Recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) depredations in Minnesota further strengthen the already compelling case for abolishing the agency. A recent federal district court ruling outlines in detail ICE’s extensive use of force against peaceful protestors, violations of a variety of constitutional rights, and other cruel, unjust and illegal actions. Moreover, it is clear that these wrongs are not just the fault of a few rogue agents, but structural defects in the agency and its mission, exacerbated by the Trump administration’s enormous expansion of it, and hiring of numerous dubious new recruits. The agency doesn’t even follow its own supposed safety guidelines, which neglect was one of the reasons for the indefensible killing of Renee Good.
Abolition is indeed the right approach. In an August 2025 article in The Hill, I outlined how to do it: by shutting down the agency and transferring its funds to state and local police. This strategy would have the virtue of simultaneously further expanding political support for abolition, reducing crime, and ending ICE abuses. Here is a brief excerpt:
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has become notorious for its cruelty, abuses of civil liberties and racial profiling. As a result, the agency and the Trump administration’s deportation policies generally have become increasingly unpopular…..
[M]ost Democrats have hesitated to call for the agency’s abolition, probably for fear of seeming to be soft on crime…. But opponents can avoid such accusations by combining abolition of ICE with reallocation of its funds to ordinary police, which would undercut accusations of being pro-criminal or anti-law enforcement. This could greatly expand support for abolition….
In my 2022 book “Free to Move,” I proposed dismantling ICE and giving the money to ordinary police, perhaps in the form of federal grants to state and local law enforcement. Recipient agencies should be required to use the funds to target violent and property crime, and abjure ICE-style abuses.
Putting more ordinary police on the streets is an effective way to reduce crime rates, according to a long line of studies….
Focusing on undocumented immigrants is a poor use of law enforcement resources…. Transferring ICE funds to state and local police would allow a greater focus on violent and property crime, regardless of the perpetrators’ background….
Abolishing ICE would not end all deportations. State and local authorities could still, in many cases, turn illegal migrants over to the federal government for removal… But abolishing ICE would make deportation much more dependent on state and local cooperation and would empower jurisdictions to make their own choices.
This strategy is even more viable today than might have been the case a few months ago. Events in Minnesota have further turned public opinion against ICE, and the idea of transferring its funds to real cops can provide an additional boost for abolition, by neutralizing fears that doing so would somehow increase crime. In addition, transferring the money to state and local cops could draw support from law enforcement interest groups that would stand to benefit.
In the August article, I also outlined how ICE abuses – including illegal violence, racial profiling, and horrific detention conditions – were already ubiquitous, even before the outrages in Minnesota. Recent events are an expansion of these evils, not a singular aberration. In that article, and a follow-up piece for the Boston Globe, (non-paywalled version here), I addressed a number of possible objections, such as concerns that local police also engage in various abuses. Here is an excerpt from that second article:
Many studies show that putting more police on the streets can reduce crime. Indeed, diverting law enforcement resources from deportation to ordinary policing can help focus more effort on the violent and property crimes that most harm residents of high-crime areas. Deportation efforts, by contrast, target a population with a lower crime rate than others…..
Some progressives might nonetheless oppose transferring funds to conventional police. The latter, too, sometimes engage in abusive practices, including racial profiling. I share some of these concerns and am a longtime advocate of increased efforts to combat racial profiling. But comparative assessment is vital here. Despite flaws, conventional police are much better in these respects than ICE, with its ingrained culture of brutality and massive profiling. They have stronger incentives to maintain good relations with local communities and don’t need to rely on racial profiling nearly as much to find suspects. A shift of law enforcement funds from ICE to conventional police would mean a major overall reduction in racial profiling and other abuses.
Survey data show most Black people (the biggest victims of profiling) actually want to maintain or increase police presence in their neighborhoods, even as they (understandably) abhor racial profiling. Grant money transferred from ICE could potentially be conditioned on stronger efforts to curb racial profiling and related abuses, thereby further reducing the problem. It should also be conditioned on spending it on combatting violent and property crime, and structured in a way that prevents excessive dependence on federal funding.
If ICE can be abolished without transferring the funds to local and state police, I would still support doing so. But the strategy I outline offers the most likely pathway to political success, and could simultaneously reduce criminality in high-crime neighborhoods.
I first outlined this general approach to immigration and crime issues in Chapter 6 of my 2022 book “Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom,” where I also make other points on why crime control is a poor justification for deportation and immigration restrictions. See also my more recent discussion of these broader issues here.
Today, the Supreme Court issued a “shadow docket” ruling staying a district court decision that had enjoined ICE from engaging in racial and ethnic profiling in immigration enforcement in Los Angeles. The decision was apparently joined by the six conservative justices; the three liberals dissented. As is often the case with “emergency”/shadow docket rulings, there is no majority opinion. Thus, we cannot know for sure what the majority justices’ reasoning was. We have only a concurring opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. But that opinion has deeply problematic elements. Most importantly, it is fundamentally at odds with the principle that government must be “color-blind” and abjure racial discrimination.
The district court found extensive use of racial profiling by ICE in immigration enforcement in the LA area, and issued an injunction barring it. Justice Kavanaugh, however, contends that the profiling is not so bad, and does not necessarily violate the Fourth Amendment because, while “apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion,” it could count as a “relevant factor when considered along with other salient factors.”
But even if it is not the sole factor, its use still qualifies as racial or ethnic discrimination. And, at least in some cases, it will be a decisive factor, in the sense that some people will be detained based on their apparent ethnicity, who otherwise would not have been. Imagine if the use of race and ethnicity were permitted in other contexts, so long as it is not the “sole” factor. Government could engage in racial discrimination in hiring (so long, again, as other factors were permitted), voting rights, access to education, and more.
Moreover, in this case, race and ethnicity clearly were major factors in ICE decision-making, not just peripheral ones. That is evident from the fact that ICE arrests in Los Angeles County declined by 66 percent after the district court issued the injunction the Supreme Court stayed today.
In SFFA v. Harvard the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling against racial preferences in university admissions, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” If this is a sound constitutional principle – and it is – there cannot be an ad hoc exception for immigration enforcement, or for law enforcement generally. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor emphasizes in her dissent, joined by all three liberal justices, “We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job.” Or at least that’s true if the Constitution genuinely requires government to abjure racial and ethnic discrimination.
