Racial profiling is a defining issue of our times. Unfortunately, it is often poorly defined.
Some people think, for example, that federal agents actually have become too sensitive to potential charges of racial profiling to do an effective job of fighting terrorists.
“We’ve made people so frightened of doing their jobs because they have to be politically correct that they avoid the obvious,” said, Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), who is pushing for tighter immigration controls. “Al Qaeda is not an equal-opportunity employer.”
Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Richard Reid, who was caught trying to light his explosive sneakers aboard an America-bound jetliner, is British. Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 20th hijacker, is French.
And, how about John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban” who trained with Al Qaeda? He was born in Maryland and grew up in California, an all-American boy. Maybe federal agents are jealous that he got into Al Qaeda before Americans thought it was all that important for one of our own agents to do so.
From here, Al Qaeda’s looking like a real rainbow coalition.
True, Al Qaeda has not shown much interest in recruiting women. At least, not so far. But the female Palestinian suicide bombers show that we can ill afford to leave anything to chance. Osama bin Laden may be crazy, but he is not stupid. We know that his organization instructs its trainees in hair dye, conservative clothes and other ways to avoid calling attention to themselves.
If we have learned anything about the minds of Al Qaeda members it is to expect the unexpected. If it is the obvious thing to do, they probably are not going to try to do it.
Yet FBI Director Robert Mueller, for example, flatly told the Senate Judiciary Committee that his agency “is against, has been and will be against any form of profiling.”
He need not be quite so sweeping in his statements. Everybody profiles at one time or another about something or other. But there’s a big difference between smart profiling and stupid profiling.
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Smart profiling does not try to leap to big conclusions about individuals based on one single factor like race, skin color, religion or what kind of head wrap the individual happens to be wearing.
Yet a lot of people aren’t very smart when it comes to profiling. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, (D-Calif.) a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on CNN that concern about racial profiling hindered the FBI from aggressively investigating reports last year that men of Middle Eastern descent were training at U.S. flight schools.
“I think we’re going to have to come to terms with it,” she said. That’s true, although I suspect that, in hindsight, the Sept. 11 terror attacks have reversed any conscious or unconscious tendency by federal agents to avoid scrutinizing Arabs and Muslims.
Quite the opposite. A wave of stupid profiling of civilians in airports sparked five American Civil Liberties Union lawsuits Tuesday in three states by five men who passed through security checkpoints only to be forced off of their flights, apparently because their dark skin made some people uncomfortable about flying with them.
Only two of the five, it is interesting to note, were of Arab descent.
One who wasn’t was Michael Dasrath, a 32-year-old Guyana-born Wall Street financial analyst. He was forced off the Continental Airlines flight in Newark, N.J., with another dark-skinned man whom Dasrath did not know, Philippines-born Edgardo Cureg, 34, a University of South Florida doctoral candidate in math. They were singled out because another passenger glared and said “Those brown-skinned men are behaving suspiciously,” Dasrath said.
Imagine the aggravation of these two men. They allegedly survived the airport’s and the airline’s scrutiny only to get bumped because of another passenger’s prejudices. Maybe the passenger should have changed planes.
Interestingly, each of the men was acceptable enough to the airlines to be put on later flights, presumably with more tolerant fellow travelers.
In at least two of the ACLU cases the men reportedly were removed from their jetliner while their checked luggage stayed on board. That sounds like the sort of stupid profiling that we Americans must, as Feinstein says, grapple with.
Profiling isn’t the problem. Prejudice is, especially when it actually gets in the way of safety. Travelers and others will put up with all manner of inconvenience, if it makes them safer. Stupid profiling doesn’t do that. It only makes some people feel safer while others wonder, who’s kidding whom?
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