When New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman cashiered her embattled police chief the other day, she took pains to stipulate that she doesn't think he's a racist, and neither does she buy his critics' charge that he tolerated "racial profiling" in his department. Instead, the firing offense was "insensitivity." Translation: It's insensitive to expose the governor of New Jersey to even a minute of bad press.
A 35-year state police veteran, Col. Carl Williams Jr. got the axe for noting, in a long interview with the Star-Ledger of Newark, that various ethnic groups play various roles in the drug trade. "If you're looking at the methamphetamine market," Williams was quoted as saying, "that seems to be controlled by the motorcycle gangs, which are basically predominantly white. If you're looking at heroin and stuff like that, your involvement there is more or less Jamaicans. Two weeks ago, the president of the United States went to Mexico to talk to the president of Mexico about drugs. He didn't go to Ireland. He didn't go to England."
As soon as the interview hit the newsstands, state assemblyman LeRoy J. Jones Jr. blasted Williams's "dastardly, . . . ill and sickened" views. Whitman fired the chief within hours, and the New York Times soon applauded. Never mind that to drug-enforcement professionals, it is common knowledge that each illicit substance has its own characteristic sources, distribution networks, and consumption patterns, many of which are ethnic.
Much of what Williams said, in fact, can be found almost verbatim in a 1996 Drug Enforcement Administration report, available at www.WhiteHouseDrugPolicy.gov. According to the DEA, heroin from Southeast Asia, for example, is brokered to "suppliers with connections to ethnic Chinese criminals in the United States who acted as wholesale distributors. . . . Nigerian and West African groups, meanwhile smuggled Southeast Asian heroin internationally," and so on.
Truth, of course, is no defense in the face of racial mau-mauing. In fact, as happened in this case, truth is often the cause of such mau-mauing.
Now, please, no accusations of racial profiling, but Gov. Whitman's failure of nerve puts THE SCRAPBOOK in mind of a truth once nicely captured by Jesse Jackson: "Some black folks ain't got rhythm, and some white folks can't think."