Today’s case is under the Fourth Amendment, while SFFA v. Harvard was decided under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth. But it makes no sense to conclude that racial and ethnic discrimination is generally unconstitutional, yet also that its use is “reasonable” under the Fourth Amendment.
In assessing the desirability of staying the injunction Justice Kavanaugh also argues that illegal migrants have little or not legitimate interest in avoiding immigration detention, while citizens and legal residents are only slightly inconvenienced because “reasonable suspicion means only that immigration officers may briefly stop the individual and inquire about immigration status. If the person is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter.” This ignores the reality that ICE has detained and otherwise abused numerous US citizens and legal residents for long periods of time. As the district court ruling and Justice Sotomayor’s dissent describe, there are plenty of examples of this problem in the record of this very case. Moreover, even actual illegal migrants have a constitutional right to be free of racial discrimination. The relevant constitutional provisions aren’t limited to citizens or to legal residents.
Justice Kavanaugh also argues that the plaintiffs in this case – including people victimized by earlier incidents of ICE profiling – lacked standing to seek an injunction against future racial profiling because they cannot prove that the profiling will recur. He cites City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, a 1983 Supreme Court decision in which a victim of a police chokehold was denied standing to seek an injunction against future such incidents. But, as Sotomayor notes, ICE has a systematic policy of racial and ethnic profiling that it seeks to continue on a large scale, at least in the LA area at issue in this case. That makes the situation fundamentally different from Lyons, where the court found there was no evidence that LA police had a systematic policy of using illegal chokeholds.
There are some other issues covered by Kavanaugh and Sotomayor, which I will not attempt to go over here. But the above points suffice to show how problematic Kavanaugh’s position is.
In fairness, while Kavanaugh and possibly other conservative justices (depending on why they voted to impose the stay) are inconsistent on issues of racial discrimination, the same is true of the liberals. The arguments Kavanaugh uses to excuse racial profiling by law enforcement here are similar to those many left-liberals routinely use to justify affirmative action racial preferences in employment and university admissions. Just as Kavanaugh argues that race is just one of several factors used by ICE to decide who to detain, so defenders of affirmative action argue that race is just one of several factors in a “wholistic” process.
Kavanaugh also suggests that the use of race and ethnicity here may be understandable, given the large population of illegal migrants in the LA area, and the correlation (even if imperfect) between illegal status and the appearance of Hispanic ethnicity. As Kavanaugh notes, people who “come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English” are disproportionately likely to be illegal migrants. As I have been saying for many years, this kind of argument is very similar to standard rationales for affirmative action, which hold that there is a large population of ethnic minorities (particularly Blacks and Hispanics) who are disproportionately likely to be victims of past discrimination or to contribute to “diversity” in higher education. These correlations, it is said, justify the use of racial preferences, even if they are often inaccurate in a given case.
Conservatives and others who rightly reject this kind of rationale for affirmative action preferences should not accept the same flawed reasoning in the law enforcement context. Either it is acceptable for government to use race and ethnicity as a crude proxy for other characteristics, or it is not. If we truly believe in color-blind government, we cannot make an exception for for those government agents who carry badges and guns have the power to arrest and detain people.
Nor can the exception be cabined to immigration enforcement. If preventing illegal migration is sufficient reason to authorize racial discrimination (so long as it isn’t the only “sole” factor), why not preventing murder, rape, assault, or any number of other, more serious violations of the law? For that matter, why not pursuing racial justice – the traditional rationale for affirmative action (before it was displaced by the “diversity” theory, thanks to Supreme Court rulings blessing the latter)?
Today, the Supreme Court took a step in a badly wrong direction. But, since this is a shadow docket ruling issued without an majority opinion, it creates little, if any, binding precedent. Perhaps some of the five majority justices who didn’t join Kavanaugh have different and narrower grounds for their stance. Hopefully, a majority will reach a different conclusion when and if they take up this kind of issue more systematically. We shall see.
A motorist is suing Michigan State Police after troopers arrested him on false claims that he was intoxicated when they pulled him over in Benton Harbor shortly after 3 a.m. on April 10.
Dakarai Larriett, who is Black, claims he was racially profiled when troopers pulled over his Cadillac SUV, mocked his name, and suggested he smelled “fruity,” which he interpreted to be a homophobic remark.
At the time, Larriett was wearing pajamas and forced to undergo field sobriety tests in the cold. Trooper George Kanyuh, who Larriett says had a history of making sexist, racist, and homophobic statements on social media, was adamant that Larriett was under the influence.
“I don’t know what he’s on,” Kanyuh told his partner Matthew Okaiye, according to footage obtained from his body-worn camera. “I’m going to assume it’s weed and alcohol.”
Larriett says the camera footage proves that troopers were trying to plant drugs on him. At 3:25 a.m., Kanyuh can be seen rifling through the trunk of his squad car for two minutes, and the video goes dark. At one point, Okaiye appears to say, “Drugs?”
Kanyuh responds, “I don’t think I have any … I had a stash in here somewhere. I don’t know where it’s at.”
Without any proof that Larriett was under the influence, the troopers handcuffed him and took him to a hospital to be tested for drugs and alcohol. He was then taken to jail, even though his alcohol test turned up negative.
Then an already humiliating encounter with police allegedly turned even more degrading.
While doing a scan of Larriett’s stomach, police claimed they had spotted an “anomaly” and accused him of “trying to smuggle drugs into the jail by way of ingestion of a bag of drugs,” Larriett tells Metro Times in an email.
“An extremely humiliating moment occurred where I was forced to defecate publicly while Trooper Kanyuh yelled at me not to flush,” Larriett recalls.
Kanyuh says he was charged with operating under the influence of a controlled substance, but prosecutors quickly dismissed the case “due to lack of evidence and the unlawful nature of the stop and arrest,” according to a federal complaint filed by Larriett’s attorney Shawndrica N. Simmons.
Five months later, the results of Larriett’s blood tests for drugs and alcohol arrived, and they were negative.
“The actions of the Michigan State Police officers were part of a pattern and practice of racially discriminatory policing,” Simmons wrote in the demand for a jury trial.
