Thu, Oct 11, 2001 page4

• Attacks narrow the American racial divide

  PROFILING Hispanics and blacks who feel they have been victims of police scrutiny feel relieved as US law enforcement agencies turn their gaze toward those of Arabic descent

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  In Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a crew of black and Latino teenage boys say they can no longer think of the police as enemies. Since Sept. 11, the boys say, the officers who patrol their neighborhoods, most of whom are white, no longer eye them with suspicion.

  Several Haitian-American groups, which had angrily protested police abuse in recent years, have sent a letter to a local police chief in Crown Heights expressing admiration for the officers.

  New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has been embraced by black leaders. On the national stage, with few exceptions, black members of Congress, seething all year long about the election of US President George W. Bush, have rallied to his side.

  

  Taxi cab driver Nurel Hassan gestures while addressing a member of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance during a meeting in the Queens Borough of New York. The alliance is offering assistance to drivers who are having trouble making ends meet. Many Arab Americans have been under intense police scrutiny since the Sept. 11 attacks.

  PHOTO: AP

  Black New Yorkers joke among themselves about their own reprieve from racial profiling. Even the language of racial grievance has shifted: Overnight, the cries about driving while black have become flying while brown a phrase referring to reports of Muslim-Americans being asked to get off planes.

  Ever so slightly, the attacks on the trade center have tweaked the city's traditional racial divisions.

  This is not unheard of in wartime, historians say. Nor do most people believe it will last long. The black-white racial pattern has too deep a history.

  But the signs of change have revealed themselves in dozens of interviews across the city in recent weeks. Some of it is evident in how police and civilians see each other. Some of it is how ordinary men and women react to each other on the streets, on subways, in bodegas. Some people attribute it to the solemnity that hangs over the city, others to fear, still others to a new-found unity as Americans. Whatever it is, the way that New Yorkers perceive one another across color lines however accurate those perceptions were has changed.

  If old racial antagonisms have dissolved, new anxieties have surfaced. Keith Wright, an assemblyman from Harlem, said that before Sept. 11, "people were looking at young black men like they were all suspected of some kind of crime." "Now people are looking at people of Middle Eastern descent as suspects of terrorism," said Wright, who is black. "Now we have to be careful not to do that."

  The New York Police Department has seen a rash of possible hate crimes against Arabs, Muslims and Sikhs -- in short, anyone perceived by untrained eyes to be suspect in the terrorist attack. Yemeni-owned delis have been vandalized, shopkeepers and newsstand workers have been punched, a Sikh cabdriver has been shot at, Arabs and Pakistanis have been attacked on subways and on the street. Of the 120 alleged bias incidents reported to the police since Sept. 11, 80 have been against Arabs and South Asians; the suspects are whites, blacks and Hispanics.

  Late last month, a Star-Ledger/Eagleton-Rutgers poll taken in New Jersey asked whether airport officials should regard Middle Eastern travelers with "more suspicion" than others. Blacks and whites differed only slightly in their responses: 38 percent of blacks and 42 percent of whites said those travelers should be treated with more suspicion. On the question of whether immigration from the Middle East should be "more restrictive than it is now," the differences were similarly small: 29 percent of blacks and 23 percent of whites said such immigration should be halted, while 55 percent of blacks and 56 percent of whites said it should be limited.

  At the center of the shift in attitude is the group of boys playing football on a balmy afternoon last week at Fort Greene Park. Some of them are African-Americans, others have roots in the Caribbean; the family of one fled war in El Salvador. "The police would probably racially profile everyone that's here," said Louis Johnson, 18, pointing to his friends with his chin.

  The child of Trinidadian immigrants, Johnson said he had all but grown accustomed to being trailed by the police. "They used to watch me from the time they see me, they watch me till I leave," he said. "But now they don't really bother us. They, like, stop everyone that has Middle Eastern features. They stop them. They ask them questions like that."

  Miqueo Rawell-Peterson, 17, notes gravely that the police were among the first to rush into the burning towers. "We've become a little more at ease with the policemen," he said. "We realize what they've done. Now we look at them more as heroes, instead of I guess, what you'd say, enemies."

  In Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Victor Lavalle, a writer, paints two pictures. The first is of his local pizzeria. Before Sept. 11, it was the usual New York jostling: the mostly black and Latino boys from the neighborhood high school would come in, loud and rambunctious, prompting dirty looks from the elderly Polish women. After Sept. 11, the boys come in quietly. They ask the women if they've ordered. The women look at them, step aside and say, "Go ahead."

  The second picture he paints is of an Indian-American friend. Last week, the friend started to park his car on a street in New Jersey, only to be greeted by a volley of threats and insults from a white man who stepped out of his house. Lavalle said his friend got back in his car and drove away, chilled to the bone.
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