Today, as part of my odious daily commute through midtown, I passed by the ABC News recording studio. A group of approximately 20 men were protesting outside. Each held a sign reading “I am Puerto Rican. I am not a drug dealer.” Similarly, they were chanting “We’re Puerto Rican. We don’t sell drugs.” I overheard other pedestrians talking about how ABC had recently been racially profiling Puerto Ricans in some of their news pieces and that this was likely what the group of men were protesting. Without even knowing the specifics of their protest, I felt offended and irritated. I am half Puerto Rican and bristle at the notion that I may therefore be half-felon.
This event led me to think more seriously about the issue of racial profiling on my way home from work. It’s something I’ve always had mixed feelings about largely because the almost too-logical argument behind it runs up against our country’s rather awful history of treating people of color as subhuman. For those who are unclear, the general argument I refer to is as follows: If the person who committed a crime is known to be [insert ethnicity here], the police should question/detain/look out for people who are [insert ethnicity] and who match the rest of the profile. The same principles are used in airports, for example, to help police identify possible terror suspects. The idea is that this will somehow narrow down the pool of suspects or streamline a screening process.
My instinct has always been to say that racial profiling is fine. Generally. It is here, however, that I feel it necessary to point out that although I am half-Puerto Rican, I present as white. Very white, to be precise. This has made it rather difficult to claim my heritage in the eyes of other people, but it also means that I have not been, and never will be, subject to any form of racial profiling. I will continue to go through life having never been stopped at an airport, detained in a subway or questioned on my way home from work. In essence, I am ethnic without the burden of my ethnicity. I realized with a certain clarity today that my unease with taking the position of “I-guess-it-makes-sense” stems from the fact that it is a position of complacency and that at the end of the day, ‘racial profiling’ doesn’t actually mean ‘racial profiling’. If it did, I would be detained and questioned along with all the other Puerto Ricans. I am not. I never have been.
The question we should be asking ourselves here is not “is racial profiling ok?”. If we consider the above anecdote, we should be asking ourselves a very different sort of question - what does a Puerto Rican man look like? If someone came up to you and informed you that a tall Puerto Rican man in his mid twenties had just robbed them, who would you look for? This description can be easily applied to up to half of New York City’s men, and so what it really means is “someone who wasn’t white robbed me.” If you disagree with that assertion, I would encourage you to consider how you would distinguish a Puerto Rican man from a man who is Dominican, South American, Armenian, Lebanese or any of the other ethnicities that are so easily lumped together.
The ultimate problem with racial profiling is that it reduces individuals to little more than their skin color. We have no way of knowing if the individual in a news report is actually Puerto Rican. While such specificity may seem like a kind of progress (at least they’re not just calling him “black”, right??), it is the opposite. This kind of language implicates all people of color because “Puerto Rican” is a meaningless descriptor when we speak of a person’s physical attributes. You may know what type of music your perpetrator might like, what foods he might prefer or even which languages he speaks with his mom, but you still have no idea what he looks like. The only thing you know is that he is not white, and therefore any man of color might be that same guy waiting to jump out and snatch your wallet.
The implications of this are obvious. If any man of color is potentially a criminal, the resulting sense of fear and impulse towards ‘othering’ creates an even wider rift between racial communities throughout the country. When you combine this with the statistics that show that minority communities tend to be more heavily concentrated in impoverished areas, it should not come as a surprise that these areas are some of the hardest to change. When everyone on the street lives in mutual fear of one another, there can be no form of social contract. There can be no progress.
While the protest was comprised entirely of men, and while it is true that men commit an overwhelming majority of reported crimes, it is worth mentioning that this is a women’s issue as well. As I looked at the men protesting today, it occurred to me that they are all men who, as my mother often puts it, ‘set off my spidey senses’. They are men who you might see in a public service announcement, men who I might avoid when walking home alone at night and men who I would expect to harass me on the street if my clothes are in any way provocative. I studied their faces intently to remind myself that the way we are taught to perceive men of color is unjust and largely incorrect. These were all well-meaning people who clearly came from a variety of backgrounds and professions. Had I encountered any of these men under different circumstances however, I am certain I would not have been wondering about their families or what kind of job they had.
While the protest was comprised entirely of men, and while it is true that men commit an overwhelming majority of reported crimes, it is worth mentioning that this is a women’s issue as well. As I looked at the men protesting today, it occurred to me that they are all men who, as my mother often puts it, ‘set off my spidey senses’. They are men who you might see in a public service announcement, men who I might avoid when walking home alone at night and men who I would expect to harass me on the street if my clothes are in any way provocative. I studied their faces intently to remind myself that the way we are taught to perceive men of color is unjust and largely incorrect. These were all well-meaning people who clearly came from a variety of backgrounds and professions. Had I encountered any of these men under different circumstances however, I am certain I would not have been wondering about their families or what kind of job they had.
This blog has a rather obvious progressive slant, and so I’ll end by saying that this isn’t the kind of issue with an immediate answer - the solution is a little more vague and gradual than that. We could end the practice of racial profiling today and the problematic assumptions made about people of color would continue to exist. It is thus the responsibility of progressives (or really anyone who doesn’t want to be a terrible person, however accidentally) to be self-aware enough to recognize when our assumptions, or the assumptions of other people, are unwarranted. We cannot feel secure if everyone around us is a potential threat and we cannot achieve any measure of social equality when some people are ‘safer’ than others.
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