According to conventional and socially acceptable wisdom, this is a familiar story — the sure cultural explanation for the phenomenal success of Kenyan distance runners. There’s only one problem: The national sport, the hero worship, the adoring fans, the social channeling — that all speaks to Kenya’s enduring love affair with not running, but soccer. Despite the enormous success of Kenyan runners in the past 15 years, running remains a relative afterthought in this soccer-crazed nation.

Unfortunately, Kenyans are among the world’s worst soccer players. They are just terrible. Despite an elaborate school system and the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars of the country’s sparse sports resources, Kenya, the most populous and affluent country in East Africa, is regularly trounced by far smaller countries in West Africa. In fact, there is no such thing as an East African soccer powerhouse. The same thing is true of sprinting. Kenya has tried desperately over the past decade to replicate its wondrous success in distance running at the sprints, to no avail. The best Kenyan time ever in the 100 meters — 10.28 seconds — ranks somewhere near 5,000th on the all-time list.

What’s going on here? And for that matter, why is it that every running record, from the 100 meters to the marathon, is held by an athlete of African ancestry? Is it racist and a white obsession to be curious about such phenomena?

In America, the convenient explanation for the tepid performance of whites in running, basketball and, increasingly, football is that blacks just work harder at them, because of cultural expectations and in part to escape sometimes desperate poverty. That’s dubious and I believe racist. Do cultural factors matter? Of course: There are no Texans, white, black or Latin, starring in the National Hockey League. But there is little more than speculation in support of assertions that the racial disparities we see in sports success are “determined,” as many sociologists claim, by social factors alone.

Frankly, such claims that blacks succeed for cultural reasons diminishes the reality that sports achievement is all about individual accomplishment — fire in the belly. It’s hard work, courage and serendipity that separate champions from the rest of the elite sports men and women.

Consider Michael Jordan, who grew up in the security of a two-parent home in comfortable circumstances. Or Grant Hill, son of a Yale-educated father and a Wellesley-graduate mother. Or one of the world’s top sprinters, Donovan Bailey, who was certainly not motivated by a desperate need to escape destitution: He already owned his own house and a Porsche, and traded life as a successful stockbroker to pursue his dream of Olympic gold. More and more top black athletes are from the middle class.

And just look at the athletes winning medals in the Sydney Olympics. Why is the success of blacks and other minorities such as Aboriginal Australians explained away by cultural channeling? Sports success is too complex a phenomenon to be tidily settled by such facile sociology. How do we explain the success of the majority of athletes, of all nations and ancestral heritage, who lived in comfortable circumstances? The classic argument that blacks succeed in sports to escape poverty is less and less plausible and more and more racist every day.

Genes may not determine who are the world’s best runners, but they do circumscribe possibility. Kenyans and other East Africans have an innate capacity, not an innate ability, to thrive in distance running; individual effort and courage separate the pretenders from the stars. Success in sports is a biosocial phenomenon.

In Kenya, the cultural argument for the country’s lackluster sprinting and soccer success amounts to an assertion that aspiring sprinters and soccer players don’t train hard enough to keep up with their African brethren on the west side of the continent. That’s sheer nonsense. Kenyan training regimens, in all sports, are legendary.

No amount of political correctness can obscure the reality that a large part of Kenyans’ mediocre record in soccer and sprinting comes down to genetics: They just don’t have the body or physiology for those sports. They are ectomorphs, short and slender, with huge natural lung capacity and a preponderance of slow twitch muscles, the energy system for endurance sports. It’s a perfect biomechanical package for distance running, but a disaster for sports that require anaerobic bursts of speed — like sprinting and soccer.

Kenya, with but 28 million people, is the world epicenter in distance running, which only became widely popular in the late 1980s. Today, Kenyans hold more than one-third of the top times in middle- and long-distance races. Including top performances by other East Africans (most from Ethiopia), that domination swells to almost 50 percent. The Kalenjins of the Great Rift Valley adjacent to Lake Victoria, a loosely named population of 1.5 million people, win almost 40 percent of major international distance events. One tiny district, the Nandi, with only 500,000 people — one-twelve-thousandth of Earth’s population — sweeps an unfathomable 20 percent, marking it as the greatest concentration of raw athletic talent in the history of sports.

At the Seoul Olympics in 1988, Kenya shocked the running world when its top male runners won the 800 meters, the 1,500 meters and the 5,000 meters, plus the 3,000-meter steeplechase. Based on population percentages alone, the likelihood of such a performance is one in 1.6 billion. The more recent figures are even more staggering. At the World Cross Country Championships in 1998, arguably the most competitive running event in the world, each country was limited to six entries. The Kenyans finished No. 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7; the No. 3 finisher was from Kenya’s East African neighbor, Ethiopia.

Why does the claim that sports success is biosocially based get some people so nervous? After all, it’s conventional science that different body types have evolved in response to differing environmental conditions in different regions of the world.

The elephant in the living room, of course, is “race.” Fascination about black physicality and black anger about being caricatured as lesser human beings have been part of the unspoken side of the American dialogue on race for hundreds of years. The fear is that some might conclude that if blacks are faster on average, they must, as part of zero-sum reasoning, be weaker mentally. But that’s a conclusion not supported by science.

Race is a term soaked in much folkloric nonsense. The concept of race is somewhat akin to a sloppy Joe masquerading as a hamburger. It’s a pretty messy concept, sometimes referred to as “fuzzy sets” or extended families. Although racial labels are helpful terms, and I use them in my book, “Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It,” they can leave misconceptions. Many traits are correlated, such as dark skin color and the presence of the sickle cell gene. But such links are not absolute. Blacks who have evolved in cooler climates are no more likely to contract sickle cell than are nonblacks. Although many blacks are lactose intolerant, a result of the utter lack of milk-producing animals in much of sub-Saharan Africa, the Masai, with their tradition of cow and goat herding, are perfectly able to digest milk products.

“Race,” as we popularly talk about it, carries enough racist baggage as to be problematic at best. It leads to simplistic generalizations that link vague concepts such as “intelligence,” “violence” and “sexual aggressiveness” to populations grouped by skin color. That’s why top geneticists, such as Stanford’s Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, while basing their research on a recognition of populationwide genetic differences, eschew the term “race.”

