Well ... I don't know that I'd have stated anything in quite such an extreme manner ... but there's not a lot to disagree with.
Well ... except for the conclusion. I was right with him until those last two sentences and then he overreached BIG time. Which isn't to say he's wrong necessarily -- I'm not at all sure either way on that. But it was a reasonable, if strident, argument that people might have listened to ... right up until those last two sentences. It is clear that racial profiling has, at its base, the idea that skin color determines the rights you have. (And now we actually have a situation in which some very dark skinned peoples may be slightly better regarded than some who are lighter skinned. Savor the irony while you can; that's a knife that tends to turn abruptly and painfully.) Nobody would consider it that way, of course, but that does lie somewhere at its base.
And much like the author of that article, I have nowhere to land with that observation.
(From a purely editorial point of view: lop off the last two sentences of that article, reverse the order of the two sentences preceding, and Mr Sullivan has a kickass conclusion.)
The problem is that people want something easy. Blacks are criminals. Hispanics are criminals. Whites are serial killers. Arabs are terrorists. If you can work through gross characteristics, life gets much easier, right? Only life isn't easy. Most blacks and Hispanics aren't criminals. Only about 35 whites a year (out of nearly 300 million, mind) are serial or spree killers. And most Arabs aren't terrorists; it's highly unlikely, for example, that most of the more than 1,000 Arabs currently in detention in the US have anything to do with anything -- the authorities have admitted as much. But we're all panicked and looking for something fast and as easy as possible -- not that any of this is easy -- so this is what we do.
Shameful as it is, this is what we do.
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
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12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!