A Black man's notes on racial profiling @ Harvard University

Jesse Jackson lecture @ Harvard Law. Charles Ogletree seated to left. 

Most of you have heard about the recent controversy at Harvard Law School. Diane Lucas, a graduate of Harvard Law, has put the spotlight on racism at Harvard. In the comments section, another former Harvard law student questioned the validity of Diane's claims that racial profiling was a major problem at Harvard. His comment prompted me to add my own recollections and experiences with racial profiling at Harvard. I have reposted my comments with a few additional observations below.
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I agree with Diane. Part of the problem is that too many white students are totally oblivious to racism and its impact.

A quick Google check might have saved you some keystrokes. There are several articles online about racial profiling at Harvard.

I am African American. I was Ph.D. student @ Harvard anthropology when Diane was a student at Harvard Law. There were in fact manyinstances racial profiling on campus. Dr. Allen Counter, one of the most recognizable faces on campus, was once threatened with arrest by campus police if he failed to produce identification.

My former roommate, Tanu Henry, is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. Several years ago, Tanu was on campus to pick up a letter of recommendation. Someone reported to the campus police that he looked “suspicious.” The police arrived on the scene and forced him to empty his pockets whilst other Harvard students looked on.

I have been reported as “suspicious” to Harvard security guards several times–in a campus building that I have been going in and out of for eight years! And of course there is the “what are you doing here” look from random white people on campus that many Black Harvardians are very familiar with.

The issue racial profiling was severe enough that President Faust organized a panel to examine the issue.

Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree had this to say on the topic:

"I’ve been hosting, moderating, and mediating meetings between Harvard’s black students and university police for much of the last 20 years, and it always stems from an individual incident when African-Americans appear to be the subject of racial profiling by the police department…The problem is a persistent one, because there’s still this unfortunate assumption that equates the color of a person’s skin with involvement in criminality.”

(I agree with Prof. Ogletree's observations. I would add that there is also a more basic assumption that a black person's presence on campus is always open to a challenge--we simply should not be there is the attitude of some white people. And I suppose there is some truth to that in the sense that for most of Harvard's existence Black students were banned from attending the university. Harvard was founded in 1636 and did not admit a black student until 1847--over two hundred years after the university was founded.)

I crashed one such meeting organized by Prof. Ogletree in 2004 or thereabouts. It was a well-attended event with participants from many different sectors of the Cambridge community including the chief of Cambridge police, if recall correctly.

One specific policy change came out of those meetings. When I started graduate school at Harvard it was common for the Harvard police to release vague descriptions of suspects like, 6ft, dark complexioned male, blue baseball cap.

Those sorts of generic black man descriptions no longer appear on campus police blotters. In lieu of these useless descriptions the blotters now say something like “the victim could not provide detailed description of suspect." kzs

tags: racism, harvard, racial_profiling