As Cavalli-Sforza has so brilliantly demonstrated, trait variations are the result of waves and crosscurrents of migrations that at times — frequently even — belie the folkloric racial categories. This is true, of course, even in sports. Pygmies, who certainly have black skin, are not particularly good athletes. It’s no surprise that their genetic history distinguishes them quite dramatically from much of the rest of sub-Saharan Africans. Similarly, the Lemba tribe of southern Africa was recently shown to be genetically linked through the Y chromosome to the Jewish population of Mesopotamia some 2,000 years ago. In key genetic ways, they are quite distant from many other Africans.

With these many exceptions in mind, it remains largely true that some body type and physiological patterns show up in various mega-populations such as West Africans, Eurasian whites, East Africans and East Asians. Today, no credible scientist disputes that evolution, along with local social conditions, has helped shape Kenyan distance runners, white power lifters, with their enormous upper-body strength, and athletes of West African ancestry who are explosive runners and jumpers.

What have scientists documented? Whites of Eurasian ancestry, who have, on average, more natural upper-body strength, predictably dominate weightlifting, field events such as the shot put and hammer (whites hold 46 of the top 50 throws) and the offensive line in football. Where flexibility is key, East Asians shine, such as in diving and some skating and gymnastic events — hence the term “Chinese splits.” Just watch the Olympics and you will see: There are no prominent Chinese sprinters, no runners of any note until you get to the longest distances and no jumpers, but the Chinese flourish in diving and gymnastics. Is this totally a product of cultural factors? It’s extremely doubtful.

Despite this remarkable confluence of massive on-the-field empirical evidence and overwhelming heritable anthropometric and physiological characteristics, some sociologists and a coterie of ideological evolutionary biologists seem determined to distort this fascinating phenomenon by turning it into a racial issue. Some argue that the empirical and scientific data should be ignored in favor of a personal conviction that humans are a tabula rasa, a blank slate for society and environment to write upon.

In light of recent advances in genetics and the science of human performance, such extremist beliefs appear quaint, dangerous and even racist. Indeed, populationwide differences are widely acknowledged in disease research. Many populations of sub-Saharan African ancestry are genetically predisposed to contracting colorectal cancer, Eurasian whites are genetically prone to multiple sclerosis — and East Asians by and large are victims of neither.

Why do we so readily accept that evolution has turned out blacks with a genetic proclivity to contract sickle cell, Jews of European heritage who are 100 times more likely than other groups to fall victim to the degenerative mental disease Tay-Sachs and whites who are most vulnerable to cystic fibrosis, yet find it racist to acknowledge that blacks of West African ancestry have evolved into the world’s best sprinters and jumpers and East Asians into the best divers?

Yet that’s the typical position staked out by ideologues such as University of North Carolina at Charlotte anthropologist Jonathan Marks. Marks rails against even discussing the issue of human differences on the basis of his disingenuous assertion that the dramatic patterns of athletic success by athletes of different ancestral origins cannot be proved, in a laboratory, to be linked to specific genes. “If no scientific experiments are possible, then what are we to conclude?” he writes. “That discussing innate abilities is the scientific equivalent of discussing properties of angels,” is “outside the domain of modern scientific inquiry” and therefore should not be pursued.

What a breathtakingly simplistic — and indeed racist — claim, that we should not even discuss the science of sports. Such a stand enrages many geneticists engaged in lifesaving research. “I believe that we need to look at the causes of differences in athletic performance between races as legitimately as we do when we study differences in diseases between the various races,” declares Claude Bouchard, a leading geneticist studying obesity and athletic performance and director of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La. “In human biology … it is important to understand if age, gender, race, and other population characteristics contribute to the phenotype variation,” he writes in the American Journal of Human Biology. “Only by confronting these enormous issues head-on, and not by circumventing them in the guise of political correctness, do we stand a chance to evaluate the discriminating agendas and devise appropriate interventions.”

Of course we have heard echoes of this debate before. It’s similar to the classic defenses of the indefensible, such as the tobacco industry response to charges that smoking causes cancer and the creationist attack on evolution. For years, tobacco lobbyists have held that because there is no confirmed laboratory “proof” that smoking directly causes cancer in humans (independent of uncontrollable individual circumstances), we should not consider this an issue of “science.”

Similarly, creationists have argued (in an unsuccessful legal brief before the Supreme Court by the Creation Legal Research Fund) that there is no direct “proof” for human macroevolution. “The evidence for evolution is far less compelling than we have been led to believe,” states the brief. “Evolution is not a scientific ‘fact,’ since it cannot actually be observed in a laboratory.”

Such posturing by the tobacco industry, creationists and environmental determinists is scientific hogwash. As Barbara Ehrenreich and Janet McIntosh wrote in the liberal weekly the Nation in 1997, this is yet another round of an unrelenting, almost hysterical, attack on the scientific method by a coterie of influential social thinkers, including Marks of UNC-Charlotte. Its goal is entirely political: to caricature the clear scientific fact that there are biologically based commonalties in populations to support the now-discredited belief that humans are a blank slate, shaped entirely by their environment and culture.

This ideologically driven perspective is infected by a fundamental misunderstanding of scientific reasoning, which rarely lends itself to “smoking guns” and absolute certainty. The search for scientific truth is a process. It may be years before we identify a gene that ensures that humans grow five fingers, but we can be assured there is one, or a set of them. We have yet to find the gene set for height, yet we can be quite certain that if one exists, men will be more likely to have it than women. Most theories, including those in genetics, rely on circumstantial evidence tested against common sense, known science and the course of history. If scientific theories depended only upon observable evidence or laboratory experiments, then everything from the theory of relativity to the certainty that the Earth revolves around the sun could be written off as speculative.

The fact that geneticists cannot yet isolate the chromosomes that contribute to hip-shifting, breakaway running does not automatically undermine the theory that such skills are genetically based — any more than the lack of an eyewitness at a crime is proof that the crime never happened. It may be years before geneticists isolate particular strands of DNA linking population clusters to athletics, “but that is not the same as saying that there is not a genetic basis for the racial patterns we see in sports,” asserts Bengt Saltin, a physiologist, director of the Copenhagen Muscle Research Institute and author of the cover story on why athletes are born, not made, in the September Scientific American. “Identifying genes will not and cannot expect to resolve the issue. The basis for the success of black runners is in the genes. There is no question about that.”

