Racial profiling

Reader question:

Please explain “racial profiling” in this sentence: “The incident raised concerns among some Harvard faculty that Gates was a victim of racial profiling.”

My comments:

A profile is a side view of a person’s head.

A profile, by extension, also means a rough description of that person, giving short but important details about him or her.

Profiling, or offender profiling, refers to the process of the police studying a crime, such as murder, and making initial judgments about the general character of the person who did it.

Racial profiling, therefore, refers to profiling according to race, i.e. the color of one’s skin. For instance, black drivers are more likely stopped in the street in America whenever there’s a murder done round the block, a traffic accident or when the police are just doing random checks for this and that. White drivers are stopped less because presumably, in the eye of the police officers, white people are less capable of crimes or wrongdoing.

That’s a prejudice against white people, of course. White people are quite capable of crimes and wrongdoing, if not more so than blacks or Asians or Hispanics. The point is, racial profiling is based on prejudice – pre-reached conclusions – and that is wrong.

Anyways, here is a recent media example. I know I usually give more than one example, in order to facilitate your putting the phrase or expression in question in future use but in today’s case, one example suffices. It is an example in which American civil rights leader Jesse Jackson condemns the fact that black people in Britain (yes, Great Britain) are 26 times more likely than whites to face stop and search by police. Mr. Jackson’s article is written with such clarity, lucidity and eloquence that I’m giving you the story in full as well.

Here it is (How can enlightened societies have institutionalized policies of race profiling? The Observer, October 17, 2010):

The use of police powers against black people in Britain is astonishing to me. Racial profiling is deeply rooted in ignorance and fear and hatred, which lead to violence.

It’s not just the personal humiliation of being stopped; it’s when these fears become institutionalized and accepted by government and the media and cultural policies.

The root of the crisis in Germany that led to the second world war was race profiling; if you were other than the superior race, you were profiled. It’s always ugly and immoral. In America they have built a whole industry around profiling people around colour. It’s called “driving while black”.

The US and Britain are both enlightened societies, with some of the best universities in the world. How can societies so enlightened have such institutionalized policies of race auditing and race profiling? If just one individual was involved, then that would be a problem, but this enormous disparity shows it is institutionalized.

Sometimes it is race, sometimes it is gender, sometimes it is religion, but categories of people are being targeted. We decry youth bullying in school because it is so unkind, but this profiling is bullying.

It undermines the promises of democracy, equal access and equal opportunity. In Britain it must be a matter of changing behaviour and then changing attitude.

Not only are you more likely to be stopped by the police but also more likely to be denied access to education and access to a job, access to capital and industry and technology.

Look at Cambridge and Oxford university, look at the ethnic breakdown, and you can see polarization there that’s not based on the distribution of brains but the distribution of privilege and resources.

You should not limit the market based on race, which is what profiling does, it creates a polarization based upon privilege rather than merit.

I am coming to London to show the hope of us living together, and the dangers of us living apart. Given the German experiences, the South African experience and the American segregation experience, we ought to know better by now. We have globalised capital and now we must globalize human rights.