Not literally. We do now have statutes at the federal level and in most states prohibiting racial discrimination in nearly every sphere of human activity, but they do not provide for criminal penalties. They impose fines for violations and compensation to victims. Where hate crimes laws exist, they apply to conduct that was already criminal, adding increased penalties where hatred for some aspect of the victim’s identity was a factor in the crime.
It seems unlikely that Representative Cannon literally means that the statutes in question are a crime. They can’t be, which she knows.
But her statement gets to a much bigger, very important point, especially with her recent arrest for the alleged crime of knocking on a door.
Rep. Cannon, obviously, is Black. A huge problem in our culture is the tendency of too many people to suspect that African Americans are involved in criminal activity, even without any evidence. This an important component to the mentality that leads cops to shoot them for no good reason, even though that is never the job of the cops.
Thoughtful people often point out how frequently the police manage to arrest white people without killing them, even when they have strong reason to suspect the person committed a serious crime, but end up killing African Americans whom they suspect of relatively trivial offenses.
Or of no offense at all.
This is also why so many white people feel free to police, in the broadest sense, the conduct, and even the presence of African American people even without any formal authority to do so.
When an African American person is merely present, suddenly too many white people feel privileged to play cop and try to remove or otherwise sanction the African American person, with results that range from the merely annoying to the fatal.
That’s what happened to Trayvon Martin.
Martin was walking home from a store one night when a self appointed neighborhood watch vigilante attacked him and killed him. The incident produced the typical effort to represent him as some sort of criminal when he was not, especially after President Obama spoke sympathetically about him.
Obama himself suffered from this tendency, even though it had little discernible impact on him. People who could not wrap their tiny minds around the idea of having a Black president dreamt up the ridiculous birther conspiracy theory, according to which Obama was not born in the United States and thus was not eligible to serve as president. A prominent purveyor of the birther nonsense was our late racist in chief, Donald Trump.
This is the level of stupidity involved in believing that African Americans are criminals with zero evidence.
How we think about people and issues has a huge impact on how we treat them and respond to them.
Even claiming that African Americans commit more crimes does not answer the problem. We have overwhelming evidence to show that African Americans just get more attention from police officers than do white people, so it is at least as likely that they are just more likely to get arrested than to commit crimes.
The belief that African Americans are criminals thus becomes a self fulfilling prophecy that works the worst sort of discrimination against them that anyone could conceive. Psychologists use the term, “implicit bias” to describe this sort of deep seated belief. To some extent, this is just how the human brain works. We cannot keep track of all of the sensory inputs we get, so our brains set up beliefs and expectations to help us manage the data. Those beliefs can be more or less accurate. The belief that any African American person is likely involved in some crime is grossly inaccurate and highly prejudicial.
This is not just a problem for adults. It impacts school children as well.
Perhaps the worst part of the problem is that it tends to be self perpetuating. The implicit bias of believing that African Americans are likely criminals results in persons with actual authority paying more attention to them, meaning they are more likely to suffer penalties for conduct that is common to both white and Black people, which in turn seems to confirm the initial prejudice.
To return to Rep. Cannon, Republicans in too many states are busy trying to reinforce this ridiculous, discriminatory system by making it harder for African Americans to vote, only so Republicans can hold onto power at any cost. Georgia police arrested Rep. Cannon, notoriously, when she knocked on the door of the governor’s office while he was signing sudden, ill considered, unnecessary revisions to the State’s election procedures that have the racist purpose of making voting more difficult for African Americans, so the offense is double — white people trying to make voting more difficult for people like Rep. Cannon and her constituents, and arresting Rep. Cannon for doing her job.
This is really an excellent example of obviously treating an African American person as a criminal for perfectly ordinary behavior that in no way threatened anyone and did not violate any laws:
This is obviously irrational and stupid, and something white people can and should be aware of. Pay attention and stop it.