After his arrest, Larriett found an X account, @GKanyuh, that he says belonged to Kanyuh before it was recently deleted. The tweets contained racist, homophobic, and misogynistic language and imagery.
In one retweet, a photo of a Black woman is captioned, “Met the biggest beauty of a crackhead last night.”
Larriett tells Metro Times he’s still struggling to come to terms with the traffic stop and arrest.
“It’s horrible,” he says. “I’m still shaking when I see that video.”
State police did not immediately return a request for comment from Metro Times.
The police bodycam video can be viewed below or on YouTube.
Four students from Monarch Montessori visited Denver City Council on Monday prepared with pitches. The 4th and 5th graders were set to speak during the general public comment session, equipped with bullet points detailing how their expanding Montbello school needs more classroom space and better pedestrian safety in the area.
But as two of the students, who are Black, began speaking to councilmembers, a person attending the meeting over Zoom began spewing racist language and insults.
“I was caught off guard,” said Councilwoman Shontel Lewis. “I’m hearing this happen and I’m seeing this young girl try to give her her public testimony and my instinct as a mom [goes to] how do we protect these babies? Turn that off, fix it. I’m looking over at our production staff and it’s not happening fast enough … I just, instinctually, just went to go hold the babies because it was traumatic.”
After about 30 uninterrupted seconds, the unidentified person was ejected from the video call.
One of the young students couldn’t continue and was escorted out of the chambers by Lewis. Councilmembers later gave the remaining students time to finish the presentation.
So, what were the students pitching? Well, they want a yurt and crosswalk safety.
Monarch is the only bilingual school in Montbello and the only Montessori school in the neighborhood.
Peoria Street near Monarch Montessori. May 16, 2024. Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
Because of its Spanish-English curriculum and focus on supporting the students’ voices and independence, Laura Pretty, the executive director of the elementary school, said enrollment requests are high. Pretty said the school has seen an increase in applications, in part because of its high test scores and bilingual program. Applicants have included new immigrants because the program can help students integrate into the school system more easily.
But the school can’t accommodate all of the students.
“The school is growing but we’re running out of space,” Pretty said. “Next year we actually are running into a problem where we can’t accept all the kindergarteners that are applying because we just don’t have the space … We’re not accepting 4th and 5th graders because of space challenges.”
Pretty said the school needs one to two extra classrooms to accommodate new students. But while most schools turn to portable classrooms, such as trailers or modular buildings, to solve space issues, the Monarch students have advocated for a different approach.
In their prepared pitches to city council, the students said trailers are ugly and can be crowded. Trailers are also expensive and can destroy the concrete they’re placed upon.
Instead, the students want a yurt, a portable tent with a rounded ceiling. Yurts can be insulated and are environmentally friendly, according to the students.
This is a yurt! Specifically, a circHouse was deployed at Sustainability Park in Denver, where it stood for three years ending in 2015. (Courtesy Edward Ryan)
“Imagine going to a classroom like that!” the students wrote in their pitches.
The yurt would be used for their music class, freeing up classroom space.
“It would be cool because if you’re in the yurt, you can hear the birds outside. You can hear outside sounds and the music teacher does not see that as a problem,” Pretty said.
While students and faculty are on board with the unconventional classroom, getting permits for the structure has proved challenging. Not because the structure is unsafe but because no other school has ever asked for a yurt before. It’ll be a learning process for the school and Community Planning and Development.
So, the four students attended the city council meeting Monday to ask members how their school can acquire a permit for the yurt.
The students’ second request, which wasn’t heard at all during the meeting, was the need for more pedestrian safety.
At the end of the school day, the students must wait in the car pickup line. But, Pretty said, the students are tired of it. They want to play in the playground while waiting for their parents.
Pretty said the only way that can happen is if the school gets rid of the pickup line. To accomplish that, more parents need to walk or bike to pick up their kids. For parents who need to drive, they would need to park on the street and walk up to the school.
The problem with those options is safety.
“Peoria is a tough street,” Pretty said. “The problem is just crossing the street. We don’t have great markings for crossing, [we don’t have] great lighting. The signs that say we’re a school are not visible so people are speeding by. It just doesn’t feel very safe and so they were advocating for finding ways to make it safer.”
Peoria Street near Monarch Montessori. May 16, 2024. Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
Pretty said students also prepared a pitch for city council to look into ways to make the area safer through clearer crosswalks, maybe a crossing guard, or anything that would encourage parents and guardians to get out of their cars.
After the incident at the meeting on Monday, Pretty said the school community, councilmembers and the mayor reached out to the students.
“I think they’re experiencing just a big embrace from the community, which I hope is making this more about them and less about the hate that they heard on Monday,” Pretty said.
City Council is also working to make sure this type of interruption or any interruption, doesn’t happen again
Robert Austin, the council’s spokesperson, said the Technology Services team is investigating how the person who leveled the racist slurs was able to speak during the meeting.
The goal is to have this not happen again.
After the comment session on Monday, Council President Jamie Torres apologized to the students, denouncing the unknown person’s actions.
Lewis also condemned the person’s actions, noting that the incident was a microcosm of what goes online. She has experienced macro- and micro-aggressions on social media, leveled at her as a Black woman.
While they can’t erase what happened on Monday, Lewis said the city council does have the ability to shed light on that type of racist speech and to make sure the people who come to speak in the chambers are not subjected to slurs.
“We certainly have a responsibility because we can’t just sweep this under the rug and pretend that it’s business as usual,” Lewis said. “We have a responsibility to lead … to say our chambers are not only the people’s chambers, but they are open to our youngest, the leaders so they can engage in democracy.”
As for whether the students will get their yurt and better pedestrian safety around their school, that’s yet to be seen. But Lewis said she’ll be looking into her rolodex to see how she can help her constituents. In the meantime, she’ll be advocating for safer spaces during public sessions.
“Don’t mess with our babies and certainly not in our chambers,” Lewis said.
Russ Skinner was formally appointed Maricopa County Sheriff on Thursday, cementing a role running the embattled agency he took charge of in January.