Although ideological critics will undoubtedly continue to spin this issue, “what began as a healthy skepticism about misuses of biology [has become] a new form of dogma,” write Ehrenreich and McIntosh. “Like the religious fundamentalists, the new academic creationists defend their stance as if all of human dignity — and all hope for the future — were at stake,” they add. But “in portraying human beings as pure products of cultural context, the secular creationist standpoint not only commits biological errors but defies common sense.”

Here’s a challenge to academic creationists, who are far better at mau-mauing than rational debate: If there are no biological differences that contribute to the vast performance disparities in sports, what is the explanation for the fact that 498 of the top 500 100-meter times in history are held by athletes of primarily West African ancestry? And why shouldn’t we discuss it?

Limiting the rhetorical use of that problematic concept of race, an admirable goal, is not going to make the patterned biological variation on which it is based disappear. Although people share a common humanity, we are different in critical ways, such as our varying genetic susceptibility to diseases.

Sports is a wonderful metaphor to encourage a constructive discussion of the wonderful benefits and potential ethical concerns ushered in by the revolution in genetics. Indeed, if we do not welcome the impending genetic revolution with open minds, if we are scared to ask and to answer difficult questions, if we lose faith in science, then there is no winner; we all lose. The question is no longer whether genetic research will continue but to what end.

Athletic competition, which offers a definitiveness that eludes most other aspects of life, is a perfect laboratory for a serious exploration of our humanity. The challenge is in whether we can conduct the debate so that human diversity might be cause for celebration of our individuality rather than a source of distrust. After all, in the end, for all our differences, we are far, far more similar.

“If decent people don’t discuss human biodiversity,” writes George Mason University professor Walter Williams in a review of “Taboo” in American Enterprise magazine, “we concede the turf to black and white racists.”

This comes at a time when an increasingly conservative backlash threatens to deny protection for our country’s most vulnerable women. A bill recently passed in the House on a largely partisan vote was criticized by many House Democrats, some Republicans, and the White House for removing Senate-passed provisions extending protection to LGBT, Native American and undocumented immigrant women. And if the Violence Against Women Act is not reauthorized, millions of American women who don’t fit the obvious definition of a victim might be denied protection.

In her book “Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation,” Beth E. Richie, professor at University of Illinois at Chicago, uses her expertise to reveal the hidden experience of black women living in marginalized communities. With over 25 years of work as a black feminist scholar and anti-violence activist, Richie tackles the extremely complicated interplay of race, gender and class that is causing violence against black women. From high prison rates to dwindling social welfare, our country is leaving these women behind.

Salon spoke with Richie about the mainstreaming of the anti-violence movement, the idea of a “culture of poverty,” and how these issues are being talked about in the upcoming election.

You describe the U.S. as a “prison nation.” What do you mean by that?

The prison nation, which is a broader concept than the prison industrial complex, for me represents the combination of both incarceration in the literal sense – an influx of people into the criminal legal system in all of its apparatus: jails, prisons, detention centers, etc. … [It is an] increase in arrest and removal of people from their communities into facilities, but it also represents the ideological shift and policy changes that use criminalization and punishment as a response to a whole range of social problems. Not just crime, but also things like policing people who are on welfare, using the child protective services system to control families, the ways that schools have become militarized. So it’s a broad notion of using the arm of the law to control people, especially people who are disadvantaged and come from disadvantaged communities.

How does this affect violence against black women?

It’s kind of an interesting parallel and a convolution of things. Anti-violence work has been going on in this country for years and years, and many people see the early 1990s as the time when there were big shifts in public consciousness about the problem of violence against women, as well as changes in policies that really took the crime of violence against women – domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, etc. – more seriously. So there were new laws, there were more sanctions, police were trained, domestic violence courts were opened up – there were a lot of policy changes that made the problem of violence against women a crime. And a lot of that harsh sanctioning of violence against women really grew out of, not feminist organizing to end the problem of violence against women, but a parallel criminalization of everything. The Violence Against Women Act really lined up right against the other crime bills that were passed primarily in the mid-1990s. So on the one hand, this is good news for anti-violence activists, in terms of criminalizing violence against women. But on the other hand, these crimes disproportionately impacted black communities, and so it was kind of a mixed result for African-American people. It created a schism, especially for African-American women, but also I think for African-American families and communities more generally, because we were taking position against mass incarceration at the same time that mass incarceration was being used as a tool to respond to the crime of violence against women.

This is an interesting development given the “everywoman” emphasis of the ’60s feminist anti-violence movement — which argued that all women, regardless of race and class, were vulnerable to domestic violence. 

Yes. We began doing training to try to raise public consciousness and make public the private care of domestic and sexual violence, in particular, by saying: This is not an isolated problem, it can happen to any women; it’s not just an issue for poor families or families of color. So — regardless of your religion, your race or ethnicity, your income, what region of the country you live in, what age you were … it didn’t matter what you wore, it didn’t matter if you didn’t cook well – there was nothing demographically or behaviorally that would protect women from male violence. We used that as a kind of anchor to our analysis: It can happen to any woman. And I think we were successful, at least initially, in making sure that it wasn’t another stigmatizing problem that was associated with other social problems of poverty and racism, etc. And people heard us. There was an increase in general public consciousness, and in particular, there was an increase in attention to the problem of violence against women by power elites – by executive decision-makers at corporations, elected officials, presidents of universities.

And when power elites started paying attention to it, they took seriously what could happen to women in their social context and started designing services for and passing laws that would protect women in their social context. So it became ultimately paradoxically kind of a narrowing of an understanding of the problem. That white middle-class or wealthy heterosexual married women or women on elite college campuses were at risk of violence against women and the attention, the resources, the analysis, went toward protecting those women at the expense of women who didn’t fall into those more normative categories. So it became hard to understand how a prostitute could be raped, for example. Or how a woman who is a substance abuser could be battered in her household. It became a sense of victimization tied to a sympathetic image of who could be hurt and how terrible it was that those women were hurt, as opposed to the real everywoman that we were trying to argue for.

