America’s current favorite boogeymen are Muslims. That’s not history, that’s right now.
must…not…reply…to…low…hanging…fruit…
Even more astuteness on display! I tip my hat to you, sir.
LHOD: to bring this thread back from the trajectory it’s on to Snarktopia, would you and I be able to agree that while racism is possible, likely, and perhaps even most likely, that we can not totally discard the potential that the stewardess was having a pants-on-head retarded moment and any number of factors unrelated to race might have potentially caused her to wig out?
Simply as a datapoint, the DHS has now released a video of dastardly white terrorists.Can we perhaps agree that the climate of fear since 9/11, especially wrt airlines in particular, and especially as we’re coming up on the 10th anniversary, can in and of itself induce Security Panic in otherwise semi-rational people, let alone people full of the milk of human stupidity?
We can no more discard that possibility than we can discard the possibility that the dude exiting the restroom mistook me for an employee. We can, however, say that absent more information, the likelihood that she was racially profiling the musician as a Middle-Easterner, just as have dozens of airline employees before her to other dark-skinned passengers, is far likelier, to the extent that it seems silly to spend a lot of time seeking alternate and bizarre explanations.
The DHS is commendable for releasing that video. They know just as you and I do that terrorists aren’t always Arabs, and by posting that video, they’ll go some small way toward getting folks to grok that. I’m certainly not saying that all people are racist against perceived Arabs. Rather, I’m saying that such racism is pretty common, and that in this situation, it’s overwhelmingly the likeliest cause of the event.
Does everyone at least agree that the airline owes this guy an explanation, and possibly some comped flight?
I’m not sure if this case meets the strict criteria of “racial profiling,” but I believe there is little doubt the man’s race played a role in the decision of the stewardess to report him to authorities. She had legitimate concerns about safety brought on by the book and the extra bag, but I’m fairly certain, as others have suggested, that if the man were a white woman, she wouldn’t have gone to the authorities to have him checked out. According to Wikipedia: Racial profiling refers to the use of an individual’s race or ethnicity by law enforcement personnel as a key factor in deciding whether to engage in enforcement (e.g. make a traffic stop or arrest). Since law enforcement let the man go on his way without too much trouble, I don’t think this counts as racial profiling, since it was really just the flight attendant overreacting.
Using wikipedia as a source is a bit like using cheesecloth as a condom.
Off the back of a single self-penned letter of questionable veracity?
No, not enough evidence by a long shot, how can it possibly be otherwise?
Unless you have other evidence to bring to the tablet that is…
Again, if we’re to have any discussion at all on this case, we kind of have to assume the facts as given. If we start questioning them, there’s no much we can have in the way of a productive discussion.
It wasn’t actually racial profiling, you see, because the guy in question wasn’t black, he was albino. And a midget. Airplane? Lies: he was on a kayak. There was no flight attendant, it was only a muskrat. He wasn’t holding a book on airplanes, he was juggling bottles of Jack Daniels. The police didn’t pull him off, it was a shark that attacked the kayak and flipped it over.
Or we could preface the entire discussion with “ASSUMING THESE FACTS ARE ACCURATE…” and move on from there.
why is it so often with stories from minorities about discrimination that members of the majority resort to this tactic of disputing the accuracy of the information? IMHO it’s a revealing of the attitude that “if a black person says it, it can’t be true.” I was thinking alike to you when I read the comment. So he wasn’t on an airplane, he is not a musician, this is complete fiction, people write to the civil liberties union with trumped up complaints, this guy is pretty good story teller with all these details.
LHOD, that’s fairly ridiculous. You seem to be saying that we have to either accept this account of the facts as 100% true in all particulars or not discuss this incident at all. But there’s a very obvious middle ground–we can discuss other possible facts based on the facts we have (as I did above with my speculation about the exact nature of the fanny pack part of the incident). Doing Þhat isn’t the same thing as coming up with the ridiculousness you spout above.
