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Most conservatives do not support racial profiling or "rationally discriminating against" anyone.
Thread fail.
What conservatives are you talking about? I have not meet one yet that didn't love racial profiling but hated race being used to help make things equal. Sorry but not one have I came across. If you can show me this is true then OK but my experience has been very different.
What was the race of the ones who killed 3000 Americans on 911? (White, little old ladies?)
What 'race' is in the majority .. streaming across the border and digging tunnels to run drugs into the country? (White, little old ladies?)
On December the 7th 1941 .. What was the 'race' of the people who bombed Pearl Harbor? (White, little old ladies?)
I can think of other examples of WHY and HOW 'racial profiling' can and should be used and would be .. much more effective than strip searching 'White, little old ladies'!
Thats right make ENEMIES out of us by treating us like criminals because of our race. Thats real smart and just like a God fearing conservative.
i noticed that conservatives here also are obsessed with the race of people when a crime is committed and will make sure its known that they are black if its a black who committed the crime.
the constant flash mob threads this summer were proof of that. a thread with a black man attacking a homeless guy got over 100 responses, a story buzzing all over the internet right now of a white thug beating up a homeless guy hasnt even been posted here.
You know why. The white guy was defending us with homes! Now lets get back to the blacks....I mean I hate that PC stops me
Mr. Sykes, problem is that profiling works the majority of the time. It's simply becoming "PC" to deny that it works or at least deny that anyone uses it. They do~
You have never been profiled I have. It does something to you inside. I know you like it that way because it makes you feel special and untouchable but someday it might be you.
In which case it's not justified, and I have yet to see a conservative take the position that it is.
Maybe so but they are completely unrelated. Social engineering is intended to create an end result that is racial in nature. Efficiency is colorblind in its result, but may use arbitrary traits such as race, gender, ear size or whatever to achieve that result. That's what it comes down to.
Disparate impact is not at all absolutism. And the disparate result is based directly on the disparate things that makes that type of profiling effective in the first place. Remember that effective profiling must be logical, so whatever disparate impact it creates is based directly on disparity in reality.
You're in a poor rural area of Kentucky or something. You see two cars. You have a tip that one of these cars has 8 pounds of meth in the trunk. Do you pull over the Asian guy or the white guy?
We all know the answer to this.
To a significant degree, disparate impact is forged precisely by the very presence of race bias at one or multiple levels of the justice system. "Efficiency" seems to be nothing more than coded justification for race-focused and race-biased law enforcement, which in the end is itself tantamount to a kind of social engineering. It may be worth noting that racial profiling exists in many forms and very often extends outside the typical socioeconomic environment wherein structural disparity "naturally" yields disparate results. The reality is that, all things being equal, race is indeed oftentimes the only characteristic that determines the likelihood of one individual being targeted over another, the one characteristic that renders policing "effective" in the first place, at least in the eyes of those who tend to support racial profiling. I fail to see how this is fundamentally different from race-focused hiring or admissions, where the "efficient targeting" of prospective applicants based on race is likewise justified as "logical" in the interest of social justice and its key component of proportional representation.
First kudos to OP for the post; very insightful to have noticed that juxtaposition. You will have me thinking about this all day, damn you! (lol)
As Sam Barrow says, everyone profiles. Jesse Jackson famously said (paraphrase) 'when I hear footsteps behind me on the street, I feel relief if I turn around and see a white.'
I am a conservative who will argue in favor of affirmative action, at least up to a point. The example I always give is that when I was a kid (long ago), I lived in an all white neighborhood. When a Chinese family moved in down the street some of the neighbors went out of their way to try to make them feel welcome, inviting them over for dinner, etc, which they would not have done for a white family. That was affirmative action, and I think it was great.
Conservatives tend to have a kneejerk reaction against afirmative action, not because of racism, but because of the threat to meritocracy, which is a kind of corollary to individualism, the bedrock of conservatism. The ever popular example is of quotas for whites in the NBA. This same threat to meritocracy does not apply to profiling. So this is one element to resolve the seming inconsistency.
Secondly I would say that conservatives support profiling only up to a point. I remember hearing Michael Medved talking about James Golden, who lived on Mercer Island, WA for a while. Medved reported that James got pulled over all the time because he was a black guy driving a nice car, and Medved was none to happy about it. Conservatives do not support profiling as a tool to allow some racist cop to get jollies.
anyway, once again, very good & thought provoking post, OP.
Thank you.
I think the issue of meritocracy is where everything hinges on. If the pursuit of meritocracy is valued more in academia and the job market than in law enforcement, then you can probably bet that those doing the valuing probably do not stand to be negatively impacted by non-meritocratic activity in the latter arena anyhow. One could in theory almost make the same argument about liberals who appear to value a meritocratic approach the other way around, except that those on the left never really attempt to make a case for across-the-board colorblindness, but rather a system that seeks to afford equal representation for groups that have been historically denied it on the basis of identity. Where race-based policing is concerned, those on the left generally oppose it on the grounds that it is often used as a tool of identity-based oppression of certain groups, not necessarily because it isn't colorblind for colorblindess' sake.
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