You argue this trend in the anti-violence movement made it more difficult to help black women. 

A lot of benefit has resulted from the kind of mainstreaming of the anti-violence movement: A lot more people talk about it, there are a lot more services, there are college classes and journals, and federal agencies take the issues seriously. But in order for there to be mainstream public awareness and response to the problem of violence against women, some key leaders in the mainstream feminist anti-violence movement tried to keep the issue “legitimate.” So again women were seen as purely victims without agency, without ever having done anything wrong. There’s sort of a painting of innocence in a not very complex way at all, so that understanding of who is hurt by male violence got to be a very narrow slice of the real dimensions of the problem.

I think in general it’s difficult for people who are removed from the lives of more disadvantaged communities to understand the complexity of life there. I think that’s just hard. So one is kind of a general inability, whether it’s the news media or research studies, to really show complexity. And to show that violence — using rape for an example — that the violence a woman experiences is an assault on her body, but it’s also an assault on her spirit, an assault on her sense of confidence. It also feels like an assault on her race; it may feel like an assault on her sexuality, on her gender. And the lived experience of assault or violence is a very complicated experience to understand. The more complicated lives are, the more complicated the experience feels. But all of that is really hard to put on a public service announcement. And it’s hard to write into a law.

How do you think these issues will play out in the coming election?

That’s going to be interesting to see. I think it’s going to show up in a couple of ways. One is, there’s been real challenges to the Violence Against Women Act, which is again sort of the major national legislation that we worked so hard to create, that the Republican power in Congress is really trying to erode. And the parts that they’re trying to erode are specifically those parts that look at women in disadvantaged communities: immigrant women, women in low-income communities, women who are living on Native American reservations. And so there’s a real attack on the special provisions in the VAWA that could help women of color. That’s going to be an important issue.

I also think that the question of president Obama’s attention to poverty, and to chronic unemployment, in particular, in black communities, which have really suffered. And they’ve suffered because of chronic lack of resources and attention. And women specifically have suffered because of the diversion of even feminist issues to focus more on white middle-class feminist issues. Black women are struggling to survive in our communities, as they had been before Obama was president, and as they have continued to since he’s been president. It’s going to be tricky to see how we get people excited and mobilized to show up and take care of this election the way that we need to.

Occupy Wall Street has arguably brought poverty into the mainstream conversation, but many people have argued that it has ignored race and gender.

Absolutely. I think Occupy has done really important reframing work around this country and that’s really exciting. But the lack of strategic attention to race and gender both as separate but also as overlapping issues has been, I think, profound. And I’ve even thought at different times, So who’s looking out for women’s safety at the Occupy encampments? It seems like a basic question, but those of us who’ve been working to fight against violence against black women and other women of color always find ourselves saying, So even the best political strategies still fail to account for the ways that even within political movements, even within parks that have been occupied, even within radical HIV prevention work, you’ve got to always take into account that some women are in dangerous situations, dangerous relationships or dangerous communities. Even the political left, the more radical spaces, don’t always account for that vulnerability. And women aren’t only vulnerable, we’re also activists. But we are indeed vulnerable too, from within as well as from the larger systemic issues that I talk about as a prison nation.

The idea of a “culture of poverty,” made famous in the ’60s by Michael Harrington, argues that poverty has a self-perpetuating value system. The term has recently made a resurgence in popular discussion. What do you think of it?

I think that the culture of poverty implies that there’s something in how people make meaning of their relationship to each other, their family structures. Culture has a very particular meaning. And I don’t think that there is a culture of poverty in the true meaning of the word “culture.” I do think that there’s a way that people have adapted to disadvantaged circumstances and have made a way out of no way. I wouldn’t call that a culture of poverty, as if there’s something that’s in their mind or spirit or social organization that’s a value system or a sense of morality about poverty. I think people have figured out ways to survive. In anti-prison work, people often talk about the culture of imprisonment – that it becomes almost a way of life, that people expect to get arrested, that they expect to go to jail, that prison doesn’t startle them. And I think that’s completely false. Even though they know their risk might be higher because there are cops everywhere and they know lots of people who’ve been incarcerated, I don’t think it becomes like a culture as if it becomes normalized. And that’s the risk to me. I don’t think women who are battered, even if they’re hurt every day by the person that they live with, I don’t think they expect it and I don’t think it becomes part of their value system, but it does become part of their reality. I think the culture of violence and poverty and prisons are just ways, I think, to shift the gaze or remove responsibility from ending those systemic failures and blaming people for what their experiences are. And I think once a notion like the culture of poverty has been misused, I think it’s very hard to reclaim it. It’s too far gone in some ways, even if its original meaning might have been one that had more utility in terms of social change.

You close with five recommendations for strategies to create more just solutions to the problem of male violence against black women in the prison nation. Are you hopeful?

I do feel hopeful. I feel hopeful because I think that more people are beginning to understand that mass incarceration is not going to solve social problems. And I think the anti-violence movement is beginning to accept its responsibility for being too closely aligned with the mass incarceration strategies. And I see, especially with young people of color and queer organizations, people saying, We’ve got to do something differently, and we’ve got to listen more carefully to the stories, the voices of women who’ve been almost untouched by mainstream anti-violence work. We’ve got to turn to them and say, What would have worked differently? What could we do differently for our daughters, for the young people in your community? And I think people are looking with very creative optimism toward more transformative, restorative, real justice programs at the neighborhood grassroots level. It’s been very inspiring to me. But it’s taken a long time, and I think there’s been some kind of damage done between the mainstream anti-violence movement and, as I talk about it the book, black communities – because of the sort of failure to connect on the issues that impact black women. Mostly I’m hopeful that the book dignifies the stories of the incredible women that are surviving under horrific circumstances. And they really are surviving. They’re making meaning and situations that just sort of seem almost impossible to imagine if you don’t live them.

