As Long as I Got My Suit and Tie

So one of my very close friends - he’s a black guy - texted me to tell me about an incident when he felt that he had been racially profiled. We go to the same school, a somewhat elite university in the United States, and he’s on campus for part of the summer. He told me how recently he was walking around through a pretty tourist-y part of campus when he walked by a campus police car. The car pulled up beside him as he was crossing the road, the officer got out of the car, and preceded to ask my friend what his business on campus was. My friend said he was a student and that he was on campus for the summer, taking classes. The police officer asked to see his student ID as proof that he was an actual student. The officer said the reason why he stopped my friend was because my friend had been looking at the police car a few too many times and it seemed suspicious, although my friend says he only looked at the car once and then again before crossing the street.

He made an off-handed comment about how his clothing could be considered suspicious (he wears the typical chubbies and crew cut socks with Sperry’s that many young men in college wear). I responded with a joke about how he has to always be wearing a suit and tie in order to be considered one of the “good ones.” My friend believes that he wouldn’t have been deemed suspicious and stopped if he were white, and I could tell through the text that my friend was really bothered by the whole situation.

It was very surprising to me that my friend not only recognized anything off about the situation with the police officer but also, that he attributed it to race. Now, mind you. My friend isn’t someone who goes around crying racism all the time. In fact, quite the opposite. He’s usually the one telling me that situations have nothing to do with race or gender or systemic discrimination/oppression and that it’s all in my head. Even though he would never say so, I personally think he subscribes to Pharrell Williams’ the “New Black” school of thought, that just as long as you’re one of the “good” black guys, acting and dressing in inoffensive ways to white people (a.k.a. completely conforming to white hegemony), then white people will have no choice but to treat you with dignity. I think he’s starting to realize that that is far from the case.

He asked me how someone like him was supposed to combat the stereotypes that so negatively affect him, and I responded by saying that constant deconstruction is the key. I know he really didn’t understand what I meant. What I mean is that stereotypes, especially negative and persistent ones like black male criminality, apply equally to all people that claim that identity, regardless of class, education, or wardrobe. Trying to be the exception by being what is stereotypically thought of as the antithesis of criminal while still being a black male doesn’t disprove the stereotype; it actually reinforces it by acknowledging that black culture must be deviant or inferior in some way for a well dressed, articulate, educated, successful black man to be considered “the exception.”  That is why dominant groups so readily use the idea of the “exception,” so they never have to question their own erroneous stereotypes when confronted with a direct contradiction to these stereotypes. The problem is that these “exceptions” cannot be universally considered exceptions because they succumb to the same stereotypes based on inherent physical attributes such as race or gender as any other person who shares that identity. That means when the racist cop sees a black kid walking around campus, his first thought isn’t “Hmm, maybe this guy is one of the exceptions.” His first thought is the stereotype about black male criminality that is actually reinforced when we use terms like “excpetion” to describe black males who don’t fit the stereotype. The police officer didn’t know my friend, and he didn’t have to in order to place him in the narrow box that is our conception of what a typical black male is, regardless of my friend’s actual achievements, background, and personality traits.

That is why deconstruction - the method of critically analyzing assumptions implicit in text, language, and cultural constructions often in order to reveal their inadequacy - is such a necessary process. I was telling my friend, it’s not enough to break glass ceilings but we must burn down entire buildings. If educated black man is the “exception,” then we must question a system that not only defines education through traditional Western means of schooling but also question a society that makes access to this form of education unequally accessible to individuals on the basis of race. That is wholly different than all of us attempting to become “exceptions” in order to gain false acceptance.