What’s Wrong With Racial Profiling?
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on May 24, 2010
I was at a meeting yesterday when the subject of the Arizona Immigration law came up. I don't think I've hidden my views on this subject from anyone, and as someone who talks about diversity, it would make sense that I would take a position against it.
Of course, I knew better as soon as I began, but that's how it goes. The other 3 men I was talking with this about supported the bill. They believed Arizona had a right to do it to keep illegal aliens out of the country. I said that the bill amounted to a support of racial profiling. One of the guys, someone I figured I knew pretty well, then said "what's wrong with racial profiling?"
In general, how does one answer a question like that when they believe there's no way a learned man would ever even make a statement like that? Is there any argument that would make any sense to someone who would utter that kind of statement?
Well, I tried. I asked if he or anyone in the room besides me has ever been pulled over by the police and asked why they were in a certain neighborhood because the police didn't believe you belonged there? They pretty much tried to negate that argument, but I wasn't having it. To me, if one has never shared that experience they're not really qualified to respond to it or make judgment on it.
Last year on another blog I took a position that said Congress can't pass a law that's aimed at only a few people because they're mad at them. In this case, it was against people at banks the government was helping that had earned bonuses based on their contracts. I felt that using government to put penalties on a specific group of people was an abuse of power.
I feel the same way about this Arizona law. I have a feeling that the Supreme Court will overturn it once someone files the lawsuit after it goes into effect. There's just too many precedents in this country and around the world that have to be taken into account. I always worry about things like this that might be allowed because they always have unintended consequences, or spark thoughts that are backwards and hurtful.
It didn't help when Rand Paul, running for the Senate seat in Kentucky, said that though he would have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, he doesn't believe the federal government has a right to tell business owners that don't get money from the government that they can't legally discriminate against those they don't want in their stores, whether it's based on race, religion, or anything else. There's a lack of understanding that you don't get to have it both ways, especially since he also said he would find the practice abhorrent.
There's a long way to go on this topic of race. I think I was correct last year when I said we're not close to being as far along as people pretended we were when President Obama was elected. Every day it seems something else occurs that proves I'm right. We have to be better at this America; we have to get to a point where no one ever asks the question "what's wrong with racial profiling".
Good post. One thing most people and the media don’t notice about Rand Paul’s position on the Civil Rights Act is that he said he would vote for it only because of the prevailing atmosphere in the U.S. in 1964. Implied in his carefully worded, after the fact caveat is that under normal circumstances, he would not support the last provision that required private businesses providing services to the public. This is an important caveat. How would a doctrinaire Libertarian vote on potential issues involving private enterprise versus the public need?
Further, there are other issues that the Libertarians do not support and clearly would vote against: Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, Unemployment Insurance, Unemployment Compensation, Housing regulations, banking and finance regulations, environmental controls, manufacturing safety controls,consumer protection policies, child safety policies, and public education. Heck, he’d vote against the requirement to wear seatbelts and have airbags in vehicles! Libertarians believe private enterprise supercedes the rights of humans. The MSM, focusing on the fabulousj intrepid Rachel Maddow, hasn’t reported on the beliefs of Libertarians, and certainly the GOP has sufficiently muzzled Rand The Younger so he will never actually answer these questions in the future.
So the next best thing is for people to discuss this on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or other social media outlets. Perhaps increased discussion will result in pressure on the MSM to fully report what the Libertarians in the Tea Party movement really represent. These are not funny little eccentrics making arcane arguments suited for the college quads. They juvenile in their thinking, their proposed policies are untenable and unworkable, and they are dangerous in the total scheme of things. Yet they truly intend to implement this mishmash of what-ifs and selfish self-centeredness. If the Federal government was essentially shut down by the GOP for the past 16 months, consider what a Congress full of these people could do to damage the viability of the United States. It would make Bush’s 8 years seem foresighted and accomplished in comparison.
It always seems to come down to most people not knowing the general effects of something because they haven’t had any of the experiences with it, or haven’t thought about how these things could potentially affect someone who’s not them. I remember President Bush II trying to push the concept of allowing people to have their Medicare money all up front and allowing them to put it into the stock market; can you imagine what life would be for those folks now after last year?
It’s scary that we’ve reached 2010 and still have many of the problems and issues that we have, and also have people wanting to take us backwards by either taking things away or allowing “new” problems such as racial profiling, which isn’t quite a new problem but, depending on how upcoming elections go, could start becoming a trend across the country. Diversity is starting to take a step backwards, and it’s depressing.