U.S. district judge Shira Scheindlin granted class-action certification to a stop-and-frisk lawsuit against the city of New York, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The plaintiffs allege that the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy regularly violates the Constitution by illegally stopping and searching scores of people belonging to a particular demographic — black and Latino. Pending the city’s appeal, the class-action ruling will put stop-and-frisk on trial.

Plaintiffs in Floyd et al. vs City of New York also argue that they were stopped by police who did not have the legally necessary “reasonable suspicion” that they had committed or were going to commit a crime. What’s more, the suit alleges, police often performed frisks, but not because they saw a bulge they suspected to be a weapon, another legal requirement.

In her written decision, Scheindlin said the alleged constitutional violations result not from the actions of rogue officers, but from a policy handed down from the very top. “The stop-and-frisk program is centralized and hierarchical,” said Scheindlin. “Those stops were made pursuant to a policy that is designed, implemented and monitored by the NYPD’s administration.”

Scheindlin’s ruling cites “overwhelming evidence” — a spike in stop-and-frisks and the NYPD’s own words — indicating that at the “highest levels of the department” police are enforcing a policy that leaves behind a trail of daily injustices.

For years, Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly have used distortions and misinformation to promote and justify a policy that violates the constitutional rights of those who were stopped. Now, the Scheindlin findings have exposed the NYPD game for what it is, an illegal system of quotas and racial profiling imposed on field police from the top of the NYPD.

“Suspicionless stops should never occur,” Scheindlin wrote in her decision, adding that, “Defendants’ cavalier attitude towards the prospect of a ‘widespread practice of suspicionless stops’ displays a deeply troubling apathy towards New Yorkers’ most fundamental constitutional rights.” Stop-and-frisk, which the data shows is a form of racial profiling, violates not only the Fourth Amendment — protection from unreasonable searches — but also the 14th Amendment, which includes the equal protection clause, the plaintiffs charge.

The Scheindlin decision was informative and comprehensive, including a number of important facts and observations. Here are eight important points from the decision.

1. Soaring numbers. The rate of stops has grown exponentially under the Bloomberg administration. Scheindlin’s ruling notes that police conducted 2.8 million documented stops of people between 2004 and 2009, about half of whom were frisked. In contrast, in 1998, Scheindlin explains, NYPD officers made roughly 150,000 stops per year. In 2004 alone, officers recorded more than 313,000 stops, “and since then the number has increased every year except 2007, rising to over 684,000 in 2011.” Scheindlin cites the large increase as evidence of a centralized policy change.

2. No reasonable suspicion. Reasonable suspicion that a person is involved in a crime is necessary for a legal stop. Eighty-eight percent of those stopped, however, are not charged with any crime. As Scheindlin noted, the data shows that “according to their own records and judgment, officers’ ‘suspicions’ were wrong nearly nine times out of ten.”

3. Imaginary bulges. Officers’ suspicions were similarly unsubstantiated when reportedly searching for guns. A “suspicious bulge” was cited as a reason for about 10 percent of all stops, but guns were seized in less than 1 percent. “For every 69 stops that police officers justified specifically on the basis of a suspicious bulge, they found one gun,” the decision notes.

4. Stops for no reason. The absence of a legally necessary, interpretable “suspected crime” cited on official forms grew from 1.1 percent in 2004 to 35.9 percent (more than 200,000 reported stops) in 2009. During those years, “Overall, in more than half a million documented stops — 18.4 percent of the total — officers listed no coherent suspected crime,” Scheindlin wrote, meaning they either ignored the section altogether or did not cite suspected behavior that is indeed illegal.

5. Unlawful stops. Scheindlin writes, “According to their own explanations for their actions, NYPD officers conducted at least 170,000 unlawful stops between 2004 and 2009.” Stops based on nothing more than “furtive movement” or a “high-crime area” were the justifications of at least 100,000 stops, but as Scheindlin says, are illegal due to the Fourth Amendment law protecting Americans from unreasonable search.

6. Racial profiling. The NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program targets blacks and Latinos because of their skin color. Scheindlin admitted the testimony of Columbia University professor Jeffrey Fagan, who found that police stopped blacks and Latinos far more than white residents. Isolated from other factors like crime rates and neighborhood racial composition, racial disparity from racial targeting was statistically significant, strongly underscoring that skin color is the essential factor in determining who gets stopped and throwing weight behind allegations of 14th Amendment violations. Fagan’s research also found that “the search for weapons is (a) unrelated to crime, (b) takes place primarily where weapons offenses are less frequent than other crimes, and (c) is targeted at places where the black and Hispanic populations are highest.” Cops are more likely to list no suspected crime category, or what Scheindlin called “an incoherent one,” like “furtive movements,” when stopping blacks and Latinos than when stopping whites. They also are more likely to use force against people of color.

7. NYPD illegal quotas. Scheindlin links the rising number of stops and the targeting of black and Latinos to NYPD quotas and to Commissioner Kelly’s own admission that the NYPD has a quota policy, albeit disguised. In a recent operations order, Commissioner Kelly explained departmental policy under the euphemism “performance goal.” Kelly said in the order, “Department managers can and must set performance goals,” for “the issuance of summonses, the stopping and questioning of suspicious individuals, and the arrests of criminals.”

The order also explains a weekly review during which a sergeant compares each officer’s monthly “activity” with the “daily assignment,” whereby police who “do not demonstrate activities” — or keep their numbers up — “will be evaluated accordingly and their assignments re-assessed.” In other words, there will be consequences for officers who don’t meet quotas, even though New York labor law says penalizing cops for failing to meet quotas is illegal.

Former NYPD officers turned whistleblowers Adhyl Polanco and Adrian Schoolcraft have collected evidence documenting NYPD quotas in practice. From 2008 to 2009, Polanco, from the 41st Precinct, and Schoolcraft, from the 81st, recorded roll calls revealing supervisors’ and other high-ranking officers’ enforcement of quotas. In Scheindlin’s own words, Schoolcraft’s audio files expose supervisors “repeatedly telling officers to conduct unlawful stops and arrests and explaining that the instructions for higher performance numbers are coming down the chain of command.”

Similarly, Polanco testified that “his commanding officers announced specific quotas for arrests and summons (quotas that rose dramatically between early 2008 and 2009) and for UF-250s” (a term for the forms used in stops), said Scheindlin, “and threatened overtime and undesirable assignments for those who failed to meet them.”

