On "racial profiling'.
A fair amount of the criticism leveled at Arizona's new law is that it encourages "racial profiling". That seems to be the latest to make the list of Cardinal Sins.
Funny, back when I was being taught by Sister Mary Tarantula at Our Lady of Perpetual Payments Elementary School in East Islip, N.Y., there was a grand total of seven Cardinal Sins. Nowadays I think they'd fill an encyclopedia. How do you keep up with all of them?
Encourage "racial profiling"? DUH!!
It goes on all the time, just not against the protected groups of our society. As an example, try having a young, white male cruise through the inner city at oh-dark thirty in the morning. If the cops see his pale ass they'll probably pull him over and give him a hard time for trying to score drugs. Racial profiling for certain.
When I was in junior college after being laid off from my first civilian job I took an Oral Communication course. Part of it involved giving a class presentation and we were encouraged to dress for it. I came in wearing my three piece suit instead of the standard jeans. A teacher I walked past EVERY DAY stopped me, started a very pleasant conversation the object of which was to find out what course I was teaching as she hadn't seen me before. When I identified myself as a student (albeit one in his forties so therefore a tad older than most) you could see her face change as if someone had flipped a switch. Up till then we'd had some profiling going on, the racial portion came into play because I'm as pale as milk. You can bet a black man wouldn't have gotten the same pleasantness based solely on dress.
At a mostly black Pentecostal church I belonged to some time ago, a few of us were doing maintenance work one night. Someone called the cops because they thought we were breaking in. Guess who the representatives of New London's finest quizzed? It wasn't the assistant pastor who was standing at my right side when the gendarmes waltzed in. "Racial profiling" because everybody "knows" the white boy is always in charge. Noted.
I could go on but anyone with two brain cells working together has plenty of examples of their own. I'm just killing time, pointing out the obvious.
Maybe I should kill some more time inventorying the latest list of Cardinal Sins.
2 comments:
Subvet, your personal examples of "racial profiling" (experienced based discretion) are priceless.
Hopefully, you will find an appropiate occasion to share them more broadly with the public at large.
Your examples will strike most open-minded people as the genuinely gritty and easily verifiable facts they are to me.
Interesting point on Cardinal Sins, too.
The best of all things to you.
Vigilis, thanks for your kind words. As I said, these are things anybody can come up with. All it takes is a bit of common sense (which I realize can seem very uncommon).
Post a Comment