Racial Profiling

Racial profiling is the increased scrutiny or selective enforcement of rules, norms, and laws for members of specific social groups. The increased scrutiny or selective enforcement results in the increased likelihood that these racial groups will experience significantly higher levels of negative sanctions than would be expected given their numbers in the population. The cumulative effect of these higher levels gives the impression that these groups are more prone to deviance than other groups. Such selective rule enforcement has led some to associate a culture of poverty or deviance with the group. Racial profiling, a more subtle form of racism, occurs in many countries besides the United States, including England, France, Japan, Germany, Mexico, Russia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe.

Evidence of this systematic singling out of racial and ethnic non-elites for differentially negative sanctions exists throughout the United States. While most recent research and concern focus on police and crime, a well-documented, long history of racial profiling exists. Sustained efforts, led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), resulted in the initiation of multiple lawsuits, passage of a series of laws, and numerous policy changes. Unfortunately, as long as racial profiling is treated as a problem and not a symptom, few actual remedies will be forthcoming. To treat racial profiling as the problem, much like smokers' cough, is to treat the symptoms. Racial profiling is part of a larger, more ingrained problem in Western culture.

In the raging debate over racial profiling, it should be understood that most Americans, both racial elites and non-elites, agree that racism is bad, that vestiges of racism yet remain, and that laws and their enforcement should be racially neutral. The degree to which groups and individuals assess such neutrality is dependent upon which side of the racial divide they find themselves. As in the 1995 O. J. Simpson trial, many racial elites view the criminal justice system as fair, while many racial non-elites view the same system as being unfair. Most racial non-elites know with certainty that police, the courts, and the laws unfairly target, systematically restrict, and regularly harm members of their groups. Alternatively, most racial elites know with certainty that their only protection from an increasingly hostile and criminal underclass is the police, the courts, and the laws.

Although several factors may account for these differences, the force of the news media cannot be ignored. Evidence seems to support the vilification of racial non-elites. Specifically, blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be presented as criminals than as victims or more positively. These types of perceptual biases have dire and negative consequences when racial non-elites confront the legal system. Thus both blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be stopped, searched, and charged with trivial offenses simply because they are members of racialized non-elites.

These types of observations are not limited to the United States but rather are universally associated with racial and ethnic discrimination. For example, research conducted in South Africa documents how racial elites inflate their own superiority by deflating that of racial non-elites. Consequently, while they perceive themselves as superior, they describe racial non-elites as greedy, lazy, sexually aggressive, deviant, disrespectful, irresponsible, dependent, and backward. Further, as seen in Russia, when racial elites [Page 744]also dominate the police, these types of attitudes can result in selective enforcement, extremism, and ethnic intolerance.

...