8. Repeat performances. According to the NYCLU, in 2011 the NYPD stopped more young, black men than live in New York; that is, some individuals are stopped and frisked repeatedly. To protect their rights, plaintiffs are seeking “systemic relief” — an end to the unconstitutional practice of stop-and-frisk.

Kristen Gwynne covers drugs at AlterNet. She graduated from New York University with a degree in journalism and psychology.

But what if both the multicultural left and the nativist right are wrong? Definitions of racial identity in the U.S. have changed over time. In the twentieth century, Americans with different degrees of African ancestry who in earlier generations would have been described as negroes, quadroons and octoroons were all lumped together in a single category as blacks. And in the nineteenth century, eminent American ethnologists debated the question of whether Irish-Americans belonged to the same race as Anglo-Americans.

In the 1970s, the federal government came up with the bizarre “non-Hispanic white” label, lumping together Arab-Americans, Norwegian-Americans and Irish-Americans into a single government-created pseudo-race. To compound the absurdity, at the same time the federal government invented a category of “Hispanics” who, as government forms invariably note, “may be of any race.” The artificial “Hispanic” category is even more preposterous than the “non-Hispanic white” category, including blond, blue-eyed South Americans of German descent as well as Mexican-American mestizos and Puerto Ricans of predominantly African descent.

These government racial labels are increasingly out of touch with America’s fluid demographic reality. But for the sake of argument, let us take America’s official racial classifications, all too reminiscent of Soviet nationality labels, at face value. According to polls, a slight majority of Hispanics (or Latinos) identify themselves as “white.” Between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of government-labeled Hispanics who identified as “other race” dropped in percentage from 42 to 37 while those who identified as white rose from 48 to 53 percent.

If self-described “white” Hispanics are annexed to the “non-Hispanic white” group in order to form a single category of “whites” (Hispanic and non-Hispanic), then the emergence of a “nonwhite” majority in the U.S. is postponed by generations and perhaps indefinitely.

What is more, by the third generation, a majority of Hispanics marry outside of their ethnic group, mostly but not exclusively into the non-Hispanic white population. It is possible that their children will identify themselves as “mixed race” or “other race” — categories for self-labeling that have been allowed in recent Census counts. But it is more likely that the unscientific but powerful cultural category of “whiteness” will be enlarged to include Hispanics and Asians and their children as “non-Hispanic whites.”

In a widely-reprinted 1998 article for the New York Times Magazine, “The Beige and the Black,” I pointed out that America’s nonrational caste system has been binary: not white/nonwhite, but black/nonblack. Because “white” really means “nonblack,” the arbitrary white category is infinitely elastic, capable of being enlarged to include practically anybody who is not clearly of black African descent. While Hispanics and Asians have suffered from vicious bigotry in American history, anti-black prejudice has always been the organizing principle of caste in American culture.

As I wrote 14 years ago:

In the 21st century, then, the U.S. population is not likely to be crisply divided among whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians and American Indians. Nor is it likely to be split two ways, between whites and nonwhites. Rather, we are most likely to see something more complicated: a white-Asian-Hispanic melting-pot majority — a hard-to-differentiate group of beige Americans — offset by a minority consisting of blacks who have been left out of the melting pot once again.

(This is a prediction on my part, not a prescription. Rather than witness the redefinition of whiteness, from Anglo-American to Euro-American to Euro-Latino-Asian American, I would rather live to see a truly post-racist America in which caste is completely expunged from culture and consciousness. But I am reporting trends, not creating them; please don’t shoot the messenger.)

If this analysis is right, then present-day Republican racial politics is doomed — and so is Democratic racial politics.

Today’s Republican right seems intent on treating the ridiculous government category of “non-Hispanic white” as though it represented a core community of  “real Americans,” excluding black Americans and protected from demographic inundation by Hispanics, or “Third World hordes” as the gentlemanly Patrick Buchanan politely calls our fellow citizens of Latin American descent. Quite apart from betraying its roots in the Republicanism of Lincoln and the abolitionists, a Republican Party whose image of the American nation excludes not only blacks but also Hispanics and their descendants is doomed in electoral politics.

Democrats are right about that. But progressives are wrong to imagine that a new “majority of minorities” is about to emerge and create a lasting majority for the Democrats. The success of white nativists in the GOP in driving away Hispanic voters may help the Democrats for a few more electoral cycles, but sooner or later Republican politicians who are tired of losing will challenge the neo-Confederate wing of their party and practice a more racially-inclusive politics of the kind pioneered by George W. Bush and his brother Jeb Bush, with his Hispanic wife and mixed-race children.

Nor should progressives assume that Hispanics and their mixed-race progeny will remain loyal to the Democrats for generations to come. The fact that Anglo-American nativists in the Republican Party in the early 1900s tried to keep their ancestors out of the country does not deter most working-class white “ethnics” of Irish and Italian descent in the U.S. from voting for today’s GOP. Like earlier waves of immigrants, Hispanics are likely to change in their political values as a result of assimilation and upward mobility.

What does this mean for black Americans? On the one hand, the persistence of an informal “white” majority defined in opposition to the black minority would mean further delay in the realization of a truly post-racist America.

On the other hand, black Americans made much more rapid advances during the New Deal/Civil Rights era, when the melting of European ethnic differences created an overwhelming “white” majority for a time, than they have done since mass immigration made them the second largest official “minority” in the U.S. after Hispanics. The truth is that the “rainbow coalition” strategy of uniting minorities has helped other groups more than blacks. Affirmative action in higher education, for example, while doing little to help the majority of black Americans who do not go to college, has benefited upper-middle-class white women, who are part of the white majority (and, if they are affluent, part of the social elite within the dominant group). Programs like affirmative action and minority business set-asides, originally designed to help the descendants of American slaves, lost all moral credibility when they were opened up to white women and recent Hispanic and Asian immigrants, notwithstanding the feeble “diversity” rationale that America’s white oligarchy invented to rationalize them.

It remains to be seen how changing racial conceptions shape American politics. But if demography is destiny, one thing is clear — in the long run, both the diversitarian left and the nativist right are doomed.

