Last week's forum on racial profiling, organized by Iota Phi Theta Fraternity, Black Student Alliance and Griot Society, brought students, police and administrators together to discuss a burning topic of late. Understandably, most of the attention went to African American interactions with police; the event itself was entitled "Driving While Black."
What is racial profiling? What does it have to do with Latinos? Isn't it just a phenomenon that affects African Americans? And why should anyone else care whether it happens or not? These lines will venture some answers.
The term "racial profiling" is quite new. As a way to designate systematic use of persons' race, in conjunction with purported statistical patterns of offenses, as a criterion for vehicle stops and other police actions, it has become infamous. Both major presidential candidates came out against it; President Bush has called it an un-American aberration.
But to think of racial profiling so narrowly, not to mention as something new, would be ludicrous. Not only the practice of slavery where it flourished, but the treatment of fugitive slaves as escaped chattel to be hunted down and returned to their owners, was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the notorious "Dred Scott" decision (1856), in which Justice Taney held blacks "so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Slavery and fugitive-slave hunting could well be considered earlier forms of "racial profiling."
After the dismantling of Reconstruction, black citizens were systematically denied the vote, secure property-holding, and safety of life and limb - particularly during the heyday of lynching and Jim Crow laws. The post-1945 wave of prosperity did not lift all; selective federal application of the G.I. Bill of Rights denied African Americans fair access to higher education and housing. The practice of "redlining," in which banks, the federal government, builders and homeowner associations long colluded, locked blacks out of suburban development and restricted them to deteriorating "inner cities." Thus, racial profiling is not just a police matter.
Systematically holding one's origin against one in all sorts of official determinations has affected Latinos too. Officially-sanctioned lynching, discriminatory vagrancy laws, and exclusion from the vote were widespread for decades. Ever since the wars of conquest that brought much of Mexico and the Spanish Caribbean under U.S. rule or domination, assumptions of foreignness, illegal status, manual labor, criminality and drug dealing have dogged Latinos. The fairer-skinned may feel immune to such assumptions and the discriminatory practices they lead to; but racial profiling can affect them too - as when Spanish-sounding names or Spanish speakers are singled out by immigration officials or drug enforcement. The Texas judge who, in 1995, ordered a Mexican-American woman not to speak Spanish to her young daughter in the home, on the grounds that using that language condemned the child to a future of servile labor, tapped deep wells of historical prejudice.
The criminal justice system has proven to be inhospitable to Latinos as well as African Americans. Not only are 54 percent of those currently on death row non-white; it is far more likely that prosecutors will seek death sentences against non-white than against white defendants. In fact, exhaustive documentation shows that at each step in the system, non-whites are at serious disadvantage: suspicion, investigation, arrest, imprisonment, prosecution, conviction and, finally, death sentences all fall more heavily on blacks and Latinos than on whites (and on those who commit crimes against white, as opposed to non-white, persons).
Closer to home, non-white students at the University have triple the likelihood of being investigated for Honor offenses, four times the likelihood of going to trial, and nearly five times the likelihood of being convicted, compared with white students. Such patterns of inequality need not be consciously or deliberately sought for the effects to be harsh.
In sum, the problem with the "racial profiling" issue is that, in setting the bar so high (a formal, systematic protocol for holding the race of certain persons against them in the exercise of authority), it allows us to overlook a vast array of practices in the society, including but not limited to policing, in which people's origin is systematically held against them. Further, when statistics which are themselves prone to the effects of prejudice and discrimination are used as a "common sense" guide to administrative practice, a powerful and unexamined dynamic of self-reinforcement builds up.
Racial profiling, in the broader sense used here, can affect anyone. Not only can it affect whites directly - as when police take a white visiting a predominantly black or Latino urban neighborhood as fitting a drug-buyer profile - but, most importantly, such systematic patterns of unfairness poison our social life and undermine the possibility of full and genuine community.
(Pablo Davis is an assistant dean of students. He works closely with Latino students.)
Read More
PARTING SHOT: Sometimes it’s okay to fake a smile
By Alexandra Holmes | 21 hours agoI surrounded myself with people who were so enthusiastic about the University and its potential, that after a while, it was impossible not to feel their passion and their convictions rub off on me.
PARTING SHOT: Girl, what did you expect?
By Cecy Juárez | YesterdayAdvocate for yourself unabashedly, even and especially when you feel like you don’t belong.
PARTING SHOT: Revisiting old comments
By Claire DiLorenzo | YesterdayIn retirement, I am also trying not to be hard on myself — I don’t have to hold onto all the mistakes that I made as an editor.
