Waiting for my flight to Cleveland on Thursday, I met and talked with King Downing, national coordinator of the American Civil Liberties Union‘s Campaign Against Racial Profiling. King was leaving the area after working with the local ACLU and NAACP in their review of possible racially-motivated hiring bias in the St. Tammany Parish’s Sheriff’s Office. The investigation was prompted by Sheriff Jack Strain’s July remarks that he would arrest anyone in his parish with “black” hairstyles such as dreadlocks and chee wees (whatever on earth that is).
King Downing & Me Surrounded By MSY Airport Wares
After containing his excitement on seeing my ACLU card, King pointed out that several black police officers on the NYPD sport dreads, twists and braids and asked, “Malcolm-Jamal Warner has the ‘chee wee’ do. Would Sheriff Strain throw Warner in jail if he showed up in St. Tammany parish?” I replied that the sheriff would have to know who Malcolm-Jamal Warner is in the first place; the poor guy may have to point out that he played Theodore Huxtable on a very reputable TV show. Attention, St. Tammany folk planning on vacationing in the Caribbean, don’t return with braided, beaded hair.
Civil Rights vs. Civil Liberties: In my reckoning, civil liberties and rights differ thus: “Although the two terms overlap considerably in ordinary usage (and are often difficult to distinguish in concrete instances), the term civil liberties generally refers more specifically to the protection of the individual’s rights to form and express his or her own preferences or convictions and to act freely upon them in the private sphere without undue or intrusive interference by the government, while the term civil rights emphasizes more specifically the individual’s rights as a citizen to participate freely and equally in politics and public affairs in order actively to promote his/her preferred public policy alternatives through lobbying policy-makers and/or through personal participation in the electoral process. Thus, civil liberties may be seen as the logical correlates of the goal of limited government, while civil rights are the logical correlates of the goal of popular or democratic government.”
I’ve thought a lot on this fuzzy boundary between civil liberties and civil rights and, before 9/11, wondered why the ACLU took on cases that clearly fall in the Civil Rights category. After the attacks on this nation, my nation, ostensibly by a group of Arabian Muslims, I realized that Driving While Black would now extend to Brown and it has. Racial profiling is more alive than ever in the western world.
Considering that both civil rights and civil liberties are violated in racial profiling, e.g. political imprisonment of people in Guantanamo based on looks or rejection from law enforcement positions based on skin color, I can see the ACLU’s role here. When participation in democracy is intruded upon by the government and bodies that enforce its laws, the marriage of civil rights and liberties occurs.
Jack Strain argues that the makeup of his police departments mirror the demographics of St. Tammany Parish. If Strain is “acquitted” and the case falls apart, I hope it doesn’t stop the NAACP and other civil rights groups protecting ordinary citizens, and not just cops, from authorities who happen not to like standard-issue haircuts. Slacks on women was outrageous once, too.