But beyond the business headlines, what’s really fascinating about “The Intouchables” is the way it exposes the gulf in racial attitudes between France and the United States, along with another gulf that’s just as wide, the one that has film critics and cinephiles on one side and popular audiences on the other. Viewers in numerous countries have eagerly devoured this feel-good fable about two men of different races and classes who forge an improbable friendship (dubbed by some wags “Driving Monsieur Daisy”). While the audience for foreign-language film is inherently limited in America, there’s no reason to believe it won’t do well here also. At the same time, heated transatlantic debate has erupted over whether “The Intouchables” traffics in offensive racial stereotypes, with Variety critic Jay Weissberg writing an uncharacteristically angry review that accused the film of “Uncle Tom racism” and compared the Senegalese caretaker character to a “performing monkey.”

When Harvey Weinstein first acquired “The Intouchables” in the wake of its smash success in France, he clearly imagined another dark-horse Oscar contender, in the wake of “The Artist.” The film has racked up audience awards at film festival after film festival, and currently stands at No. 93 on IMDb’s user-generated “Top 250″ list. Omar Sy, the charismatic Afro-French actor who plays Driss, the caretaker, won this year’s César award (the French Oscar equivalent) for best actor, beating out actual Oscar winner Jean Dujardin. But with the looming possibility that “The Intouchables” could spark a divisive, soul-searching racial debate — which was precisely what squelched the Oscar hopes of “The Help” — those expectations have been downplayed. (That isn’t why “The Intouchables” is being released this week, with Weinstein and most of the film-biz aristocracy in Cannes, but the coincidence is oddly useful.)

Let me come clean right now and tell you that I enjoyed “The Intouchables” quite a bit. If you’re looking for a lightweight summer change of pace, with just a smidgen of Continental flair, here it is. Both Sy and co-star François Cluzet (of the hit thriller “Tell No One”) are marvelous, the former playing a guy who’s constantly in motion, both physically and psychologically, and the latter playing a depressed and repressed guy who literally can’t move, but whose real imprisonment has more to do with his spirit than his spinal cord. Don’t go expecting serious French art cinema, please; those who have described this movie as something like a mid-’80s Eddie Murphy comedy dressed up with classy Parisian settings are correct. But here’s the question, and I can’t answer it for you: Is that such a bad thing, in itself?

Once is not enough for a movie that’s made this much money, of course, and Weinstein already has an American remake in the works, possibly to star Colin Firth as stick-up-butt wheelchair dude. The real Eddie Murphy has gotten too old to play the loosey-goosey, pot-smoking sidekick, but there’s no shortage of guys who could do it: Jamie Foxx is the default setting these days, but I’d go for the suddenly hot Kevin Hart from “Think Like a Man.” I’m not claiming it’s aesthetically or sociologically valid to remake a French movie that already feels like a reheated Hollywood throwback, by the way. I’m saying it’s a cruel reality, like Dutch elm disease or Adam Sandler, and there’s no way to stop it.

To get back to the case at hand, I do understand what the haters find so offensive about “The Intouchables.” (The infelicitous English title, by the way, reflects the fact that they couldn’t really get away with calling it “The Untouchables,” could they?) I was pretty taken aback by Weissberg’s vituperative review, and I tend to believe that “Uncle Tom” is one of those expressions that white people should pretty much never use. On the other hand, I can only applaud him for abandoning the balanced, analytical mode of trade-magazine criticism and saying exactly what he damn well thinks. (As for comparing a black man to a monkey — well, I understand what Weissberg was getting at, but it’s an error of rhetoric, the sort of comment that makes nuance and context disappear.) And I know for sure, from hearing friends and acquaintances in and around the movie business complain about this film, that Weissberg is not alone.

I believe that Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, the writing-directing duo who made “The Intouchables,” are innocent of any bad intentions. In fact, “innocent” isn’t a bad word overall, for this movie and the worldview it represents. The French may pride themselves on being the most worldly and sophisticated of all people, but the debate in France about race and immigration and multiculturalism — which ramped up sharply after the suburban riots of 2005 — can sometimes sound strikingly naive to American ears. Until very recently, mainstream French opinion has resisted thinking about the nation in anything except homogeneous terms, despite growing Arab and black minorities (both immigrant and native-born) and evident social problems with segregation and discrimination. (The French census, for instance, is prohibited from collecting data on race or religion, so no one really knows how many French people are black or Islamic.)

There can be no question that the characters in “The Intouchables” are stereotypes, in the broad sense. Cluzet’s character, Philippe, is an aristocratic zillionaire who lives in an astonishingly luxurious flat in central Paris. Since being injured in a paragliding accident, he’s lived inside a cocoon of money and privilege, surrounded by antiques and modern art and a bevy of assistants. Sy’s character, Driss, is easygoing, good-hearted, lustful and uncultured, and his passions run toward pretty girls, getting high and vintage American R&B. Philippe hires Driss specifically because Driss doesn’t particularly want the job — he only shows up to get a signature for his benefits card — and feels no pity for Philippe.

Which is actually a pretty good reason. You get where this is going, most likely: Driss is a pretty inept caretaker, at least at first, but is the only person Philippe knows who will relate to him man to man. There’s a bit of borderline-homophobic humor about their enforced intimacy; there are interludes with hookers and fast cars and late-night conversations fueled by booze and marijuana. Driss learns to like Mozart and modern art; Philippe learns to get down with Earth Wind & Fire and gets some valuable tips about chicks. It’s probably fair to summarize this movie as being the story of a paralyzed white man who needs the help of a younger, stronger, more virile black man to reconnect with his own masculinity, and if you want to say that narrative reflects an underlying latticework of racist attitudes, I won’t argue with you. Then there’s the complicating factor that in the real-life story on which “The Intouchables” is based, the caretaker was of Algerian origin, and hence Arab rather than black. (The filmmakers have said they wanted to cast Sy, and built the story around him, but it’s certainly possible to render other interpretations.)

