Service of Racial Profiling
Monday, July 26th, 2010
Last week, I saw racial profiling in action. We were piling suitcases into the trunk of a cab on Lexington Avenue, a block north of Grand Central Station, when we heard yelling. As our heads emerged from the trunk, we saw who was doing it: A NYC policeman who had parked his motorcycle in front of the cab. He claimed that the cab was holding up traffic. [There is little to none on a summer morning at 10:46 a.m. and continued to be none until the cop held up the loading process.]
The driver was young, appeared to be Arab, clean-cut and clean shaven. He didn’t say a word. I jumped to his rescue telling the policeman that it was totally our fault; the driver helped us by stopping where he did so we didn’t have to lug our suitcases further. There was an illegally parked US Postal Service truck taking up one lane and a fat chunk of another one and the cab extended into the avenue a bit beyond it. The policeman didn’t bother the truck driver.
By the time I’d said my bit, my husband, who was going home with the luggage, was in the cab and ready to leave but because the policeman was still reprimanding the driver, traffic began to pile up. Yet the policeman continued to rant and the driver remained silent. I left the scene so as not to exacerbate the situation as I thought the policeman might have been trying to impress a like-minded citizen. My husband told me that in the end, the driver did not get a ticket. The cabbie admitted that he was used to such instances.
Profiling is in the news this summer between Arizona’s immigration law, Shirley Sherrod’s edited-to-be misinterpreted address to the NAACP and the Cordoba House and mosque under consideration for construction in the vicinity of Ground Zero.
Racial profiling makes us collectively jumpy. It polarizes us and distracts us from other issues that in the list of current crises, such as the economy and war, seem to top it. Yet it has become a tempting distraction that politicians and talk show hosts, desperate to remain in the headlines, relish whipping up.
Our nervous, knee-jerk reactions made in seconds remind me of the card game slapjack. A dealer turns up card after card in a deck and he/she and one or more other players watch for the jack. The idea is to be the first one to slap it and not some other card. Today, some are ready to slap anything that resembles a jack, and they don’t much care if it turns out to be the king or queen.
There are times when profiling is appropriate. Taking an example from hours watching “Law & Order” and its spin-offs, it makes sense that when a witness identifies a perpetrator, say a teen with black spiky hair, brown eyes and olive skin, that police officers at airports and bus stations won’t be questioning curly blond, blue-eyed 40 year olds and will stop teens with olive skin.
Not all profiling is racial. Haven’t most people at one time been subject to it? Whether you are a recent high school or college graduate who needs experience before you can get a job in a field you want to join, are middle aged with too much experience so seem too expensive, are over 65 and considered too old to function, belong to a religion that is out of favor, are single and want to buy a condo or are divorced, gay, bankrupt, bald, fat, ugly, have white hair or whatever is the you-don’t-want-to-be-that du jour–you’ve been singled out in a negative way by assumptions made about you by some decision-maker who is in your way.
Have you felt the sting? Do you see use for profiling in any instances or not at all? Do you think that there’s hope that profiling can be defined or implemented so that people who look on either its pro or con ramifications will ever agree?