While I think it’s very possible, even likely, that race played a factor, I don’t think that it’s the only explanation. Basically, it could have just been because the flight attended thought that he is scary looking. Who’s to say if the guy looked like Steve Buscemi or Brian Peppers and was in the same circumstances the flight attendant would have acted differently? She certainly acted wrongly and stupidly, but it’s not for certain a racial thing.
This isn’t minority vs majority. This is basic “wronged party” stuff. A person who perceives themselves as the wronged party will naturally play up the parts that make them look good and make the other guy look like Satan. It’s human nature and applies whether the story is about two white guys, a black guy and a white guy, a black guy who looks kind of middle eastern and a white guy, etc.
United’s response to this controversy is pretty standard stuff from the other side:
Personally, I think FinnAgain’s one-act play in post 113 is the most likely explanation for how it played out.
I dunno, she looks pretty ‘Mediterranean’ to me. That could be Middle Eastern, right?
Don’t underestimate the ability of paranoids to misread racial identities.
nonsense, utter nonsense and seeing as it was my comment that sparked your post I think you are way out of line with your subsequent inventions.
That is NOT my attitude. I’m an equal opportunities sceptic and you know why? Because people are people and human nature is human nature.
No-one has come close to saying or even implying that everything he said was “complete fiction”.
What some of us have done is question how accurate his story is, nothing to do with his race, everything to do with a wronged human being’s tendency to exaggerate to their own benefit.
Justin pointed to this, and I meant to address it before. Sure, that could be the case, in which case it’d be slightly more likely that Suzie has a really uncommon reason to finger this guy as a terrorist, instead of the much-more-common reason of being afraid of people who look Arabic.
But in order for this to be the case, we must assume not only that Suzie is afraid of beards or whatever, but ALSO that there’s some policy/whatever-the-fuck dictating that a single insane crew-member’s accusation can derail (to mix metaphors) a flight. That’s assumption on top of assumption, making it even more remote a possibility.
The most obvious explanation is that Arab-Looking-Guy gets accused of being a terrorist, by someone who thinks that Arab-Looking-Guys are likelier to be terrorists, because he’s an Arab-Looking-Guy. We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that such people are not only existent, but fairly common. While it’s remotely possible that Arab-Looking-Guy got accused of being a terrorist by someone who thinks that beard-guys are likelier to be terrorists, Occam’s Razor ought to shave that off pretty quickly.
Obviously my argument isn’t one for a court of law where there’s a beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard. Fortunately that’s not where we are.
As for the accuracy of his story, while I exaggerated for effect in my description of what else the truth could be, the point stands. None of us have any effect on the outcome of this case anyway. All we can do is use it as a case study in social dynamics. If we’re free to question even one small part of the story, we end up having no case study. An example: the guy left out the fact that the flight attendant spent the weekend at a White Power rally, because he didn’t know that. Suddenly the case swings incontrovertibly in my favor, with this tiny addition to this story. Why play this game? Discuss the story as given, with the proviso that a change in facts can change the conclusions.
Edit: this is not to say you have to trust him completely. You can say, “Personally his story sounds like bullshit, but if it’s true, then…”
Let me clarify. I back this interpretation of events (a single flight attendant invoking some kind of reporter rule) but I don’t think it removes the possibility of a racist twit being behind it all.
Basically, it wasn’t “profiling” per se, it was a single moron who put 2 (Arab looking) + 2 (book about planes) + 2 (doesn’t want me touching his stuff) together and got 666.
This may be a semantic difference, then. When I read about profiling in instances such as these, I mean someone with authority (or ability to invoke authority) making decisions about people’s possible violation of rules based in part on their race. I don’t necessarily mean that the profiling is an official policy. If profiling necessitates an official policy, I’m happy to substitute some other term.
No, she did not. Those are not legitimate concerns. People read books about all kinds of things. Keeping a small bag close at hand while traveling is normal.
The flight attendant was effectively “making the stop” here, acting as the eyes of law enforcement.
Requiring official law enforcement participation is too narrow an understanding of the concept anyway. Any authority action against an individual on the basis of a race-based group “profile” is racial profiling.