In a 4-1 vote, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors selected Skinner and filled a vacancy created when Paul Penzone left office on Jan. 12. Skinner, who has been chief deputy of the sheriff’s office since 2018, has been carrying out the duties of sheriff since Penzone’s resignation.
State law required the board to appoint someone in the same political party as Penzone, a Democrat. Skinner — a Republican since 1987 — switched parties the day after Penzone resigned, according to the Arizona Republic.
Skinner was one of three finalists supervisors interviewed for the position. The others were Jeffrey Kirkham, most recently an Apache Junction police commander, and Glendale police Lt. Patrick Valenzuela, Sr. Kirkham was also a longtime Republican before recently switching parties.
Voters will pick a sheriff for a four-year term in November. Skinner will serve until that person takes office in January.
“Although I could have just walked away, collected my pension and moved on with my life, I decided to take on the challenge, to say, ‘You know what, I want to keep certainty with this agency, especially with an election cycle coming up, major events coming up and keep continuity with the agency,’” Skinner said during a press conference after taking the oath of office.
Skinner, a county employee for 33 years, also said he was “apolitical.”
“I am bipartisan in the sense that I am a law enforcement professional, and I will do what needs to be done to uphold the law, uphold the constitution and make sure we keep Maricopa County safe moving forward,” he said.
Steve Gallardo, the only Democrat on the board of supervisors, was the lone vote against Skinner. But he congratulated the new sheriff and said he looked forward to working with him to build the public’s trust in the agency.
Supervisor Jack Sellers, the Republican chair of the board, said law enforcement shouldn’t be a partisan political position.
“We as a group really discounted that (former party affiliation) and went to find who is absolutely the best candidate to run the county sheriff’s office during what could be a very contentious year,” Sellers said. “We’re gonna be running three elections this year. We need someone who has the respect of the people in the county sheriff’s office and also the respect of the other law enforcement agencies in Maricopa County. Deputy Chief Skinner meets that qualification.”
In his remarks, Skinner said he would focus on security during elections later this year.
“The biggest thing I look at is this election cycle. I watched the board meeting yesterday, and I saw some unruliness there from the crowd. That’s unacceptable. Let’s respect each other,” Skinner said. “We have to get past the anger, the separation and the polarization.”
Skinner declined to say if he planned to run for election as sheriff in November, adding that he needed to discuss it with his family.
Former Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone announced Oct. 2 that he would step down, which he did on Jan. 12.
O’Hara Shipe
Skinner inherits years of court baggage
The sheriff’s office has an annual budget of $526 million and 3,500 employees, though Sellers said the office employs 4,000 people. By both metrics, it is one of the largest sheriff departments in the country.
When Penzone took office in 2017, he inherited an office plagued by scandals and controversy thanks to former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, one of Arizona’s 12 worst politicians. Tent City, the notorious open-air jail that former Arpaio created, brought a national spotlight to Arpaio’s discriminatory and dehumanizing policies.
“It represented all the things that are wrong about incarceration and law enforcement,” Penzone said of Tent City, which he closed in 2017. “It was degrading, and it tried to pass this message as though by disrespecting and mistreating inmates that suddenly it would change behavior. And that was nonsense.”
But even with Penzone in command, the sheriff’s office has been under scrutiny for various controversies, including a ballooning list of unresolved misconduct cases.
Penzone also left behind a 16-year-old court case that dates back to Arpaio’s reign.
The class-action lawsuit Melendres v. Arpaio took Arpaio to court for his racial profiling practices. Penzone inherited the lawsuit when he became sheriff. In November 2022, U.S. District Court Judge Murray Snow held Penzone in contempt in the case. According to Snow, the massive backlog of misconduct investigations had swelled during Penzone’s tenure, and it took the agency an average of 611 days to look into a complaint — far beyond the 85-day limit imposed under Snow’s court order.
In October, Guadalupe residents said the sheriff’s office continues to racially profile drivers. The town contracts with the sheriff’s office to provide law enforcement.
Skinner noted he used to patrol Guadalupe and wants to work with the town’s residents to build trust.
“We are committed to gaining that trust and transparency, and I think a lot of that starts right here with communication and transparency,” Skinner said. “What you get with me is I will communicate, I will be transparent. My door is open.”
Sylvia Herrera, a community organizer at Barrio Defense Committees and member of the Community Advisory Board that was created to advise the sheriff’s office, told New Times she and other local activists are concerned about Skinner’s involvement in Arpaio’s administration, which she said became evident during the Melendres case.
“We haven’t got a sense of where he’s coming from other than his participation in some of Arpaio’s activities that were questioned during the court hearings,” Herrera said. “We haven’t had recent interaction with him directly.”
When Penzone announced on Oct. 2 that he would step down, he lamented the court’s oversight of the sheriff’s office.
“I’ll be damned if I’ll do three terms under federal court oversight for a debt I never incurred and not be given the chance to serve this community in the manner that I could if you take the other hand from being tied around my back,” Penzone said.
Skinner struck a different tone on Thursday, though he said the office probably would not be fully compliant with court orders in the Melendres case this year.
“I can’t give you an estimate of when that will happen. All I can tell you is that the agency will progressively, continually and aggressively work towards the compliance efforts relative to that and make sure that we’re doing the right thing moving forward,” Skinner said.
For more than half a century, I have been studying the shifting relations between white and Black Americans. My first journal article, published in 1972, when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, was about Black political power in the industrial Midwest after the riots of the late 1960s. My own experience of race relations in America is even longer. I was born in the Mississippi Delta during World War II, in a cabin on what used to be a plantation, and then moved as a young boy to northern Indiana, where as a Black person in the early 1950s, I was constantly reminded of “my place,” and of the penalties for overstepping it. Seeing the image of Emmett Till’s dead body in Jet magazine in 1955 brought home vividly for my generation of Black kids that the consequences of failing to navigate carefully among white people could even be lethal.
