Racial Profiling is Morally Wrong and Bad for America

Racial profiling refers to governmental surveillance directed at a suspect group on the basis of certain physical characteristics. This practice of selective targeting currently occupies center stage in debates over national security in post 9/11 America and the curbing of illegal immigration. Most recently, it is discussed in relation to the controversial Arizona immigration law. Hotly debated, the law allows police to check the immigration status of people who are lawfully stopped and deemed “reasonably suspicious” for being illegal. Physical characteristics, according to legal experts, enter as a factor in this process.

A section of the public supports racial profiling as a statistically effective tool to safeguard security and punish illegality. Critics on the other hand, have strongly argued that racial profiling cannot solve the nation’s problems. For example, the fact that Arab Americans and Muslims constitute a greatly diverse population (which includes “whites” and African Americans among others) makes racial profiling unenforceable. Regarding illegal immigration and terrorism, racial profiling is seen as a solution, yet it cannot take the place of systemic solutions to the crisis of porous borders.

Debates about racial profiling as a rational response to terrorism and illegality overlook an acute moral problem. In marking certain groups as a source of threat, racial profiling puts innocent citizens, residents, and immigrants under pervasive scrutiny. As a result it produces a sense of exclusion, alienation, and fear among members of the targeted group. It also diminishes the trust in law enforcement among law-abiding citizens.

In a fundamental sense, racial profiling defines certain Americans of the “wrong look” as not fully American. Or, to put it differently, it puts them on continuous trial. It is a menacing force, causing devastating psychological and physical harm to those targeted. It must be unequivocally rejected as morally wrong. Moreover, it is bad for America.

Feeding popular suspicions toward the targeted groups, racial profiling also involves the public, not only the government. It alerts otherwise well-meaning citizens that certain people who look or dress in particular ways are potential enemies. And it emboldens a race-centered harassment of immigrants and minorities. This exclusionary impulse is far from marginal in the country. The fact that a book advocating a racially homogeneous America–Peter Brimelow’s national bestseller Alien Nation: Common Sense about America’s Immigration Disaster (1995)–enjoyed such great popularity speaks volumes of the power nativist arguments have on the contemporary imagination even in groups that have suffered prejudice in the recent past.

Racial profiling intensifies, therefore, the monitoring, the fearing, and even despising of certain peoples in all aspects of public life. Lawful citizens who fit the profile are seen as not fully American, as aliens in their own neighborhood, schools, or workplace. No wonder innocent Muslim, Arab, or Hispanic Americans experience a profound sense of alienation. Stigmatization functions as a constant reminder of being considered second-class citizens, not fully belonging to the nation. The American decree of equal inclusion irrespectively of ancestry is violated, producing anger and humiliation.

Those who argue that lawful inhabitants of the country have nothing to fear trivialize the ways stigmatization damages the soul and offends one’s civil sensibilities. Individuals singled out because of their appearance offer testimonies of harrowing experiences. As reported in the media, books, as well as formal and informal discussions, they live in a state of siege, being closely watched while flying, subjected to constant suspicion and intrusive searches, showered by ethnic slurs, and being harassed in their own communities. Racial profiling holds a significant population of lawful individuals as hostages. Designating certain Americans as potentially hostile alien, it marks them as lesser Americans.

In addition to psychological horror, physical harm is integral to racial profiling. This is because racial profiling sanctions all kinds of extralegal violence. Having the “wrong look” could be a matter of life or death, particularly during times of crisis. In the months following the 9/11 terrorist attack for instance, over 1,000 incidents of hate crime were reported against individuals who “looked” in the eyes of the vigilantes as Middle Eastern and Muslim. The fact that some of the victims were Sikh, mistakenly thought to be Arabs, sent shock waves across a rainbow spectrum of Americans who looked “south Asian,” including Caribbean Americans. In the aftermath of the disaster many Americans of the “wrong look” feared to go to their work and send their children to school. “Non-whites” are a fair game in the “all seeing” and at the same time blind force of racial profiling.

Numerous examples of Greek immigrants victimized by racial profiling in the past bring this point close to home. In the infamous 1909 Omaha riot as well as the 1918 anti-Greek riots in Toronto, Greek residences and businesses were razed to the ground. No wonder communities scorched by racial profiling drape themselves in the American flag as the ultimate line of defense.

Supporters of racial profiling wrongly assure the public that racial profiling is not random; that it is based on behavioral cues legitimizing suspicions of illegality. This position entirely misses the point that “suspicion” is a socially constituted experience. It is well known that an innocent activity such as riding a bike in the white suburbs may raise suspicion if the biker is of a “certain look or color.” Or consider the horrifying incident in Pirtleville, Arizona, when Border Patrol Agents opened fire on thirteen-year old Rosita Gonzales. Rosita was playing in a tent set in the backyard of their house, when, startled by strange noises she heard, ran toward her home. The Agents fired, misrecognizing her as a fleeing illegal immigrant.

There is yet another moral dimension in racial profiling, an aspect rarely if ever explicitly acknowledged by the public. Racial profiling associates illegal aliens with non-whiteness. This is a false connection, obscuring two interrelated phenomena: The existence of undocumented European immigrants and the preferential treatment they have often received in relation to their Latin American counterparts.

Take the case of the thousands, as many as 30,000, of Irish who overstayed their visas remaining in the United States illegally. This was in the 1980s when, not unlike today, the nation was alarmed over an illegal immigration crisis. Yet those so-called “new Irish” were not subjected to the public hostility that is commonly reserved toward non-white undocumented aliens. The new Irish are “Illegal but not Alien” an article in The New York Times proclaimed. And Boston’s Mayor unflinchingly extended “the welcom[ing] mat,” creating an office to provide legal aid to this group.