But one can concede all of that while still agreeing with French historian and multicultural activist François Durpaire, who has responded to Weissberg by arguing that the huge success of “The Intouchables” is likely to have positive effects in Europe’s emerging discussion of race and culture, even if the movie relies on crude generalizations. (Durpaire adds that if “The Intouchables” is offensive, so were the “Beverly Hills Cop” movies.) Movies are not meant to be seminars in sociology, after all, and most viewers will receive “The Intouchables” as an upbeat story about two guys from vastly different circumstances who turn out to have a lot in common and help each other, etc., rather than a lesson in racial semiotics.

Perhaps the strongest endorsement for “The Intouchables” has come from aging French ultra-nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has described it as an allegory about how the future of his nation depends on disenfranchised young immigrants from the suburbs. He thinks that’s a “dreadful” vision, mind you — but, seriously, who knew that guy was so smart?

“The Intouchables” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.

A far more unsettling finding is buried in this otherwise up-with-reading news item. The Ohio State researchers gave 70 heterosexual male readers stories about a college student much like themselves. In one version, the character was straight. In another, the character is described as gay early in the story. In a third version the character is gay, but this isn’t revealed until near the end. In each case, the readers’ “experience-taking” — the name these researchers have given to the act of immersing oneself in the perspective, thoughts and emotions of a story’s protagonist — was measured.

The straight readers were far more likely to take on the experience of the main character if they weren’t told until late in the story that he was different from themselves. This, too, is not so surprising. Human beings are notorious for extending more of their sympathy to people they perceive as being of their own kind. But the researchers also found that readers of the “gay-late” story showed “significantly more favorable attitudes toward homosexuals” than the other two groups of readers, and that they were less likely to attribute stereotypically gay traits, such as effeminacy, to the main character. The “gay-late” story actually reduced their biases (conscious or not) against gays, and made them more empathetic. Similar results were found when white readers were given stories about black characters to read.

What can we do with this information? If we subscribe to the idea that literature ought to improve people’s characters — and that’s the sentiment that seems to be lurking behind the study itself — then perhaps authors and publishers should be encouraged to conceal a main character’s race or sexual orientation from readers until they become invested in him or her. Who knows how much J.K. Rowling’s revelation that Albus Dumbledore is gay, announced after the publication of the final Harry Potter book, has helped to combat homophobia? (Although I confess that I find it hard to believe there were that many homophobic Potter fans in the first place.)

Absurd as this tactic may sound, many publishers are already kind of doing it — and catching hell. Although the term “whitewashing” is most often used to describe film and TV adaptations in which white actors are cast as characters who were people of color in the original book, something similar also happens with book graphics. Novels about black or Asian characters have been given cover art that features white people.

Controversies over cover-art whitewashing, and other attempts by agents, editors and publishers to downplay or even eliminate minority characters, have roiled the world of young adult literature in recent years. The author Justine Larbalestier (who is white) wrote a YA novel, “Liar,” with a black heroine in 2009, but her publisher insisted on using a photograph of a white teenager for the cover. Larbalestier took their disagreement public and the ensuing scandal persuaded the publisher to back down. Ursula K. Le Guin, a revered science-fiction and fantasy author who has often chosen dark-skinned people as her protagonists, has had to put up with seeing them depicted as white in cover art and film adaptations for decades.

Publishers argue that they’re only trying to make sure their authors’ books find the widest possible audience. What they mean is that a certain percentage of white (or straight) readers will summarily conclude a book isn’t for them if the face on the cover fails to resemble their own. Sad to say, the publishers are probably right about that. While the readers in the Ohio State study didn’t get to choose the stories they read, many of them were deciding how much to invest in the protagonist and his experiences — how much to identify — on the basis of his sexual orientation or race.

Authors, fans and observers are rightly disgusted by the practice of cover-art whitewashing. It shouldn’t have to be that way. But some commentators on the controversy seem to think that if publishers act as if race or gender or sexual orientation isn’t a factor in what many people decide to read, somehow it will simply stop being a factor. This seems unlikely. If it were so easy to rid people of their prejudices, the world would already be a much pleasanter place. It takes regular exposure to different types of people in the course of everyday life — at school and in the military, the workplace and the neighborhood — plus a whole lot of time and peer pressure to wear bias down.

Well, it takes that — and maybe the magic of storytelling? The readers in the Ohio State study did become more understanding of gay and black people after they were (let’s not put too fine a point on it) tricked into identifying with them. This type of sleight-of-hand is something only a non-visual medium like prose fiction can pull off. It can firmly lodge readers inside an imaginary person’s head without ever showing them his or her face. In Neil Gaiman’s “Anansi Boys,” for example, the narrator never explains that all the principle characters are black, and each reader will come to that realization at a different stage in the narrative. It’s Gaiman’s way of tweaking the very common readerly assumption that defaults all major characters to white unless their race is otherwise specified. (And sometimes not even then, as quite a few young fans of “The Hunger Games” demonstrated by being astonished when a supporting character, clearly described as black in the novel, was played by a black actress in the film.)

Of course, not all readers are white or straight, and the ones who aren’t deeply appreciate novels that advertise the diversity of their characters. It’s about time they got heroes and heroines who looked like them, and novels that speak to their distinctive experiences. They have been identifying with characters across the boundaries of race, gender and sexual orientation from time immemorial, and are masters of the art, but understandably they’d like to give their ninja skills a rest. Furthermore, there are also white readers who prefer variety in their fiction or are deliberately trying to correct the imbalances of the past.

Nevertheless, if you believe, as many Americans have since the days of the Puritans, that books ought to morally improve their readers, then maybe there’s a place for a little judicious whitewashing in the writing and publication of fiction. It has literally been demonstrated to change hearts and minds, at least for a while. That’s more than many consciousness-raising efforts — including righteous lectures delivered by the enlightened — can say.

Further reading

Ohio State University’s research blog on the study of the experience-taking while reading stories

The Booksmugglers blog on notable recent instances of book-cover whitewashing in YA.

Ursula K. Le Guin writes for Slate about the changes made to the race of major characters in the TV adaptation of her “Earthsea Trilogy.”

Hunger Games Tweets, a Tumblr compiling and discussing the response of some fans to the casting of a black actress as a supporting character in the film version of Suzanne Collins’ novel.