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For the past 16 years, I have been on the faculty of the sociology department at Yale, and in 2018 I was granted a Sterling Professorship, the highest academic rank the university bestows. I say this not to boast, but to illustrate that I have made my way from the bottom of American society to the top, from a sharecropper’s cabin to the pinnacle of the ivory tower. One might think that, as a decorated professor at an Ivy League university, I would have escaped the various indignities that being Black in traditionally white spaces exposes you to. And to be sure, I enjoy many of the privileges my white professional-class peers do. But the Black ghetto—a destitute and fearsome place in the popular imagination, though in reality it is home to legions of decent, hardworking families—remains so powerful that it attaches to all Black Americans, no matter where and how they live. Regardless of their wealth or professional status or years of law-abiding bourgeois decency, Black people simply cannot escape what I call the “iconic ghetto.”
I know I haven’t. Some years ago, I spent two weeks in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, a pleasant Cape Cod town full of upper-middle-class white vacationers and working-class white year-rounders. On my daily jog one morning, a white man in a pickup truck stopped in the middle of the road, yelling and gesticulating. “Go home!” he shouted.
Who was this man? Did he assume, because of my Black skin, that I was from the ghetto? Is that where he wanted me to “go home” to?
This was not an isolated incident. When I jog through upscale white neighborhoods near my home in Connecticut, white people tense up—unless I wear my Yale or University of Pennsylvania sweatshirts. When my jogging outfit associates me with an Ivy League university, it identifies me as a certain kind of Black person: a less scary one who has passed inspection under the “white gaze.” Strangers with dark skin are suspect until they can prove their trustworthiness, which is hard to do in fleeting public interactions. For this reason, Black students attending universities near inner cities know to wear college apparel, in hopes of avoiding racial profiling by the police or others.
I once accidentally ran a small social experiment about this. When I joined the Yale faculty in 2007, I bought about 20 university baseball caps to give to the young people at my family reunion that year. Later, my nieces and nephews reported to me that wearing the Yale insignia had transformed their casual interactions with white strangers: White people would now approach them to engage in friendly small talk.
But sometimes these signifiers of professional status and educated-class propriety are not enough. This can be true even in the most rarefied spaces. When I was hired at Yale, the chair of the sociology department invited me for dinner at the Yale Club of New York City. Clad in a blue blazer, I got to the club early and decided to go up to the fourth-floor library to read The New York Times. When the elevator arrived, a crush of people was waiting to get on it, so I entered and moved to the back to make room for others. Everyone except me was white.
As the car filled up, I politely asked a man of about 35, standing by the controls, to push the button for the library floor. He looked at me and—emboldened, I have to imagine, by drinks in the bar downstairs—said, “You can read?” The car fell silent. After a few tense moments, another man, seeking to defuse the tension, blurted, “I’ve never met a Yalie who couldn’t read.” All eyes turned to me. The car reached the fourth floor. I stepped off, held the door open, and turned back to the people in the elevator. “I’m not a Yalie,” I said. “I’m a new Yale professor.” And I went into the library to read the paper.
I tell these stories—and I’ve told them before—not to fault any particular institution (I’ve treasured my time at Yale), but to illustrate my personal experience of a recurring cultural phenomenon: Throughout American history, every moment of significant Black advancement has been met by a white backlash. After the Civil War, under the aegis of Reconstruction, Black people for a time became professionals and congressmen. But when federal troops left the former Confederate states in 1877, white politicians in the South tried to reconstitute slavery with the long rule of Jim Crow. Even the Black people who migrated north to escape this new servitude found themselves relegated to shantytowns on the edges of cities, precursors to the modern Black ghetto.
All of this reinforced what slavery had originally established: the Black body’s place at the bottom of the social order. This racist positioning became institutionalized in innumerable ways, and it persists today.
I want to emphasize that across the decades, many white Americans have encouraged racial equality, albeit sometimes under duress. In response to the riots of the 1960s, the federal government—led by the former segregationist Lyndon B. Johnson—passed far-reaching legislation that finally extended the full rights of citizenship to Black people, while targeting segregation. These legislative reforms—and, especially, affirmative action, which was implemented via LBJ’s executive order in 1965—combined with years of economic expansion to produce a long period of what I call “racial incorporation,” which substantially elevated the income of many Black people and brought them into previously white spaces. Yes, a lot of affirmative-action efforts stopped at mere tokenism. Even so, many of these “tokens” managed to succeed, and the result is the largest Black middle class in American history.
Over the past 50 years, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, the proportion of Black people who are low-income (less than $52,000 a year for a household of three) has fallen seven points, from 48 to 41 percent. The proportion who are middle-income ($52,000 to $156,000 a year) has risen by one point, to 47 percent. The proportion who are high-income (more than $156,000 a year) has risen the most dramatically, from 5 to 12 percent. Overall, Black poverty remains egregiously disproportionate to that of white and Asian Americans. But fewer Black Americans are poor than 50 years ago, and more than twice as many are rich. Substantial numbers now attend the best schools, pursue professions of their choosing, and occupy positions of power and prestige. Affirmative action worked.
But that very success has inflamed the inevitable white backlash. Notably, the only racial group more likely to be low-income now than 50 years ago is whites—and the only group less likely to be low-income is Blacks.
For some white people displaced from their jobs by globalization and deindustrialization, the successful Black person with a good job is the embodiment of what’s wrong with America. The spectacle of Black doctors, CEOs, and college professors “out of their place” creates an uncomfortable dissonance, which white people deal with by mentally relegating successful Black people to the ghetto. That Black man who drives a new Lexus and sends his children to private school—he must be a drug kingpin, right?
In predominantly white professional spaces, this racial anxiety appears in subtler ways. Black people are all too familiar with a particular kind of interaction, in the guise of a casual watercooler conversation, the gist of which is a sort of interrogation: “Where did you come from?”; “How did you get here?”; and “Are you qualified to be here?” (The presumptive answer to the last question is clearly no; Black skin, evoking for white people the iconic ghetto, confers an automatic deficit of credibility.)
Black newcomers must signal quickly and clearly that they belong. Sometimes this requires something as simple as showing a company ID that white people are not asked for. Other times, a more elaborate dance is required, a performance in which the worker must demonstrate their propriety, their distance from the ghetto. This can involve dressing more formally than the job requires, speaking in a self-consciously educated way, and evincing a placid demeanor, especially in moments of disagreement.
