The Clipboard: Racial profiling's downside

From an article¹:

The problem with this logic, however, is that it assumes that racial profiling actually works. Although there are many valid criteria that can be used to develop profiles of individuals who are prone to violent, extremist activity, "racial features" are among the most unreliable at our disposal. After all, what does a terrorist look like?

Even if we start with the baseline assumption that terrorists are, necessarily, Muslim fundamentalists (which isn't true) we're still faced with the question, "What does a Muslim fundamentalist look like?"

Perhaps the answer to this question is obvious to some people, but perhaps we should also stop to consider that as the world's second-largest religion, claiming more than 1.3 billion followers worldwide, you can find a Muslim person who conforms to virtually any ethnic profile you can imagine. Many Muslim people of Arab descent look very similar to Southern European people, as just one example.

The recent atrocities committed by Chechen rebels are another reminder that all Muslim terrorists don't look like Osama bin Laden (even though some Chechen rebels, along with an ethnically diverse array of terrorist outfits around the world are beginning to claim affiliations with al-Qaida). So if a Chechen terrorist who looked like a "typical Eastern European" with a "typical Eastern European" name was looking to enter the United States, is it likely that enforcement offices would be able to catch them using a racial profile? Or would they end up detaining the Italian-American guy who looked like an Arab?

Another disturbing issue is the problem of domestic terrorism. It's wrong to suggest that militia groups support domestic terrorism (for the same reason that its wrong to suggest all Muslim fundamentalists are terrorists). It's also true, however, that most of the U.S.-based groups that have made public statements exhorting armed violence against the government happen to be militia-type outfits composed of white, native-born males. The fact that some of these groups actually applauded the actions of the Sept. 11 terrorists gives some indication of the seriousness of the matter.

It would also be ridiculous for the U.S. government to start a program of surveillance and special registration for all native born white males just because a tiny fraction of this population found common cause with al-Qaida's anti-Semitic extremism. It bears noting however, that these sorts of people are also an extremely small fraction of the U.S. Muslim population -- but for some reason we've been led to believe that wide scale surveillance of people who fit a Muslim racial profile is an effective way of ensuring our national security. (link)

It's good to see some common sense on this issue.

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Complete text of the article, Racial profiling's downside, by Philip Kretsedemas

Racial profiling has always been a controversial issue but, in these security-conscious times, we are sometimes led to believe that profiling is an unavoidable, even practical, way of rounding up the bad guys.

The common-sense logic goes something like this -- if we know that we're being threatened by groups that are organized on ethnic lines then it makes sense to look a little more closely at people who look like the people who typically belong to these groups.

The problem with this logic, however, is that it assumes that racial profiling actually works. Although there are many valid criteria that can be used to develop profiles of individuals who are prone to violent, extremist activity, "racial features" are among the most unreliable at our disposal. After all, what does a terrorist look like?

Even if we start with the baseline assumption that terrorists are, necessarily, Muslim fundamentalists (which isn't true) we're still faced with the question, "What does a Muslim fundamentalist look like?"

Perhaps the answer to this question is obvious to some people, but perhaps we should also stop to consider that as the world's second-largest religion, claiming more than 1.3 billion followers worldwide, you can find a Muslim person who conforms to virtually any ethnic profile you can imagine. Many Muslim people of Arab descent look very similar to Southern European people, as just one example.

The recent atrocities committed by Chechen rebels are another reminder that all Muslim terrorists don't look like Osama bin Laden (even though some Chechen rebels, along with an ethnically diverse array of terrorist outfits around the world are beginning to claim affiliations with al-Qaida). So if a Chechen terrorist who looked like a "typical Eastern European" with a "typical Eastern European" name was looking to enter the United States, is it likely that enforcement offices would be able to catch them using a racial profile? Or would they end up detaining the Italian-American guy who looked like an Arab?

Another disturbing issue is the problem of domestic terrorism. It's wrong to suggest that militia groups support domestic terrorism (for the same reason that its wrong to suggest all Muslim fundamentalists are terrorists). It's also true, however, that most of the U.S.-based groups that have made public statements exhorting armed violence against the government happen to be militia-type outfits composed of white, native-born males. The fact that some of these groups actually applauded the actions of the Sept. 11 terrorists gives some indication of the seriousness of the matter.

It would also be ridiculous for the U.S. government to start a program of surveillance and special registration for all native born white males just because a tiny fraction of this population found common cause with al-Qaida's anti-Semitic extremism. It bears noting however, that these sorts of people are also an extremely small fraction of the U.S. Muslim population -- but for some reason we've been led to believe that wide scale surveillance of people who fit a Muslim racial profile is an effective way of ensuring our national security.

At the bottom of it all, the problems that are inherent to racial profiling are problems that are inherent to the idea of "race" itself. For well more than half a century it has been firmly established that there is no scientific basis to the concept of race. Geneticists have pointed out that there is no reliable relationship between genotype (what's in our DNA) and phenotype (our physical appearance).

Simply put, this means that people who we often lump together in the same racial category don't necessarily share the same genes.

The problem of racial classification gets even more complex when we start defining groups in ethnic-cultural terms, since these characteristics (like language, religion, manner of dress) are socially learned and can pass back and forth between so-called "race" groups much more easily than genetic traits.

Most scientists agree that we are about 60,000 generations removed from a common ancestor who originated somewhere in Northeast Africa. Unfortunately, the idea that all human beings hail from the same family tree hasn't caught on with our media pundits and politicians. In these security-conscious times, it seems much more comforting to accentuate our differences, projecting our anxieties on to bad guys that are racially different from us in very obvious ways. Perhaps this is one way that we can assure ourselves that we have some control over our safety. If we can tell who's a dangerous person just by looking at them, it's much easier to pick them out in a crowd (or, more specifically, in an airport).

Although it might be psychologically comforting to think this, it doesn't necessarily make us any safer. As is often the case, what is rationally in our best interest is not what is easiest to do or satisfies our desire for a quick and tidy resolution.

On the other hand, if we made a genuine commitment to start confronting and letting go of our engrained racial bias, we would probably not only better off as a society, we would also learn some very important lessons about who "we" really are.

reference=http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040925-021938-6278r.htm