On Jan. 14, former N.J. state troopers John Hogan and James Kenna pleaded guilty to much-reduced charges arising from a
1998 incident on the N.J. Turnpike in which the troopers fired 11 shots at a vanload of unarmed blacks and Latinos. Each
trooper gave up his job and was ordered to pay $280.

None of that lays to rest the sickness behind racial profiling. It doesn't begin to.

Early in life I learned that, as an African American, I was at war with the police.

I can recall my uncles and cousins sitting around planning trips down South along routes that would avoid the most racist
cops in Indiana, Illinois, Georgia or even my own home state of Michigan. As I grew older, I quickly learned that this wasn't
just a war between a few racist cops and African Americans.

This bloody, still-raging contest pits a racist ideology against a people who have been systematically denied justice and
peace. While disagreeing with the sentence given to the troopers, I believe Judge Charles A. Delehey was right when he said
they "were victims of the system that employed them." But I don't believe Delehey - or many other whites, for that matter -
know the true extent of America's system of racism.

America's system of white supremacy is so deeply embedded - still, today - that it is often difficult to detect. Even our
language helps conceal its pervasive nature. From my point of view, the term racial profiling, which came into prominence
(for some folks) following the turnpike shooting, makes police racism seem like nothing more than an unfortunate
administrative decision. All this meanness seems too crude to fit into the neat little category called racial profiling.

African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans have been screaming about police racism for years. Members of the
Black Panthers started carrying guns and following police patrols around because of the law enforcement war unleashed
upon the black community. We've seen Window Washin' Charlie shot down. An unarmed man at 30th Street Station, he too,
was felled by police bullets. Donta Dawson's family has felt the cruel meaning of the term justifiable police shooting.

While in this post-Sept. 11 era, the media, both in news and entertainment, work full tilt to portray the police as heroes,
African Americans have long known the police to be the violent arm of government authority. But what the police do in the
streets is no different from what insurance company executives, corporate managers, lawmakers, university professors, and the media do behind closed doors. All work in concert to deny African Americans jobs, health care, decent housing, and high-quality education.

The $280 in fines and penalties imposed on the state troopers was probably barely enough to pay for the bullets fired at the
van's occupants. Justifying this mild reprimand by blaming the institution while doing nothing to alter it amounts to doing
nothing at all. If the police carried out their actions through the tacit consent of the state and the Democratic and Republican
politicians who control the bureaucracy, then they must be held responsible.

That they are not reflects a deep philosophical dishonesty in America. Our nation has fooled itself into arrogantly believing
that it is fair and just, and that the democratic project has fulfilled its promise. These wrongheaded assumptions have stunted
any serious discussion about such critical issues as policing, the nature and meaning of education, or our nation's foreign
policy. Our failure to be patriots to the democratic idea has allowed our society to become an Orwellian freak show
featuring sham elections, commercials and game shows like Survivors, docudramas such as Cops, and one corporate-owned
sports show after another.

If events on the New Jersey Turnpike reflect anything, it is the sad failure of America's democratic project. Our democracy
is a lie, a cash-only privilege for sale to the highest bidder. In this society controlled by the rich, all people are not treated
equally. Race, class and gender have everything in the world to do with how justice is dispensed.

The New Jersey Turnpike shooting and hundreds of other incidents of police abuse prove it. Our failure to root out white
supremacy and economic injustice will, in the end, harm America far more than any attack by a foreign foe.

Terry E. Johnson is publisher of Real News. His email address is terryjohnson@flycomm.com.

----------------------
Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan 20, 2002
Sometimes you must, and do it without fear

By Mona Charen

Sometimes it seems that sensitivity will be the death of us.

Imagine the following scenario: A plane is hijacked and crashes into the White House (God forbid). In the post-disaster
investigation we learn that a young, Arab-looking man claiming to be a Secret Service agent on his way to protect the
president had been permitted onto the plane carrying a gun. How would the airline look?

As it is, the pilot of an American Airlines plane carrying Walid Shater, an American of Arab descent and a bona fide Secret
Service agent, chose to play it safe. He declined to let Shater fly and dismissed the idea of phoning the Secret Service
number Shater offered on the grounds that the person on the other end could be an accomplice. The pilot further claimed that
the paperwork Shater submitted was not in order.

Shater flew to Texas the following day. End of story? It should have been. Except Shater has engaged lawyers and the
Council on American-Islamic Relations to whine that he was the victim of racial profiling.

Shater was inconvenienced, treated with suspicion, and doubtless embarrassed. But this man has undertaken to give his life
without hesitation for the sake of his country. Can't he suffer a little inconvenience and even embarrassment?

The powerful and famous alike have been subjected to searches at airports that have, at times, verged on the absurd. U.S.
Rep. John Dingell (D., Mich.), 75, was asked to drop his pants (in a back room) after his surgically implanted steel hip joint
set off metal detectors. Secretary of Transportation Norm Mineta was held up for 10 minutes. Former Vice President Dan
Quayle was subjected to the same treatment while passers-by called, "Hi, Mr. Vice-President. What's going on?" None of
these three men, to their credit, responded with "Don't you know who I am?" indignation.

We can agree that Shater was inconvenienced because of his appearance and his reading matter. (When he briefly left his
seat, a flight attendant noticed that he was carrying a book on Islamic history.) This set off alarm bells. But the
anti-racial/ethnic profiling crowd is telling us that such calculations are illegitimate. We must treat everyone exactly the
same.

This is the most foolish recommendation imaginable. But it's already being implemented. As James Q. Wilson and Heather
Higgins recount in the Wall Street Journal, Delta Airlines on a recent day selected three elderly males, six Caucasian women
and two Hispanic women for complete searches. This on a flight that also contained half a dozen young males of Middle
Eastern appearance traveling alone. Delta explained that they would perform only random searches.

Anything else would be "discriminatory," I guess.

We would not be in this self-crippling psychological posture were it not for a generation of training in political correctness.
The reigning orthodoxy in America is that to suspect black American males more than other people of being criminals is
itself a kind of crime. The President himself has endorsed this weak-mindedness by pledging to rid the land of racial
profiling and by suggesting that if Shater was picked out because of his ethnicity, "that would make me madder than heck."

But everyone knows that young black males commit crimes way out of proportion to their numbers. Taking that into account,
the New York City police under then-Mayor Giuliani were able to cut crime rates in half. And everyone knows that all of the
terrorists who attacked us recently (with the exception of Tim McVeigh) have been Middle Eastern young males. (American
blacks, by a large margin, favor ethnic profiling to stop terrorists.) To stop and frisk elderly men and moms with kids
because you are pretending these things aren't true is not only stupid; it is cowardly. It says that you fear being called a racist
more than you fear failing to catch a terrorist.

Americans have shown we can rise to the occasion when confronted with terrorism. We've learned we can win a war with
scarcely a dozen casualties halfway around the world. But whether we are strong enough to risk being called names is still,
alas, an open question.

Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist.