between 18 and 39, since most crimes are committed by males in that age range. Using data from the 2010 Census, the report found that 1.6% of foreign-born males are in jail, compared with 3.3% of the native-born population. Researchers have long questioned the accuracy of Census data for prisoners, since the information they get from inmates is often incomplete, and immigrants could lie out of fear of being deported. But the authors found similar trends going back to 1980, so that helps bolster their case.

Finally, the authors tried to isolate undocumented immigrants through a variety of narrow studies conducted in recent decades. In each case, they found evidence to show that undocumented immigrants were less likely to commit violent crimes than their native-born neighbors.

So where does that leave us?

The reporter in me wishes there was a more definitive way of comparing crime rates for undocumented immigrants and the American-born population. But using the data we have, it seems impossible to responsibly claim that those immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than their American-born neighbors.

Don't trust me? How about the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes any kind of plan to grant legal status to undocumented immigrants and regularly testifies in Congress against them.

"There's no evidence that immigrants are either more or less likely to commit crimes than anyone else in the population," Janice Kephart, a CIS researcher, said last weekon the PBS NewsHour.

In the world of the immigration debate, that's as definitive as it gets.

Hmmm...so then....people are people, whomever they are? What a novel idea.