As part of my ethnographic research, I once embedded in a major financial-services corporation in Philadelphia, where I spent six months observing and interviewing workers. One Black employee I spoke with, a senior vice president, said that people of color who wanted to climb the management ladder must wear the right “uniform” and work hard to perform respectability. “They’re never going to envision you as being a white male,” he told me, “but if you can dress the same and look a certain way and drive a conservative car and whatever else, they’ll say, ‘This guy has a similar attitude, similar values [to we white people]. He’s a team player.’ If you don’t dress with the uniform, obviously you’re on the wrong team.”
This need to constantly perform respectability for white people is a psychological drain, leaving Black people spent and demoralized. They typically keep this demoralization hidden from their white co-workers because they feel that they need to show they are not whiners. Having to pay a “Black tax” as they move through white areas deepens this demoralization. This tax is levied on people of color in nice restaurants and other public places, or simply while driving, when the fear of a lethal encounter with the police must always be in mind. The existential danger this kind of encounter poses is what necessitates “The Talk” that Black parents—fearful every time their kids go out the door that they might not come back alive—give to their children. The psychological effects of all of this accumulate gradually, sapping the spirit and engendering cynicism.
Even the most exalted members of the Black elite must live in two worlds. They understand the white elite’s mores and values, and embody them to a substantial extent—but they typically remain keenly conscious of their Blackness. They socialize with both white and Black people of their own professional standing, but also members of the Black middle and working classes with whom they feel more kinship, meeting them at the barbershop, in church, or at gatherings of long-standing friendship groups. The two worlds seldom overlap. This calls to mind W. E. B. Du Bois’ “double consciousness”—a term he used for the first time in this publication, in 1897—referring to the dual cultural mindsets that successful African Americans must simultaneously inhabit.
For middle-class Black people, a certain fluidity—abetted by family connections—enables them to feel a connection with those at the lower reaches of society. But that connection comes with a risk of contagion; they fear that, meritocratic status notwithstanding, they may be dragged down by their association with the hood.
When I worked at the University of Pennsylvania, some friends of mine and I mentored at-risk youth in West Philadelphia.
One of these kids, Kevin Robinson, who goes by KAYR (pronounced “K.R.”), grew up with six siblings in a single-parent household on public assistance. Two of his sisters got pregnant as teenagers, and for a while the whole family was homeless. But he did well in high school and was accepted to Bowdoin College, where he was one of five African Americans in a class of 440. He was then accepted to Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, where he was one of 10 or so African Americans in an M.B.A. class of roughly 180. He got into the analyst-training program at Goldman Sachs, where his cohort of 300 had five African Americans. And from there he ended up at a hedge fund, where he was the lone Black employee.
What’s striking about Robinson’s accomplishments is not just the steepness of his rise or the scantness of Black peers as he climbed, but the extent of cultural assimilation he felt he needed to achieve in order to fit in. He trimmed his Afro. He did a pre-college program before starting Bowdoin, where he had sushi for the first time and learned how to play tennis and golf. “Let me look at how these people live; let me see how they operate,” he recalls saying to himself. He decided to start reading The New Yorker and Time magazine, as they did, and to watch 60 Minutes. “I wanted people to see me more as their peer versus … someone from the hood. I wanted them to see me as, like, ‘Hey, look, he’s just another middle-class Black kid.’ ” When he was about to start at Goldman Sachs, a Latina woman who was mentoring him there told him not to wear a silver watch or prominent jewelry: “ ‘KAYR, go get a Timex with a black leather band. Keep it very simple … Fit in.’ ” My friends and I had given him similar advice earlier on.
All of this worked; he thrived professionally. Yet even as he occupied elite precincts of wealth and achievement, he was continually getting pulled back to support family in the ghetto, where he felt the need to code-switch, speaking and eating the ways his family did so as not to insult them.
The year he entered Bowdoin, one of his younger brothers was sent to prison for attempted murder, and a sister who had four children was shot in the face and died. Over the years he would pay for school supplies for his nieces and nephews, and for multiple family funerals—all while keeping his family background a secret from his professional colleagues. Even so, he would get subjected to the standard indignities—being asked to show ID when his white peers were not; enduring the (sometimes obliviously) racist comments from colleagues (“You don’t act like a regular Black”). He would report egregious offenses to HR but would usually just let things go, for fear that developing a reputation as a “race guy” would restrict his professional advancement.
Robinson’s is a remarkable success story. He is 40 now; he owns a property-management company and is a multimillionaire. But his experience makes clear that no matter what professional or financial heights you ascend to, if you are Black, you can never escape the iconic ghetto, and sometimes not even the actual one.
The most egregious intrusion of a Black person into white space was the election (and reelection) of Barack Obama as president. A Black man in the White House! For some white people, this was intolerable. Birthers, led by Donald Trump, said he was ineligible for the presidency, claiming falsely that he had been born in Kenya. The white backlash intensified; Republicans opposed Obama with more than the standard amount of partisan vigor. In 2013, at the beginning of Obama’s second term, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which had protected the franchise for 50 years. Encouraged by this opening, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas moved forward with voter-suppression laws, setting a course that other states are now following. And this year, the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in college admissions. I want to tell a story that illustrates the social gains this puts at risk.
Many years ago, when I was a professor at Penn, my father came to visit me. Walking around campus, we bumped into various colleagues and students of mine, most of them white, who greeted us warmly. He watched me interact with my secretary and other department administrators. Afterward, Dad and I went back to my house to drink beer and listen to Muddy Waters.
“So you’re teaching at that white school?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“You work with white people. And you teach white students.”
“Yeah, but they actually come in all colors,” I responded. I got his point, though.
“Well, let me ask you one thing,” he said, furrowing his brow.
“What’s that, Dad?”
“Do they respect you?”
After thinking about his question a bit, I said, “Well, some do. And some don’t. But you know, Dad, it is hard to tell which is which sometimes.”
“Oh, I see,” he said.
He didn’t disbelieve me; it was just that what he’d witnessed on campus was at odds with his experience of the typical Black-white interaction, where the subordinate status of the Black person was automatically assumed by the white one. Growing up in the South, my dad understood that white people simply did not respect Black people. Observing the respectful treatment I received from my students and colleagues, my father had a hard time believing his own eyes. Could race relations have changed so much, so fast?
