It was not a great day for Eddie Bauer, Inc., although it could have been worse.
A federal jury ordered the national clothing and outdoor gear company to pay a total of $1 million to a black suburban teenager and his two black friends last Friday. The jury decided a white security guard acted improperly when he forced the 18-year-old youth to take off and surrender a shirt he was suspected of shoplifting.
It turned out that the young man had purchased the shirt in the store the day before. The shirt was returned to him after he went home and returned with a receipt for it.
The jury also decided the guard and a second white security guard, both off-duty sheriff’s police, acted improperly when the second guard ordered the other two young men to a corner of the store and threatened to “lock them up” if they moved.
It was the racial angle that made this a major story and elevated it to national attention. The incident, which occurred Oct. 20, 1995, sparked a massive e-mail and letter-writing campaign and an NAACP protest. Richard Fersch, president of the Redmond, Wash.-based company, flew to Washington D.C. just before Christmas to apologize.
It touched raw nerves because it illustrated a problem that has become all too familiar to many African-Americans. It is the problem of being, as black comic Chris Rock says, “born a suspect.”
It is the problem of being presumed to be a criminal suspect, just because you are black–especially if you are young, black and male. The young men in the shirt incident appeared to have been “profiled” and stopped for committing a modern American crime. They were SWB–shopping while black.
It is similar to the crime of DWB–driving while black.
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Or HATWB–hailing a taxi while black.
Just about everyone I know who parents a black male teen has a horror story to tell of how young black males are automatically suspect as soon as they walk out the door.
Quite a few people, including some blacks, argue that such suspicions are justified because black male youths commit more crimes. Yes, they do, in some places.
But, although most young black males are not criminals, the opposite perception is fed by news reports of violent black killers, gang-bangers and drug dealers. Poor people commit more violent crimes and the poor people who live closest to big-city TV stations are mostly black and Latino. White male criminals have moved their unlawful activities farther out into the boondocks.
Nevertheless, while white people would like to be judged by their best, we black people constantly are judged by our worst. In America you apparently are not supposed to be stigmatized by someone else’s bad acts, unless you’re young, male and non-white.
So, those of us who try to parent young black males responsibly are obliged to preach a double message: Don’t prejudge people because of their race, son, even though they quite likely will prejudge you because of your race.
Yet while the racially mixed jury held the store chain responsible for the harassment, they found insufficient evidence to support the claim that Eddie Bauer was guilty of “consumer racism” or other racial discrimination. The company insisted that the guards acted on their own in violation of store policy, which calls for everyone’s rights to be respected equally.
There was little evidence to suggest otherwise. There was only the suspicion, albeit a strong one, that the lads–none of whom had a police record–would have been treated less callously had they been white.
So it could have been worse for Eddie Bauer, but it could have been worse for the black youths, too.
After all, as my column-writing colleague Courtland Milloy noted in the Washington Post, around the time of the 1995 incident at least five other black teens in the same suburban Washington area were arrested in armed robberies involving Eddie Bauer coats. At least one Eddie Bauer coat robbery left a 17-year-old black male bystander dead of a gunshot wound.
Similar stories have emerged across the country in recent years. That’s why I say it could have been worse for the fellows harassed in the shirt incident. Instead of getting a $1 million settlement for their shirt, they could have been shot.
Yes, we African-Americans do have a problem when whites don’t respect us. But we have bigger problems when we fail to respect ourselves.