In Detroit, Black people are 75% of the population but about 50% of the police force, and this is after twenty years of one of the most anti-racist mayors in history, Coleman Young, and affirmative action until it was struck down.
I don't believe there is any general idea of targetting police jobs in general among Black people.
You said an "impression", so I am just giving you another impression. I noticed the tv pattern too by the way. I always thought it was a Hollywood way to misrepresent the level of authority in Black people's hands and thereby undercut this aspect of racism.>>
I agree with Charles that impressionistic comments on black Americans using or even being able to use the same strategy that white ethnic Americans used in the past to become 'truly white,' as regards the police, are probably mistaken, more a result of the representations by the corporate media.
One of the conflicts that arise from the interactions between the police and urban black communities has been the high percentage of cops who police the urban black areas and yet live in very white suburbs. As Charles notes, racial proportionality has improved, and yet it has not (and, given that affirmative action is on the way out everywhere, is not likely to) match the racial compositions and residential patterns of communities.
Besides, comparisons between ethnic whites and blacks that some made on this thread don't allow us to grasp how white and black races have become social facts. Ethnic whites have been able to become 'truly white' only because they succeeded in drawing the racial boundary between them and blacks.
However, I do agree with Wojtek that public-sector employment (the military, civil service, etc.) has been a much better avenue to pursue 'equal opportunity' for black Americans, compared to the record of the private sector.
Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>I think even more so by joining the military or civil service -- that are
>far less discriminatory than the corporate sector or, for that matter, the
>academe.
I would like to also add that this fact has been cleverly exploited by the Right-wingers who often decry what they refer to as 'dependency' of black Americans upon the public sector employment, and this Right-wing argument, in my view, is part of ammunitions that have been used in their attacks on the 'welfare state.'
Yoshie