About that "Driving While Black" Canard

Ann Coulter destroys the old myth about "driving while black."  This is trotted out to "show" that if you're black you are more likely to get stopped for speeding than if you are white.

The story that made headlines was about NJ Turnpike cops stopping a disproportionately high number of black drivers.

Throughout the 1990s, the nation was fixated on tales of jack-booted New Jersey state troopers who were stopping speeders on the turnpike just because they were black! In a 2000 primary debate, Vice President Al Gore sneered at then-New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, saying, "Racial profiling practically began in New Jersey, Senator Bradley."...

Nonetheless, based on the assumption that blacks speed just as much as whites -- because to believe otherwise would be racist! -- Temple University's John Lamberth announced that while only 13.5 percent of drivers along a particular stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike were black, 46 percent of those stopped for speeding were black. ...

Confident that any new study would merely serve to confirm the troopers' racism, the DOJ and the New Jersey attorney general commissioned a statistical investigation from the Public Services Research Institute in Maryland.

The institute's study was a spectacular thing. Using expensive monitors with high-speed cameras and radar detectors, they clocked the speeds of nearly 40,000 drivers on the relevant section of the turnpike. Three researchers then examined the photos to determine the race of the driver -- without knowing whether the driver was speeding, which was defined as going more than 80 mph in 65 mph zones.

The result: No racial profiling.

Blacks constituted 25 percent of all speeders and they were 23 percent of drivers stopped for speeding. Controlling for age and gender, blacks sped at about twice the rate of whites. The racial disparity was even greater for drivers exceeding 90 mph.