The debates surrounding both the efficacy and the morality of racial profiling have created a lot of disagreement from many communities of color. Kabzuag Vaj is an organizer with the Asian Freedom Project in Madison, Wisconsin. The Asian Freedom Project has garnered hundreds of accounts of racial profiling of Southeast Asian youth over the past year. (Davis, 2001)
"Talking to the mainstream about racial profiling is hard," says Vaj. "The excuse people give us is extreme times demand extreme measures, whatever is necessary to catch the terrorists." (Davis, 2001) Organizers at People United for a Better Oakland (PUEBLO) also face similar concerns. They understand that although they are on all levels a multiracial organization, their campaign against racial profiling and police misconduct is simply inadequate to address the current political and sociological situation. "The fact that we have members from the Arab-American community means we work in solidarity with that community, but our work is not set up right now specifically to meet the needs of that community," laments Dawn Phillips, PUEBLO director.
The debates surrounding racial profiling have also engendered tolerance in some unlikely places. According to Davis, although Shehadeh does not believe that racial profiling is an effective way to stop crime, nor that it will prevent further attacks against the United States. However, he believes that some form of racial profiling is understandable in the current political environment. "What we say is that racial profiling is not the answer. Security for all is what's needed," says Shehadeh. "As Arab-Americans, we are tolerant of this phenomena because we understand, because we're sensitive. But just for now." (Davis, 2001)
Like many Arab-Americans, Shehadeh has recently felt an increased pressure to prove his patriotism in the months since September 11, and is temporarily willing to put up with policies and actions that in the past have been completely unacceptable. But Shehadeh is not naive about the root causes of recent U.S. domestic and foreign policy decisions. "The solutions of war and hate mongering tighten the grip of racism," he says. It remains to be seen how much tighter that grip will become, and what it will take to break it. (Davis, 2001)
As a bottom line, racial profiling of Arabs has replaced racial profiling of African-Americans as the leading cause for concern about American liberties and freedoms. (New York Times, 2002) Granted, most Arab-Americans in America do not have the economic and socio-economic issues that African-Americans have, but they have a host of constitutional issues that may be even harder to remedy in today's political climate, without a serious look at the systems that put racial profiling in place.
Depsite advances, African-Americans still face economic hardship
On the other hand, the problems of African-Americans are not at all traceable to the recent history of America. Rather, the moment Africans were brought to America as slaves against their will, that action created the hundreds of years of inequality that have followed, and now followed us into this newest millennium.
One of the most striking areas in which the differences between African-Americans and the majority in America exist is in health. The legacy of racial and ethnic health disadvantages suffered by African-Americans (indeed, the second largest minority group in the United States) constantly forces patients, health practitioners and policymakers to recognize the taint of America's "slave health deficit." Infamous healthcare scandals like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study -- in which African-Americans were exploited for scientific gains, and their health sacrificed -- affect the healthcare choices of both African-Americans and their providers, most often against a solid backdrop of racist, classist and paternalist medical conduct, abhorred on the surface throughout the industry, but implemented nevertheless in a subversive manner. (Williams, 2002)
Despite passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, numerous medical milestones, and the government's "Healthy People" initiative to eliminate minority health disparities by the year 2010, African-Americans still suffer much higher disease and excess death rates than other racial groups. And indeed, these diseases are the most grave facing humanity: diabetes, heart disease and cancer. (Nader, 2004) Infant mortality, one of the nation's most critical gauges of maternal and societal health, is twice as common in African-American communities than it is in white communities, and even occurs across all socioeconomic ranges of the Black community. This indicates that the problem...
Religion in Human Transformation of the African-American topic with a focus on the African-American Christianity experience. The writer explores the transformation to Black Christianity and uncovers some of the underlying features of its existence. The writer examines the patterns and experiences of spirituality for the Black Christian experience in North America as well as the ways that the particular historical experiences of Blacks in the United States assisted in
Racial profiling is not new, however, and was a theory of sociology in the late 19th century known as Social Darwinism. Incorrectly using Darwin's theory of evolution, the Social Darwinists believed that some species were morally superior to others, and even some races superior to othersJohnson () Public perception, though, believes in favor of seeing race as a reason for crime, and having a considerable fear of anyone outside their own
Racial Profiling The distinguished Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Studies, was arrested for trying to break into someone's house. It happened to be his own (Project America; 2008). This is but one of numerous cases of racial profiling that has been documented in this country and that points to the injustice and irrationality of singling out ethnic minorities for
Racial Profiling Since 911 The racial profiling implies the discrimination by police to detail a person as suspect basing on the racial manifestations. In the present days the process of racial profiling has changed to a great extent. (Harris, 58) The racial profiling, till the present period was indicated towards the practice of police dragging over the black male drivers discriminately on the empirically valid but morally denounced hypothesis that they
This abuse of Arab-Americans and Muslim-American follows the ritualized sacrifice of the pharmakos, which involved the projection of a specific set of characteristics onto the scapegoated victim, who was then sacrificed in order to restore the health and unity of the community" (p. 165). As Taslitz (2002) emphasizes, such hate crimes and stereotypical portrayals of Arab-Americans represent a firmly entrenched set of beliefs held by many Americans that contribute
New Jersey held hearings concerning racial profiling in which one state police investigator testified that 94% of the motorists stopped were minorities (Anderson Pp). Not only were minorities more likely to be stopped than whites, but more often than not are pressured to allow searches of their vehicles, and are more likely to allow such searches (Anderson Pp). In March 2001, the New York Times reported that a 1997 investigation
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