They had—in large part because of what affirmative action, and the general processes of racial incorporation and Black economic improvement, had wrought. In the 1960s, the only Black people at the financial-services firm I studied would have been janitors, night watchmen, elevator operators, or secretaries; 30 years later, affirmative action had helped populate the firm with Black executives. Each beneficiary of affirmative action, each member of the growing Black middle class, helped normalize the presence of Black people in professional and other historically white spaces. All of this diminished, in some incremental way, the power of the symbolic ghetto to hold back people of color.
Too many people forget, if ever they knew it, what a profound cultural shift affirmative action effected. And they overlook affirmative action’s crucial role in forestalling social unrest.
Some years ago, I was invited to the College of the Atlantic, a small school in Maine, to give the commencement address. As I stood at the sink in the men’s room before the event, checking the mirror to make sure all my academic regalia was properly arrayed, an older white man came up to me and said, with no preamble, “What do you think of affirmative action?”
“I think it’s a form of reparations,” I said.
“Well, I think they need to be educated first,” he said, and then walked out.
I was so provoked by this that I scrambled back to my hotel room and rewrote my speech. I’d already been planning to talk about the benefits of affirmative action, but I sharpened and expanded my case, explaining that it not only had lifted many Black people out of the ghetto, but had been a weapon in the Cold War, when unaligned countries and former colonies were trying to decide which superpower to follow. Back then, Democrats and some Republicans were united in believing that affirmative action, by demonstrating the country’s commitment to racial justice and equality, helped project American greatness to the world.
Beyond that, I said to this almost entirely white audience, affirmative action had helped keep the racial unrest of the ’60s from flaring up again. When the kin—the mothers, fathers, cousins, nephews, sons, daughters, baby mamas, uncles, aunts—of ghetto residents secure middle-class livelihoods, those ghetto relatives hear about it. This gives the young people who live there a modicum of hope that they might do the same. Hope takes the edge off distress and desperation; it lessens the incentives for people to loot and burn. What opponents of affirmative action fail to understand is that without a ladder of upward mobility for Black Americans, and a general sense that justice will prevail, a powerful nurturer of social concord gets lost.
Yes, continuing to expand the Black professional and middle classes will lead to more instances of “the dance,” and the loaded interrogations, and the other awkward moments and indignities that people of color experience in white spaces. But the greater the number of affluent, successful Black people in such places, the faster this awkwardness will diminish, and the less power the recurrent waves of white reaction will have to set people of color back. I would like to believe that future generations of Black Americans will someday find themselves as pleasantly surprised as my dad once was by the new levels of racial respect and equality they discover.
This article appears in the November 2023 print edition with the headline “Black Success, White Backlash.”
SOMERVILLE, Tenn. — A Tennessee man whose violent arrest for alleged traffic violations is under investigation by state police said Monday that he was stopped because he was a young Black man driving a nice car.
Brandon Calloway and some of his family members spoke with an Associated Press reporter outside a courthouse in Fayette County, where he was scheduled to appear before a judge on charges filed against him in July. The hearing was rescheduled to Nov. 28.
Calloway, 26, was arrested by Oakland Police and charged with disregarding a stop sign, speeding, disorderly conduct and evading arrest. Video footage of the confrontation leading up to the arrest, which spread on social media, shows officers chasing him through his home, attempting to stun him, and beating him bloody before dragging him away.
One police officer has been placed on paid leave while the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation investigates the arrest. Once the TBI probe is complete, the state police agency will give the report to the district attorney, who will decide whether to pursue charges against the officers. The Oakland Police Department did not return a phone call seeking comment Monday.
According to a police affidavit, Calloway drove through a stop sign about 7:30 p.m. on July 16. He was then clocked driving 32 mph in a 20 mph zone (51 kph in a 32 kph zone) before an officer attempted a traffic stop. Calloway continued driving until he reached a house, where he pulled into the driveway and ran inside, the affidavit says.
The affidavit says that later Calloway and others were outside speaking with the first officer when a second officer arrived. The officers said they needed to detain Calloway, and he ran back inside the house. The officers kicked down the front door and followed Calloway upstairs, where he ran into a room and locked the door. Officers then kicked down that door, used a stun gun on him and began to hit him with a baton, the affidavit says.
The confrontation happened in Oakland, a small town about 30 miles (50 kilometers) east of Memphis. Calloway, who runs a notary public business, said the beating left him with stitches in his head, speech problems and memory loss. He insists he would not have been stopped in the 2020 Chevrolet Camaro he was driving if he was white.
“I just happened to get stopped in a nice car and my dad lives in a nice neighborhood,” said Calloway. “That was the only crime right there.”
Calloway’s father, Ed Calloway, agreed, remarking that the situation “revealed the issues that we still have with the relationship between police and young African-American males, and this innate fear of being caught up in this situation.”
“If he was white, no, he would never have gotten pulled over,” and the situation would not have escalated like it did, Ed Calloway said.
Ed Calloway also said police unlawfully entered his house.
“It was my home, it was my door that they kicked in,” he said, adding that his daughter suffered trauma when she saw “her brother’s blood all over the floor, all over the walls, throughout the house.”
Brandon Calloway said he would like to see repercussions for the officers involved in his arrest. He said that he is feeling better from his injuries and is in therapy but gets “really bad anxiety” when he sees a police officer.
His lawyer, Andre Wharton, said he is seeking transparency and accountability from the TBI investigation so that the Calloways can reach closure after the “disproportionate response” by police.
“Closure comes when people realize that a system worked like it should — that it was open and honest and accountable,” Wharton said.
WHITEVILLE, N.C. — A suspended North Carolina sheriff has resigned in the aftermath of a leaked audio recording in which he called Black employees by derogatory names and said they should be fired, his attorney announced Monday.
Attorney Michael Mills made the announcement during a hearing on whether Jody Greene, who was elected Columbus County sheriff in 2018, should be removed from office, according to news outlets.
“Jody Greene loves Columbus County and does not want to put the people he has served through this ordeal,” Mills told Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Douglas Sasser. The announcement prompted applause from some in the courtroom, The News & Observer reported.
District Attorney Jon David had sought Greene’s removal alleging that he had engaged in racial profiling of employees both personally and through those under his command, WECT-TV reported.
