FUHRMAN IS NO SURPRISE

By Jack E. White

What planet are these white people living on, the ones who profess such shocked surprise at the Mark Fuhrman tapes? Haven't they heard what black people have been telling them all these years: that the ranks of major police departments all across the country are full of Fuhrman-style lying bigots? Not all cops, by any means, not even most of them, but enough to generate a steady stream of racially motivated police misconduct. Most of it never makes the national news--the hundreds of cases in which minority suspects are manhandled, beaten or even killed. But certainly the most outrageous incidents, from the assault on Rodney King to the six Philadelphia cops who have pleaded guilty to framing African Americans, have been widely publicized. For that reason, says Don Jackson, a former cop who has devoted himself to exposing police racism in Southern California, "The naive white reaction of shocked dismay is totally disingenuous. It's more like they don't want to know, because if they did, they'd have to do something about it."

Indeed, the say-it-ain't-so-Joe reception of the Fuhrman tapes follows a well-established pattern of denial about the virulence of racism that extends far beyond the field of law enforcement. In part be cause of the conservative backlash against affirmative action, it has become fashionable to dismiss black and Latino complaints of discrimination as either mere pleading for preferential treatment or hallucinations, until an incontrovertible piece of evidence such as the Fuhrman tapes comes along. Then, inevitably, a surge of moral condemnation washes across the country like a cathartic wave--and subsides without any lasting effect. By the time the next ugly story surfaces, we're right back in denial mode.

The question is why so many otherwise alert and responsible citizens are so ready to accept the notion that police racism and other acts of discrimination are aberrations rather than commonplace occurrences. And how, in the face of such reports, citizens can nevertheless believe that it is time to disregard race as a factor and take a ''color-blind'' approach to social issues. The Fuhrman tapes effectively refute the claim put forward by conservatives, both black and white, that prejudice no longer has much impact on the lives and fortunes of African Americans. Like most black men, I can testify from personal experience that it does. During the 1970s, when I lived in Montclair, New Jersey, a leafy--and thoroughly integrated--New York City suburb, I was thrown up against a police car and slapped in handcuffs one evening by two white officers--simply because there had been some burglaries in the area. Once the cops established that I was a journalist for a newsmagazine, they apologized and released me, and I decided not to press the issue. I should have filed a complaint and insisted that it be acted on.

That is because unchecked police racism has a heavy cost. It exacts an enormous psychic price from black parents forced to warn their children--particularly their teenage sons--that many of their countrymen, including those sworn to uphold the law, regard them as no more than suspects. It is excused by the callousness of those who believe that suppressing ghetto crime is worth the cost in trampled civil liberties. And it perverts every aspect of the justice system, from the O.J. Simpson trial on down the line. In a nation where confidence in the rule of law is the only thing that holds us all together, all that is too high a price to pay.