COLUMN: "Not a Black and White Issue"

From Elizabeth Hunt's "One Man's Meat," Spring '92 To those of us in the knowledge business, these decisions may seem welcome. Descriptions of crime suspects, some argue, are useless without race. And though the ramifications of the Georgia decision on the University are not yet clear, another group of us is thrilled that at last we may know the Greek affiliations of students involved in various kinds of misconduct. The costs of race disclosure may outweigh the benefits, while the Georgia decision may provide us with insight on a longstanding University debate. Before we break out the champagne to toast victories for the public's right-to-know, it's worth exploring what the University stands to gain or lose from these two decisions. In the case of the University Police decision, not much. Race is not merely a "sensitive" issue, it's a very cloudy issue, and one with a dubious intellectual history. In the literal sense of the word, race is completely irrelevant to criminal descriptions. Race currently refers to someone's ethnic or semantic affiliation, though historically, it had a biological definition: it was a type of subspecies, as breeds are to dogs and other animals. Race is not skin color, nor is it reducible to skin color, and its heritage as a bilogical term gives it an unfortunate genetic determinist connotation. Neither of the traditional definitions of race is relevant to the description of a crime suspect: it is nonmaterial to a physical description upon which continent a crime suspect's ancestors lived, or to which language group her native language belonged. So if law enforcement officials and journalists remain convinced that skin color is worth mentioning in crime stories, they ought to develop a non-racial skin color scale, say from "trout-belly white" to "estuary-silt black." Perhaps color consultants from J. Crew could advise such an undertaking. Race disclosure advocates argue that "black" and "white" don't refer to race, but simply to skin color. After all, the words "black" and "white" describe colors; "Negroid" and "Caucasian" name races. But all this amounts to is that some suspects are described by color, while others are described by race, however obsolete and problematic those names may be. When subjects are Asian or Hispanic, will the newspaper describe them as light brown? And of course modifiers such as "light" and "dark" are themselves relative, usually to white skin colors. Nevertheless, say some, detailed descriptions of crime suspects can protect the community. Let's not deny the public information that could have a bearing on safety for the sake of a few intellectual niceties. But how useful are suspect descriptions -- with or without race -- to the general public? Numerous psychological studies show that eyewitness descriptions are highly fallible, and are susceptible to suggestion, stereotype and prejudice. When a paper runs an eyewitness or victim description of a suspect, much of it may be inaccurate or transitory. A person described as a six foot light-skinned black male wearing a red cap could be five-nine and Semitic, or Hispanic, or white and just back from Spring Break, and in all likelihood he has ditched the cap by the time a newspaper description has appeared. Annenberg Professor Oscar Gandy is among University faculty members concerned about race descriptions of crime suspects. He questions what he calls "the social function" of these descriptions. "The level of detail that would allow the community to avoid a dangerous individual is never going to appear," he said. "Therefore to identify by race is only going to contribute to a general level of fear against all persons matching that description." University Police Commissioner John Kuprevich is sensitive to the problems with race disclosure, and plans to draft a written policy which he hopes will ameliorate some of these problems. Kuprevich may solicit input from University and community members on how the written policy should work. But even a thoughtful race description policy will not insure that we consistently learn the race of assailants in campus crimes. For example, University students -- who are predominantly white -- are the most frequent assailants in certain types of crimes at the University, notably rape and other kinds of sexual assault. But because these students are often charged through the University judicial system -- or are not charged at all -- we do not learn that the majority of these assailants are white. Which brings me to the second public disclosure issue: What's in it for Penn if we learn which University organizations have violated University policy, as the Georgia decision may allow us to do? Plenty. For several years University community members have hotly debated the role of fraternities on campus, but the process has been hampered by the difficulty of getting accurate and verifiable information of fraternity violations. Whether or not judicial code violators are fraternity members is directly relevant to a vital set of issues facing the University, as well as college campuses across the country. Disclosure of the organizational affiliations of students under investigation will help us make decisions, implement new policies, and educate University community members -- things that disclosure of race will never do. Elizabeth Hunt is a trout-belly white doctoral candidate in History and Sociology of Science from Bloomington, Indiana, last seen wearing a green duffel coat. "One Man's Meat" appears alternate Thursdays.