That was my understanding too. I thought that “racial profiling” meant screening certain members of a group who are all engaged in the same non-suspicious behavior just on the basis of their (apparent) race. E.g., when you’re X-raying the shoes of airline passengers or checking the backpacks of subway passengers, if you pick only the black-haired dark-skinned men to check, that’s racial (and gender) profiling.
And I thought the point was that that kind of screening isn’t really sensible, because the odds of any individual in that subgroup being a terrorist aren’t substantially different from the odds of any other individual among the passengers being a terrorist. When you’ve got a huge bunch of harmless people of all backgrounds taking a plane or riding the subway, racial profiling isn’t really statistically likely to be of any use in catching the extremely tiny percentage of terrorists among them.
When you’re talking about a small number of individuals engaged in behavior that you have some reason to think is suspicious, though, that’s somewhat different. Apparent ethnic background might be a valid contributing factor to concern levels there.
Perhaps the real question here is “Should taking photographs of nuclear plants automatically be regarded as suspicious behavior?”
You may be right. I am very slow to move threads here because I don’t seem to make very good calls at it. I’m much better at picking out the MPSIMS and Pit threads. shrug We’ll see.
In my experience, white people border between tolerating to outright embracing racial profiling as a “benign” means to investigate suspicious behavior. It’s not benign. It is humiliating and degrading. And yes, it is discrimination. It is very probable that your friend needlessly made life difficult for three innocent human beings just because she thought they were terrorists. If it were up to me, your friend would be thrown in jail and forced to issue a formal apology to the “terrorists”; on second read, that sounds too harsh, but that’s because I’ve been racially profiled and I know all-too-well how terrible it feels. As a result, I have little respect for law enforcement and no respect for the criminal justice system. IMO, the whole system is corrupt and needs to be overhauled.
This is the United States of America where racial profiling by law enforcement has been heavily denounced by not only the current President but key members of the legislative branch; the FBI should not be encouraging, tacit or otherwise, this behavior from its citizens. Period. The only Western country where racial profiling is legal is Israel and we see how safe it is there.
Your friend should be feel embarrassed and ashamed. There is nothing laudable in disguising discrimination with patriotism.
Several of the best beaches in Spain have power plants (steam or nuclear) nearby. It can be kind of hard to get a pic aimed inland without a piece of the plant in it.
Way to miss the point. If you can’t see the difference between “There are three guys casing a nuculear power plant and they look like they might be middle eastern” and “Help me there are three Arabs in the park!” I you can’t see the difference then there is no need for anything further.
Seems this thread was derailed from my choice of title. Sucks, because it’s become evident that there are people who think nothing should be reported to the authorities for fear of racial profiling.
I was once confronted for taking pictures at Logan Airport (this was post-9/11). I had gotten off my plane and was waiting for my luggage, and I decided to take a few pictures of the disembark gate and the luggage conveyors because they factor into one of the screenplays I’ve been writing (I always do this when I see an interesting or relevant location).
Did I mention I’m often mistaken for being Middle Eastern? So a lady comes up and asks what I’m doing. I told her the truth, and though I’m not sure she believed me or not, she mumbled something along the lines of “You can’t be too careful”, though honestly, if I didn’t look the way I did, I don’t doubt for a second she wouldn’t have done what she did (plus what would a terrorist want info about a baggage claim area, anyway?). This was around the same time that I was constantly being profiled at airport security checkpoints, so I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised.
I know quite a few people who are working or have worked on the nuclear power plant security detail (national guard). If someone saw you taking pictures of a plant they would question you no matter what you look like. Of course most are big enough that you could find a place to take pictures without anyone noticing you.
Maybe **Honesty’s ** point is that the FBI, either by legal necessity or its own ineptitude, would treat both of those reports as being worthy of investigation.
Without even knowing the person in question, I have a very hard time imagining that she was thinking “let’s make life hard for those brown people” as opposed to “OMG, WTF, they’re taking pictures of a nuke plant.” Motivation matters.
BTW, what was actually going on, if any “profiling” was going on, was religious profiling – if the woman in question had been told, “Oh, wait, those are Spanish secular Catholics, or Druze, or Egyptian Coptic Christians,” she’d have likely reacted differently. Why? Because people aren’t scared of “Arabs” or “Arab-looking” people – they’re scared of Islamist terrorists (many but not all of whom are Arab or “Arab-looking”). Sorry if the actions of a bunch of Arab and Arab-looking people have led to this not-unreasonable fear.
Also, it is not as if this “profiling” has the aim of screening all of the billion or however many Arabs or Muslims on Earth. It’s being “Arab-looking” coupled with weird behavior. YMMV as to what is “weird,” but no one is combing Detroit or Damascus to report every single brown-skinned person who’s just shopping for groceries or playing soccer (as opposed to photographing N-plants, acting odd on a Northwest Air flight, etc.).
Again, “racial profiling” is a specific construct that by definition isn’t too palatable. It’s not too much of a stretch to consider that 9-11 itself was only possible in light of so many who don’t wish to offend, or worried about litigation, or emasculated public officials, etc.
People have been so worked over and the issue so demagogued that they conflate “racial profiling” with criminal profiling. I can’t think of a good argument against criminal profiling, otherwise crimes would only rarely be solved or prevented.
If I’m not mistaken, the most recent crop of folks swept up by the FBI have not been “Middle Eastern” looking. That includes the JFK people as well as the Liberty City people.
When the next bunch of folks who are rounded up also deviate from the Arab/Middle-Eastern/Swarthy/Could-Be-Anything-Except-for-Scandanavian profile, will people continue to say how much racial profiling makes logical, perfect sense?
“The only Western country where racial profiling is legal is Israel and we see how safe it is there.”
But when is the last time an El Al airliner has been hijacked?
IIRC and I may not, after 9-11 US authorities asked the Israelis about their screening process and were told that young Arab men were picked out and questioned. When the Americans said: “We can’t do that–it’s racial profiling”. The Israelis responded: “Get back to us when you want to take this seriously”.
Many might find racial profiling odious, but does it work in the Israeli airliner case?
Which is yet another argument against why racial profiling makes any damn sense at all. If the concern is about Muslims, then we should be profiling every Asian man who wants to get on an airplane, because the vast majority of the Muslims in the world come from South East Asia. Arabs are a tiny minority of the global Muslim population.
