Little Green Footballs embraces racial profiling. I disagree.
Saying that all our enemies are of a common ethnic and religious group is one thing; treating all members of that ethnic or religious group as our enemies is quite another. And that's what racial profiling is, whether it's used to fight terrorism, drug trafficking, or any other social ill.
There's another problem here, in that the premise - most of our enemies look like X - simply isn't true. Racial profiling won't catch a Timothy McVeigh. It won't catch a David Gunn. It won't catch the lunatics who sent anthrax to Senate Democrats and liberal media outlets (does anyone still think that was a foreign effort?).
Racial profiling won't make us any safer - in fact, it may lull us back into a false sense of security like the one we had on the morning of September 11.
If we have to treat our fellow citizens as if they were criminals, solely because of their appearance, in a futile effort to improve our "security" then we have all become less secure, not more.
Posted by wasylik at December 27, 2001 12:35 AM | TrackBack