Racial Profiling Means We've Lost
Mark Green writes an excellent piece at Huffington Post on the danger of racial profiling.
....every time civil liberties have been suspended, the result has been a humiliation not only for the targeted community but also ultimately for the United States. Besides the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War Two, for which the government issued an apology and reparations, Bush’s deferral of constitutional procedure for Guantanamo detainees drew a Supreme Court rebuke. Indeed, they make the further suspension of the rights of Middle Eastern-looking folk on New York’s subways that much more gruesome. You’re stopped at Columbus Circle on your way home from work, and you may wake up in Cuba without your family ever getting a phone call.
Ultimately, profiling hurts the so-called “war on terror” because it feeds the resentments of marginalized immigrants and can provoke victims to go from hostile to homicidal. Even Donald Rumsfeld has admitted that this is a “war for hearts and minds.” Needlessly degrading the very communities we want as our allies—on the specious grounds that it will make our commutes safer—risks even more terrorists growing from the soil of police sweeps.
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