Keeping Our Biases ‘N Sync

He had me up to the point where he mentioned listening to Justin Timberlake on the radio. Now I say: Lock him up!

Seriously, though, Professor Ali raises some good questions. When does vigilance become paranoia? When does ethnic profiling become racism? And, most importantly, exactly what price are we willing to pay to feel safe?

The last question, of course, is a bit misleading. For the vast majority of non-Muslim Americans, “we” are not paying any price whatsoever. It is all too easy for us to ask others to bear the burden of our insecurity. After all, we can always reassure ourselves that if the 9/11 terrorists had been blond-haired, blue-eyed Swedes, we’d all be keeping our eyes out for fair-skinned young men bearing suspcious packages.

But do we really believe that? Prior to September 11, 2001, the worst terrorist act on American soil was perpetrated in Oklahoma by young white men with short, “military-style” haircuts. Yet few, if any, Americans think of Timothy McVeigh when they see a member of, say, the college ROTC boarding their airplane.

You might conclude that this is really no big deal. After all, Professor Ali merely had to answer a few questions on his cell phone and everything was fine. But imagine what might have happened if his students and colleagues had not recognized the description of his rather unusual little white Beetle. Imagine instead that he had remained unidentified except as a “Middle Eastern” man in a car with New York plates, and that he had been pulled over on the interstate. My guess is that he would have had a very different, and far less pleasant, experience about which to write.

There’s obviously nothing wrong with thoughtful vigilance, but there is something very wrong with ethnic profiling. At the very least, we should probably ask ourselves one question before we contact the authorities: Would I still find this behavior suspicious if I was the Muslim and the man carrying the package was a member of the ROTC?

Unapologetically Tenured, at 8:55 am EDT on April 23, 2007

Profiling

Anyone with any actual knowledge of effective police work can tell you that racial and ethnic profiling is worse than useless. It drives whole communities away from the kind of cooperation that might make us safer, so honestly, we should have zero tolerance for that.

As unapologetically tenured points out, we only “profile” this way when the people do not look like us. There were no aggressive car stops of white farm boys in pick-up trucks leaving the feed store after Oklahoma City, and there has been no round up of midwestern Marines after Haditha. And, in both cases, that instinct, unlike this sad case of poor ROTC training, is correct. 99.9999 percent of people buying mass quantities of fertilizer are, surprise, surprise, farmers, 99.9999% of Marines have strong enough morals to prevent incidents like Haditha, hunting down all who fit these profiles is ridiculous.

Behavioral Profiling is something good cops do every day (and always have), and it is effective, because it does not divert resources to a cardboard box next to a recycling center, and it does not assault being based on appearances or place of birth. Nor is it the absurd waste of effort that leaves US airport TSA agents searching the shoes of infants.

Mr. “Rambo” above may feel well trained enough to make these judgments, and he may have the requisite skin tone and vehicle type that ensures that he will not have police weapons put in his face whenever he makes an innocent move, and that is probably lovely for him, but “erring on the side of caution” in the wrong way quickly creates a chilling climate and separates ordinary citizens from their community and their state, and nothing we could do would be worse for national security than that.

Ira Socol, Michigan State University, at 10:10 am EDT on April 23, 2007

Professor Socol, I’m confused. Where exactly did you get the information that the student in question was a “sad case of poor ROTC training"? I must have missed some very informative paragraphs in Professor Ali’s comments.

Regine, at 10:30 am EDT on April 23, 2007

Being under suspicion

My husband and I used to drive a retired police car, a Ford Crown Victoria that still sported dual spotlights and numerals on the back bumper.

One day in 1991, we were in a Feed and Seed store, and our son, a biology student, was looking at the ingredients of all of the bird seed mixtures to see if any of them had thistle seed, which was a preferred nutrient for songbirds. This took quite a long time, and I sat down and waited on a bench near the checkout. We ended up leaving without purchasing anything, because he had already purchased another bag of seed from the competition. Being the compulsive type, though, he had to make sure that he had made the best buy.

We had driven a few blocks and were pulling into a parking lot to go to the public library, when we were surrounded by police cars. It seemed that our “suspicious behavior” had prompted a call to the police. The store owner surmised that we probably had killed a state patrolman and were going on a crime spree.

Luckily, I had my faculty i.d. in my wallet, proving local residence (since the car had out-of-state plates, and my husband had not moved to the area yet), and I opened the trunk and showed the bag of bird seed as evidence of our intentions to feed the birds.

That experience did not involve any racial profiling, but it was prompted by our violation of a set of expectations shared by the store owner and checkout clerk.

Luckily, the police accepted our explanation and closed the conversation by saying, “Don’t let this leave a bad taste in your mouth.”

I think that is generally good advice. In a week when poetry students are suddenly viewed as dangerous, perhaps a box of poems could have been reasonably seen as threatening.

Let’s all try to find peace in our hearts and our world today.

Peaceful professor, at 12:30 pm EDT on April 23, 2007

Mr. Rambo mentioned earlier “It is a reality that people know that at this time in the world, islamic fundamentalism is the source of much indiscriminate bombing. Only a fool would not acknowledge that reality.” I would like to point him and others to a small article written recently by a Swede Kristoffer Larsson, about the Islamic threat in Europe, in numbers. The article can be accessed at http://www.counterpunch.org/larsson04212007.html

I am sure that US data would not be that different.

TM, at 1:55 pm EDT on April 23, 2007

Perhaps I should not be surprised by the fear-spawned paranoia of an American college student—ROTC or otherwise. Perhaps I should not be surprised by the arrogant reaction of the local police who cautioned Professor Ali to be careful about his behavior in these troubled times. (Careful indeed, it the good doctor had been armed with, egad, a cell phone, who knows where this might have gone.) I certainly should not be surprised by the tepid response of the university administration. These are all predictable. But, I am a little, well, unsettled by the paternalistic, “let’s not get carried away,” “caution is understandable,” “nothing really that bad happened,” clichés in the comments.