I cite this example not to single out the Irish, obviously, but to illustrate that racial profiling creates hierarchies among illegal immigrants. This raises a deeper issue: Racial profiling grants unearned privileges to those who most closely approximate a “white phenotype.” This is morally wrong as it conflates illegality with non-white status. In this arrangement “non-white” Americans are called to keep proving their national belonging, a surveillance to which their white counterparts are for the most part spared.

Let us face it: Racial profiling divides the country into “good white” and potentially “bad brown” Americans.

Supporters of racial profiling would have the public believe that this practice entails an inconvenient interlude in otherwise normal lives. I have shown why this is not the case. Racial profiling forces millions of Americans to painfully adjust their everyday lives to address its pernicious effects. It is deeply harmful, extracting immense human cost. Racial profiling is bad for America.

The nation must collectively invest in strategies to combat terrorism and illegality without resort to racial discrimination.

On the Question of "Race"

I was planning to take a couple of days off from writing during Spring Break, when a discussion in the Modern Greek Studies Association list-serve (see https://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/public/mgsa-l/ under the thread “2010 Census”) landed me firmly back to my chair. The exchange developed along two directions: a) The politics of racial and ethnic identity in the U.S. census; and b) the racialization of Greek Americans. Below is my contribution to the latter.

Writing about the early 1900s classification of southeastern European immigrants as "inbetween peoples," historian David Roediger insists on the messiness (his word) of the racial landscape at the time. Roediger emphasizes the need to take into account the vast complexity of the ways in which racial identities were experienced and spoken about, throwing the gauntlet to the academics: "Scholars are no friends of such messiness," he writes.

Similarly, one of the most sophisticated anthropologists currently writing about the construction of white racial identities, John Hartigan Jr., calls scholars of whiteness to move beyond neat models and convenient generalizations to probe instead the ways in which identities are racialized contextually; to pay attention to their fluidity, ambivalence, and situational politics without losing sight of larger social discourses; to examine how cultural factors and regions (even neighborhoods) shape the way we talk and experience race.


Finely tuned ethnography appears to be one of the best tools we have at our disposal to chart this complexity.

I cannot frankly see how we can have a meaningful discussion on the racialization of Greek Americans without taking into account the racialization of European immigrants and their descendants in the U.S.; without, that is, examining the history of the politics of ethnicity and race in American society. And we cannot advance this discussion without knowledge of the latest developments in whiteness studies.

Risking oversimplification, but for the sake of establishing an explicit framework, here is the premises guiding my engagement with the question of "race":



1) I side with the constructivists who view race as a social construction, to only add what is commonly accepted these days: although races are social constructions, they may carry real-and sometimes devastating-effects on individual lives and groups (think of Jim Crow, the Chinese exclusion act, affirmative action, etc). To further complicate things, many individuals experience their identities as real. 



2) We live in a racially hierarchical society where approximations to a racial and cultural national ideal carry a number of privileges (lack of discrimination, high potential to marry within the dominant group, inclusion into "true" national belonging, etc).



3) We need to make a firm distinction between dominant racial categories (the ethnoracial order) and the ways in which individuals negotiate their place in that order. In other words we can speak of racial location as a) a widely shared social fact/construction (identities for example are racially ascribed in the U.S., the offspring of a WASP and an African American is most likely to be classified as "black") and b) a subjective experience of identity. 

In the situation where individuals challenge official racial categories is useful to remember that personal identity can be profoundly political. How individuals view their identities vis-a-vis their assignment into dominant racial classifications varies, of course, requiring ethnographic research to untangle this question in all its complexity. Conversely, how and why the dominant society assigns an ethnoracial location to a specific group may vary along a number of variables, needing careful contextualization. There are too many examples in American history about the whitening of the immigrant working class to convince me that class does not necessarily determine racial status, though class may factor-in in ethnoracial assignments, including the prospect of being included in whiteness (see Fairchild).



4) White ethnics (including Greek Americans) have been elevated as the poster ethnics of multiculturalism by conservative commentators and academics (among others); their narrative of bootstrap mobility (what Sylvia R. Lazos calls "the white ethnic immigrant narrative"), in particular, is utilized for all sorts of explicit and implicit undermining of racial minorities, particularly African Americans (think of who is prefacing William Spanos's story of becoming a multimillionaire; think of constructions of "good immigrant families" vs. "pathological black families"). 



I have an interest in whiteness because it represents an ideology (re)producing racial hierarchies. As such I maintain that it must be relentlessly critiqued; hence I insist on the analytical utility of examining racialization. 


I am not interested on framing the question as "who is" or "who is not–white," a question that invariably leads to reductive positions, dangerous biologisms, etc. I prefer to examine how whiteness is constructed, who does the defining, why, and for what purpose (though the privileges associated with appearing white is an important issue). It is of outmost importance to me to examine how individuals or groups reproduce or challenge whiteness. And I am also vested in the question of what kind of cultural and political work do claims to a white status or disavowal from it accomplish.

In this context it is worth keeping in mind that whiteness is continuously morphing into something else; it is modified in response to political and social developments, even through a language that lacks explicit references to race (hence its particular power). 

Matthew Frye Jacobson identifies, for instance, cases where disavowals of a white identity among European ethnics in the U.S. ("I am not a white," "I am an ethnic") may be far from innocent. When ethnics who are perceived as white by the wider population disassociate themselves from their white racial location they implicitly deny the privileges associated with this racial classification. In this manner, they render all these structures that perpetuate the (hierarchical) racial order invisible with all the political implications that this position implies.

Color-blindness is a lauded ideal, but the difficult question is how to bring about racial justice in a society already structured around racial hierarchies.