Sasser suspended Greene earlier this month until Monday’s hearing on the petition for removal. The rest of the hearing was called off and David, the district attorney for Bladen, Brunswick and Columbus counties, said it was no longer necessary due to Greene’s resignation.
David has said that he asked the State Bureau of Investigation to probe allegations of obstruction of justice within the sheriff’s office. That investigation is ongoing.
The recording of the phone call was given to WECT-TV by a former sheriff’s captain who’s now running against Greene to be sheriff. Located about 120 miles (193 km) southeast of Raleigh, Columbus County has about 50,000 people and is approximately 63% white and 30% Black.
The 2019 call to then-Capt. Jason Soles came shortly after Greene narrowly defeated former Sheriff Lewis Hatcher, who is Black. Soles was temporarily acting as sheriff at the time due to a court-mediated agreement that kept Greene from assuming the duties of the office while election officials examined the contest, which was ultimately decided by fewer than 40 votes.
In the call, Greene, who is white, said he believed someone in the sheriff’s office was leaking information to Hatcher, the station reported.
“I’m sick of it. I’m sick of these Black (expletives),” Greene is recorded saying. “I’m going to clean house and be done with it. And we’ll start from there.”
Greene was also recorded as saying: “Every Black that I know, you need to fire him to start with, he’s a snake.”
Several Black officers in leadership positions were later demoted or fired. WECT-TV reported that two Black officers were on the previous sheriff’s group of high-ranking officers known as command staff, but that a captain was fired and a lieutenant was demoted after Greene was sworn in. Another Black sergeant said he was fired shortly after Greene was elected. The station reported that several Black deputies appear to remain in the sheriff’s office in positions below the level of command staff.
Greene issued a statement arguing that the recording of the 2019 phone call had been edited or altered. But he didn’t deny in the statement that he was on the call or that he made the statements.
Though Greene had been suspended since Oct. 4, he had been campaigning for reelection. His name remains on the ballot in the Nov. 8 election.
ATLANTA (AP) — Comedians Eric André and Clayton English are challenging a police program at the Atlanta airport they say violates the constitutional rights of airline passengers, particularly Black passengers, through racial profiling and coercive searches just as they are about to board their flights.
Lawyers for the two men filed a lawsuit Tuesday in federal court in Atlanta alleging that they were racially profiled and illegally stopped by Clayton County police at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
The two men, well known comedians and actors, say officers singled them out during separate stops roughly six months apart because they are Black and grilled them about drugs as other passengers watched.
“People were gawking at me and I looked suspicious when I had done nothing wrong,” André said in an interview, calling the experience “dehumanizing and demoralizing.”
While the stated purpose of the program is to fight drug trafficking, the lawsuit says, drugs are rarely found, criminal charges seldom result, and seized cash provides a financial windfall for the police department.
Clayton County police officers and investigators from the county district attorney’s office selectively stop passengers in the narrow jet bridges used to access planes, the lawsuit says. The officers take the passengers’ boarding passes and identification and interrogate them, sometimes searching their bags, before they board their flights, the lawyers say in the lawsuit.
The police department calls the stops “consensual encounters” and says they are “random,” but in reality the stops “rely on coercion, and targets are selected disproportionately based on their race,” the lawyers argue.
Clayton County police spokesperson Julia Isaac said the department doesn’t comment on pending litigation.
Police records show that from Aug. 30, 2020, to April 30, 2021, there were 402 jet bridge stops, and the passenger’s race was listed for 378 of those stops. Of those 378 passengers, 211, or 56%, were Black, and people of color accounted for 258 total stops, or 68%, the lawsuit says.
Those 402 stops resulted in three reported drug seizures: about 10 grams of drugs from one passenger, 26 grams of “suspected THC gummies” from another, and six prescription pills without a prescription from a third, the lawsuit says. Only the first and third person were charged.
Those 402 stops also yielded more than $1 million in cash and money orders from a total of 25 passengers. All but one were allowed to continue their travels, and only two — the ones who also had drugs — were charged, the lawsuit says. Eight of the 25 challenged the seizures, and Clayton County police settled each case, returning much of the seized money, the lawsuit says.
Carrying large quantities of cash doesn’t mean someone is involved in illegal drug activity, the lawyers argue in the lawsuit, noting that people of color are less likely to have bank accounts and are more likely to carry large sums when they travel.
English was stopped while flying from Atlanta, where he lives, to Los Angeles for work on Oct. 30, 2020, the lawsuit says. André had finished a shoot for HBO’s “The Righteous Gemstones” and was traveling from Charleston, South Carolina, to his home in Los Angeles on April 21, 2020, when he was stopped after a layover in Atlanta.
Officers blocked them as they entered the jet bridge and asked if they were carrying illegal drugs, the lawsuit says. Both were asked to hand over their boarding passes and identification. An officer said he wanted to search English’s bag, and English agreed, not believing he had a choice.
“I felt completely powerless. I felt violated. I felt cornered,” English said at a news conference outside the federal courthouse in Atlanta. “I felt like I had to comply if I wanted everything to go smoothly.”
André complained about his stop right after it happened. Clayton County police said at the time that it was “consensual.”
“Mr. Andre chose to speak with investigators during the initial encounter,” the department said in a statement posted on Facebook. “During the encounter, Mr. Andre voluntarily provided the investigators information as to his travel plans. Mr. Andre also voluntarily consented to a search of his luggage but the investigators chose not to do so.”
André said he felt a “moral calling” to bring the lawsuit “so these practices can stop and these cops can be held accountable for this because it’s unethical.”
“I have the resources to bring national attention and international attention to this incident. It’s not an isolated incident,” he said. “If Black people don’t speak up for each other, who will?”
One of the lawyers who filed the lawsuit, NYU School of Law Policing Project co-founder Barry Friedman, encouraged anyone else who has had similar experiences to get in touch.
The lawsuit names Clayton County and the police chief, as well as four police officers and a district attorney’s office investigator. It alleges violations of the constitutional rights that protect against unreasonable searches and seizures and against racial discrimination.
The comedians seek a jury trial and ask that the Clayton County police jet bridge interdiction program be declared unconstitutional. They also seek compensatory and punitive damages, as well as legal costs.