I admit to being outraged by what happened to Prof. Ali. Not, obviously, because on some absolute scale of human suffering, it rates as a great human tragedy, but because of what it represents. Minus the phenotypical markers that converted him into a Middle-Easterner in the racializing gaze of a young student, his only crime was to recycle a box of old manuscripts. Granted, he was not detained, manhandled, or arrested… then again he was not unlucky enough to have been in a face-to-face confrontation with beat cops worried about what if and as spoon fed on images of dark-skinned terrorists as the rest of us.

At issue here is more than “profiling,” though—the action of the student was not just civic minded caution: it was fear mongering, in himself first of all. What if? What if that box had been a bomb? A bomb cleverly planted next to a … dumpster? Why couldn’t the student see the faculty parking sticker? Seeing the New York plates and the a dark-skinned “foreigner” he didn’t have to look—he knew it wasn’t there.

I try to imagine what Prof. Ali could do differently, to be less “suspicious.” I imagine him asking, per impossible, “Yes, officer, I understand: what do you advise?”

“Well, Mr. Ali, I’m glad you asked. All you have to do is stop triggering our racist, xenophobic, and ethnocentric biases with your Middle Eastern appearance. And by the way, that business about NOT being Middle Easter because you are Indian, doesn’t cut it around here: real Americans take pride in not being able to tell the difference. You just watch yourself mister.”

Translation: Well, you can’t be white, so nothing else matters.

Wake-up call: What happened at Virginia Tech was a tragedy, but it did not make the work a more dangerous place. Paranoid and racist reactions, however, will surely make it a less humane one.

Just Visiting, at 5:15 am EDT on April 24, 2007

Outraged & Intolerant of Racial Profiling

I am outraged by what happened to Kazim Ali, though not surprised given our country’s history of racial profiling and INtolerance for its non-white communities. I am also outraged (though not surprised) by the harassment by the police and by the non-response of the university administration.

Although I’m sure there will be an increase in INtolerance after the Virginia Tech shooting for Asian Americans and others historically viewed as “suspicious", namely non-whites, immigrants, etc, I can’t say with confidence that such an incident would not have happened prior to Virginia Tech.

Kazim Ali is lucky that he still has his life.

Have we forgotten the recent (but prior to Virginia Tech) shooting death of Sean Bell, an unarmed African American man whom the New York City police shot to death 50 times right before he was going to be married? Should we be tolerant of his death, a “mistake” at the hands of the police? Should we tell his fiance — Sorry, please be tolerant of the fact that as a black man, he was a suspicious figure in these times, which is why he couldn’t be with you on your wedding day?

Have we forgotten Kuancheng Kao, a Chinese man who police mistakenly shot in Rohnert Park, assuming he knew martial arts?

Or have we forgotten the incarceration of 20,000 peoples of Japanese ancestry during World War II?

There are many such examples of how our nation has been INtolerant of people who it deemed “dangerous” and “suspicious” based on race, ethnicity, skin color. What happened to Kazim Ali follows a long line of such incidents. We cannot afford any more Sean Bells or Kuancheng Kaos and we cannot sit idly by if we know that this kind of profiling is happening within our communities.

Outraged!, at 3:05 pm EDT on April 24, 2007

To all the apologists for “unfortunate yet necessary vigilance” out there:

Yes, I do agree that terrorism and Muslim extremism exist. It would be stupid to argue otherwise. Yet on the ladder of things that I fear in my day-to-day life, they rank about as high up as getting sh!t on by a bird.

The example of Timothy McVeigh is a good one. Before 9/11, no one bothered to be leery of young white males with short cropped hair. Well, except me and those like me, since I’m not a white male.

And despite the acts committed on 9/11, 5 times as many people were killed that year by drunk drivers. Twice as many people were murdered that year with firearms. Yet there is no public backlash against drinking, gun fanatics, etc.

It is easier to focus on an “enemy” when there is a

1) single collective description to abide by

and

2) they are different from us.

We can’t do anything about drunk drivers because so many different people do it. We can’t stop gun proliferation because so many of our acquaintances are pro-gun. But terrorists? They’re brown and Muslim. VA Tech? Those damn Asians. They’re different and they’re dangerous. At best, we might have one or two friends who fall in that category. Then it becomes even easier to make them second-class citizens (or not citizens at all) because we can say “well I’m not racist, because I have a friend/co-worker/sister-in-law/etc. who is Asian/Persian/Arabic/etc.”

Scared, at 4:00 pm EDT on May 1, 2007

Re: Poetry can be dangerous

Honestly, until you’ve walked a day in my or any other non-caucasian’s shoes in this country, it really is hard to understand how deeply incidents like this affect us. To all caucasians who counsel patience and understanding, please go walk off a cliff or something. If you’ve never been pulled over for DWB, DWL, or DWA (driving while black, driving while latino, driving while asian or any other form of wrongful ethnic driving) and told to, “shut your mouth if you know what’s good for you, boy,” or my favorite, “put your hands on the vehicle and spread em,” then it’s really hard to understand our point of view. I don’t mean to say that all caucasians are evil. I’m just saying that unless you’ve experienced racial profiling first hand, then you really shouldn’t be telling us to just chill out. You wouldn’t tell a rape victim to just calm down, learn patience, and be at peace with the world. You would just do your best to try to be understanding and provide the best support you can. This professor has a very good reason to feel angry. Now can we just try to be understanding and use this situation to try to better understand the root of the problem, just plain ignorance.

Bumblefreak, student, at 4:30 am EDT on May 2, 2007