America+-+'The+Sorrow+and+Pity+of+Racial+Profiling'

America: "The Sorrow and Pity of Racial Profiling"

First off, I have no idea why this book, and every writer in it, is obsessed with the Pacific war during WWII. Granted, the war with Japan is often overlooked until the bombs, but that doesn't mean it was cesspool for illegal activities. WWII was a __//**war**//__; I don't know how many times this book tries to make the **//__war__//** seem like something it isn't. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not acts of terrorism, and the internment camps were not just for Japanese, there were also camps for Italians and Germans (and I don't see anyone getting worked up over that). The book wants to give a different perspective to the "selective" perspective of the mainstream, but the view presented in the book is just as selective. It's getting really annoying.

I disagree with Temple's opening statement; "if Jewish extremists ... ever engaged in acts of terrorism in the United States, a roundup of foreign Jews would be likely to follow (798)." There's the obvious response that it wouldn't happend because in our day and age, we wouldn't do anything to the Jews. Temple's counter is that "roundups reassure the public (799)", which is essentially saying, 'yeah, we would'. I'm not disagreeing with the fact that we would become suspicious of Jews; I disagree with the idea of automatically rounding them up. Last time I checked, Judaism was a religion, practiced by a variety of people, it would be rather difficult to "racially profile" "Jews" for containment purposes. Now a counter to that is to point out the Germans did it. Well yes, but they went on the basis that Jews "look funny", essentially different. There's too much diversity in Ameirca for that to effectively work, so the turn-to would be race, and Judaism doesn't have a specific race. The next logical question is then "why can we racially profile Muslims"? That's an easy one. Most Muslims are Arab and are very middle-eastern in appearance; not to mention that Arab names are pretty easy to recognize as being middle-eastern. This doesn't happen with Jews because Israel is, relatively speaking, a really young country, and whose inception did not attract middle-eastern Jews, but European Jews, in other words: Jews are white. In America, we don't racially profile against whites, they're the majority; we profile minorities.

Now let's look at racial profiling in America's past, specifically from the era this book loves to rip on, WWII. As mentioned previously, the United States did not put just the Japanese into containment camps, but also Germans and Italians. Most people assume it was just Japanese and that it was a terrible mistake to put the Japanese into containment camps, and in //hindsight//, it was. The reasoning behind the Japanese containment was to protect the American people from another Japanese-inspired attack in case there were Imperial-Japanese sympathizers, but there was also the, albeit somewhat whimsy, reason of the Japanese-Americans's own protection from other Americans who would've attacked the Japanese-Americans for the Japanese attack. Ignoring the protection argument, the containment camps become a preemptive defense using "the one identifiable fact we know about them (799)": race. Now I'm sure you're probably wondering, if I previously stated that in America we don't racially profile whites because they're the majority, how America could've rounded-up Germans and Italians; after all, they are white European. This is where context of the time and world politics come into play. There were Nazi sympathizers and Fascist groups within German and Italian-American communities. When the United States entered the war against Germany, in order to preserve ideaologic unity, it rounded-up all of the Germans and Italians. Undoubtedly the same line of thought was being used when the Japanese were contained: there are people within the group that are a threat to national interests and it will take too much time to go through every Japanese person to know who's-who, so we'll just round them all up.

Fast forward to today and one will still find racial profiling of many varieties, but Temple chose to foucs on the profiling of Arabs, which is a bit of a shame. Temple should know that there's racial profiling of Latinos, African-Americans, Native-Americans, and any other minority, even though, to the untrained eye, we've "moved past" that type of racial profiling. What's bad about Temple's article, at least the excerpt we have of it, spends about a page actaully focused on the topic of racial profiling Arabas, the rest is dedicated to the discussion of individual rights and attempts at parallelism with WWII. The parellelisms might have worked, had more of the article been related to racial profiling of Arabs. Temple argues that profiling is bad because those affected by the profiling, specific the innocent, are punished and suffer for things that are beyond their control. While the death of innocence is a tragedy, "plan[s] to fingerprint and photograph an additional 100,000 Middle Eastern people ... (799)" pales in comparison to actually putting these people into concentration camps of Nazi Germany or containment camps of the United States. True, we profile, but it's not a physical containment, but rather a mental one. When Columbine happened, people instantly profiled the "outcasts". It wasn't a roundup of every "outcast" and it certainly was no Salem witch-hunt, but it was profiling, and that kind of profiling is closer to what is being experienced today. We create stereotypes like Kinsley's "an Arab-looking man heading toward an airplane is statistically more likely to be a terrorist (799)." Kinsley's statement, rightly refuted by Temple, is just like any other stereotype, not true. Besides, most experts expect the next big terrorist threat to be on a subway and not a plane. While on the subject of airplanes and airports, Temple argues that "if Arabs are to be questioned and frisked at airports, let us all be questioned and frisked in the same way (801)". Temple expects that if everyone were to experience the same treatment that "the public will not tolerate unnecessary and excessive measures (801)." Unfortunately for him, he's wrong. Airport security does check everyone who is suspicious, if the activities were exclusive to Arabs or Muslims, there wouldn't have been a huge uproar over the TSA scans. Even more, people are okay with these precaustions because, as Temple alludes to, it makes them feel safer and insures safety, and who doesn't like safety?

One of the big themes in Temple's article was John Rawls's "Veil of Ignorance", or more importantly the idea of seeing the situation from the other point of view by "contemplat[ing] such potential vunerabilities as being in an unpopular minority ... (802)." It's important to, if not the actual argument itself. Temple talks about how bad the Arabs have it and wants people to reconsider profiling. What's even more influential is the over comparison to WWII Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. I think these are weak positions to take because, in the case of American containment camps, it would take too much time when a decision needed to be made quickly. As for the WWII overtones, there weak because they are, currently, nothing more than a slippery slope. What's more, it seems to be the only way Temple can argue that profiling is bad "you don't want to be a //Nazi// do you?" because, honestly, if you're not in the minority, profiling doesn't affect you, so why care. Although Temple made some interesting points, most of them were illogical and appealed more to emotion and empathy. Sure, those are important, but not when the thing you're arguing against is an emotional reaction.