I just heard on the news that a recent poll showed that 71% of African Americans support racial profiling of middle-eastern looking people to prevent terrorism.
I’m interested to know how an African American can justify racial profiling of one group, but argue vehemently against it when it is done to them. “Driving while black” is wrong, but “driving while middle-eastern” is just fine and dandy? I’m interested in how any African American can justify this apparent hypocrisy. Do they take a “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” approach, or is it simply that “Sept. 11 changed everything and now this is really serious”?
On a broader note, do you think profiling - where race just happens to be a reliable characteristic to use - is wrong? If so, should it be tolerable during a “time of war” (if that is indeed what this is)? Do you think the exigencies of a national emergency can justify it? What if that national emergency is in fact caused by one distinct outwardly observable group?
Not necessarily. If you happen to know that a good chunk of the suspects in a certain case are bound to be of a certain race - in the case of the whole Bin Laden affair, Middle-Eastern (at least, most of his cohorts have been Middle-Eastern, I believe) - then if you see someone acting suspiciously, who also happens to be Middle-Eastern, then it wouldn’t be wrong to investigate further.
Racial profiling becomes wrong when race is the ONLY factor in someone’s arrest. For example, if a security guard were to spot a Middle-Eastern man coming through airport security, and detained him and gave him an anal cavity search, simply because of the man’s race, that would be a not-nice thing.
theres plenty of double standards male female black white ,
a big example though is the MOBO awards where only black people can win awards , now if you had a white people on awards then we’d have people lobbying the government on racism
and also sides , ie if you don’t support this then you must support the other side , al la America and terrorism support us or the terrorists there is no middle ground kind of thing
That makes no sense to me. If you see someone acting suspiciously you do not need to consider anything else. It just makes no sense that you can consider a factor and it not be profiling, just like it is impossible to have affirmative action for blacks and no negative effects for whites.
If a security guard uses a given factor (race or whatever) to decide whether to investigate or not, then you have profiling. If he cannot use that factor, then there is no profiling on that account.
Now, profiling is, without doubt, used by all of us every day to make decisions. It is just making decisions based on information we have gathered by personal past experience and from other sources. Of course much of this information may be mistaken but that is how we handle life because there is just no other practical way.
If I am walking down a dark alley in DC with a wad of cash in my pocket and I see a person coming my way, I will consider a number of things when deciding if I should go another way. Is this person male or female? Young or old? Well dressed or not? Black or white? Statistically race is a factor just like the others and I would be stupid not to take it into account.
If a certain race, nationality, whatever, are statistically more prone to be suspects and if we demand from or police the best results, then profiling is just inevitable. (Of course, this can be abused by the police like anything else)
OTOH, some people may prefer some loss of police efficiency as a price to pay for less harassment of certain minorities. That is a personal choice. But you cannot have the best police results if you ban them from using some information which is relevant.
Personally I am all for profiling and using whatever information is available. If I happen to be in one of the groups subject to closer police scrutiny I may not enjoy it but I will not blame the police either. I will blame the persons of that group who do wrong and make life uncomfortable for the rest of us. If I were Afghani or muslim, I would make sure to condemn those of my group who did evil and I would understand why others may have suspicions.
Having said this, law enforcement and security have a concrete job to do which is to find and detain criminals, so i would allow them to use any relevant information. Profile as much as you like. BUT, I have read of several instances where airlines have refused to fly passengers after they were cleared by security. I think it was United who said they left the decision entirely to the pilots and some pilots have refused to fly with some passengers of Middle Eastern origin. I find this totally, absolutely, 100%, unacceptable and I hope these passengers sue the airlines for all they are worth. The pilot’s job is to fly the plane and not to decide who gets onboard. If he is “not comfortable” flying some passengers then he can take a job selling insurance. If a passenger is suspicious, let security investigate him. If the suspicions are founded he can be detained further; if they are not then he should be allowed to fly with everyone else. I am so pissed with this that I have changed my mind. After 9/11 I said I would fly American airlines just to show my support and that I would not be intimidated by terrorists. I despised some friends who said they would fly foreign airlines because they were less likely to be hit by terrorists. But after reading several instances of USAir and United rejecting passengers, I have decided to do a turnaround and I will not fly with any US carriers for the near future. It is shameful what they are doing. Indefensible.
The problem here is that when blacks are subjected to racial profiling it was with the erronous assumptions that blacks commit more crimes than anybody else so that even when there was no crime committed(as in traffic stops) it just “made sense” to stop blacks. I don’t think anyone would argue that if the police are searching for a suspect who is identified as a black man, that they stop black men.
But in this case the suspects are middle-eastern. What is needed, I think, is more a stringent criterion than “he/she looks middle-eastern”.
Racial profiling of Middle Easterners will be ineffective. If a terrorist organization knows that Middle-Eastern-looking people are being watched carefully, all they have to do is recruit people that don’t fit the profile. Plenty of Lebanese people could pass for Italian-Americans. Suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui looks like any black dude you might see walking down the street. Are we prepared to start profiling Italians, Blacks, Eastern Europeans, Greeks, Hispanics, Indians, and pretty much all East-Asians (because let’s face it, could you tell at first glance the difference between a Chinese person, an Indonesian, a Malaysian, a Filipino, etc.?)? Who’s left after you do that? The only people who wouldn’t be searched at the airport would be Canadians and Osmonds.
I know there are studies that show that racial profiling in general is ineffective, but I’ve never been much of a “cite” person
I did a quick google search and searched the FoxNews website (I heard it while watching FoxNews) and had no luck finding the survey. I know I heard it right, and they started to talk about how they were “shocked” at how black people could support racial profiling of non-blacks. But alas, I cannot find the poll. FoxNews wouldn’t make it up, would they? (don’t answer that)
SenorBeef, you assume without support that whites do not hold the same attitudes as blacks on the issue of Arab-American profiling, and would not express the same opinion to a pollster. Get back to us when you find a poll that asks the same questions of whites that the poll noted in the OP asked of blacks.
geepee, I cannot remember the last time the Knights of Columbus admitted someone who wasn’t Catholic. Ditto scads of other enthically- or religiously- based organizations. Have you heard of people lobbying the government to force the Knights of Columbus to admit non-Catholics? Thanks for playing, and have a nice day.
There was a black comic on BET joking about this subject recently, saying he’s for racial profiling now if it will keep him safe. Of course, he was going for laughs, but I imagine there may be a few people who really feel like he does.
