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werewolf
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a book has recently been published that defends the internment of the japanese during WWII and that has been used to suggest and defend current racial profiling in the war against terror. I am not going into a detailed refutation of each point made in the book or in interviews with the author or her ilk, but rather a brief (which is all that is required) dismissal of the general idea behind racial profiling. My first objection comes from the fact much touted by liberals, that our freedoms are the very thing at stake in this war and so to remove them in their own defense is a form of circular reasoning (protecting our freedoms by destroying our freedoms). The fact is, when this country was founded, the tension between freedom and safety was fairly well understood by the creators of the constitution. i believe the saying attributed to patrick henry is, give me liberty or give me death. in our country we err on the side of liberty rather than safety. it is a well known fact that if someone wants to kill another person in this country, unless it is in plain sight of a law enforcement agent, they are given plenty of opportunities. perhaps we'd be safer if we pre-emptively arrested those of questionable character, or if we had collars on our necks that prevented us from ever having violent thoughts. that is an intuitively scary scenario even if you feel safer, because it threatens the one thing more valuable than total safety, and that's a reasonable ability to live and interact as you will, even with some of the risks inevitably involved. this is clearly implied in the constitutions provisions for due process of the law, the assumption of innocence until proven guilty, and the right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures (racial profiling is hardly reasonable and i shall describe my reasons for thinking so). Throughout our history we've rejected forms of government which might be safer but which was inherently in disagreement with our values of liberty. Communism and fascism both are safer than democracy is if exercised in such a way that it removes people's abilities to take risks or to have any power against the government or others. Now during the war of terror, it may again be tempting to reject freedom and to become the very thing we're fighting against in order to defeat it, but what will that have accomplished? There is no doubt we are more powerful militarily than the terrorists or any nation or group in the world today, but what truly separates us is our dedication to freedom. Oftentimes the tension between freedom and safety demands that we find creative ways to protect ourselves, but we can rise to that challenge and accomplish it without changing the basic nature of all that is good about our country. Besides that, racial profling is based on fairly flawed and pragmatic statistics, and at its heart lies fallacy. To simply judge a whole group of people as worthy of suspicion based only on the acts of a few "among them" who form a group with them based on pretty tenous and contrived shared traits to begin with, is downright tyrannical. Instead of looking at middle eastern people as a group who commits more crimes than other speciously created groups such as "whites", "blacks", "asians", and "jews" to underscore the point i'm trying to make, let's look at them within themselves. Out of all middle easterners, is it the majority who commit crimes of terror? If the coloring of their skin and the region of the world they come from is enough to predict that they are more likely than not to commmit crimes, then of course we should intern and question all of them, since more than 2 out of three could be terrorists. This is not the case, however. And so you're openly admitting you will trouble what more likely than not (statistics show so) are innocent people (what's truly ironic is that the people who argue this way also tend to dismiss the war crimes in iraq as a few bad apples and see no need for a review of the system that's supposed to keep such activities in check). Of course a proponent of profiling would claim statistics show that these people as a group are more likely than whites as a group to be terrorist. But you're grouping them on a category that is totally unpredictive of their character: their skin. The innocent people this would unduly burden have no more in common with these terrorists than you or I reasonably might, and yet you've chosen to focus on one shared trait that no sane person would link to a criminal disposition. Some would argue that the threat is so great from the terrorists that drastic measures like this must be taken. The fallacy there is assuming that the only way to combat terrorism and to weed out terrorists is through racial profiling. No one would argue that the threat makes some drastic measures necessary, but why it has to be based on the tired myth of race is beyond me. My main point is that there are much more predictive shared traits we could look for in these terrorists that would also have the benefit of not costing innocent people in a discriminatory way. We all are the ones who need protection, so we all should share the burden of it, rather than shirking it onto one portion of innocent people and saying "hey they came with you." Associating a whole group of people with terrorists based on nothing but their skin is disenfranchising and unjust. A good way to ensure only reliable and safe people get on airplanes is to require background checks before you fly. We need licenses to drive cars and background checks to purchase guns. Now that flying has been identified as potentially dangerous, why not require that all those wishing to fly to or within our country be licensed? The air travel industry would probably throw a shitfit, but let's not be unjust simply because we're lazy or worried about protecting the rights of a company over the safety of us all. At least then the freedom we're taking away will be all of ours, and so will have to be agreed upon, rather than the majority stripping basic and essential liberty from the minority. The protection of that liberty even against a panicked majority is something our constitution was established to uphold. Let us remember the wisdom embodied in it during this time of turbulence.
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040810
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