Ethnic Profiling Quotes

Cultural Studies and Ethnic Studies are on the rise, and many minority protests that I have witnessed say, in effect, “Do not racially profile us, we are Americans.

America hasn’t seen this type of ethnic polarization since the days leading up to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Our police force must not only enforce the law; it must obey the law. In America, that applies to all citizens, regardless of race, creed, or ethnic origin. Our goal as a department, as a community, hell, as a society, is total colorblindness when it comes to law enforcement.

We all live in the digital poorhouse. We have always lived in the world we built for the poor. We create a society that has no use for the disabled or the elderly, and then are cast aside when we are hurt or grow old. We measure human worth based only on the ability to earn a wage, and suffer in a world that undervalues care and community. We base our economy on exploiting the labor of racial and ethnic minorities, and watch lasting inequities snuff out human potential. We see the world as inevitably riven by bloody competition and are left unable to recognize the many ways we cooperate and lift each other up. But only the poor lived in the common dorms of the county poorhouse. Only the poor were put under the diagnostic microscope of scientific clarity. Today, we all live among the digital traps we have laid for the destitute.

The FBI and the Secret Service each published reports in the first three years, guiding faculty to identify serious threats. The central recommendations contradicted prevailing post-Columbine behavior. They said identifying outcasts as threats is not healthy. It demonizes innocent kids who are already struggling. It is also unproductive. Oddballs are not the problem. They do not fit the profile. There is no profile. All the recent school shooters shared exactly one trait: 100 percent male. (Since the study a few have been female.) Aside from personal experience, no other characteristic hit 50 percent, not even close. “There is no accurate or useful ‘profile’ of attackers,” the Secret Service said. Attackers came from all ethnic, economic, and social classes. The bulk came from solid two-parent homes. Most had no criminal record or history of violence. The two biggest myths were that shooters were loners and that they “snapped.” A staggering 93 percent planned their attack in advance. “The path toward violence is an evolutionary one, with signposts along the way,” the FBI report said.

In 2019, Jordan Marie Brings Three White Horses Daniel (Lakota and Diné) started running high-profile marathons with a red handprint painted across her face to raise awareness of the overlooked crisis of Native American women, girls, and LGBTQ people going missing and/or dying by homicide at higher rates than women of any other ethnicity.

At the same time, medical experts of every persuasion agree that African Americans share the most deplorable health profile in the nation by far, one that resembles that of Third World countries. When Dr. Harold Freedman observed that the health status of Harlem men resembles that of Bangladeshis more closely than that of their Manhattan neighbors, he did not exaggerate. Twice as many African American babies as babies of other ethnic groups die before their first birthday. One and half times as many African American adults as white adults die every year. Blacks have dramatically higher rates of nearly every cancer, of AIDS, of heart disease, of diabetes, of liver disease, of infectious diseases, and they even suffer from higher rates of accidental death, homicide, and mental illness. Before they die young in droves from eminently preventable diseases, African Americans also suffer far more devastating but equally preventable disease complications, such as blindness, confinement to wheelchairs, and limb loss.

Camara Jones, a prominent medical researcher of health disparities, explained it this way to bioethics scholar Dorothy Roberts: “People are born with ancestry that comes from their parents but are assigned a race.” People from the same ethnic groups that are native to certain geographic regions typically share the same genetic profile. Geneticists call them “populations.” When geneticists compare these ethnic populations, they find there is more genetic diversity between populations within Africa than between Africa and the rest of the world. Ethnic groups in Western Africa are more genetically similar to ethnic groups in Western Europe than to ethnic groups in Eastern Africa. Race is a genetic mirage.

In March 2002, the National Academy of Sciences, a private, nonprofit society of scholars, released a high-profile report documenting the unequivocal existence of racial bias in medical care, which many thought would mark a real turning point. Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care was so brutal and damning that it would seem impossible to turn away. The report, authored by a committee of mostly white medical educators, nurses, behavioral scientists, economists, health lawyers, sociologists, and policy experts, took an exhaustive plunge into more than 480 previous studies. Because of the knee-jerk tendency to assume that health disparities were the end result of differences in class, not race, they were careful to compare subjects with similar income and insurance coverage. The report found rampant, widespread racial bias, including that people of color were less likely to be given appropriate heart medications or to undergo bypass surgery or receive kidney dialysis or transplants. Several studies revealed significant racial differences in who receives appropriate cancer diagnostic tests and treatments, and people of color were also less likely to receive the most sophisticated treatments for HIV/AIDS. These inequities, the report concluded, contribute to higher death rates overall for Black people and other people of color and lower survival rates compared with whites suffering from comparable illnesses of similar severity.

In the Metro, one evening, I looked closely around me: everyone had come from somewhere else . . . Among us, though, two or three faces from here, embarrassed silhouettes that seemed to be apologising for their presence. The same spectacle in London. Today’s migrations are no longer made by compact displacements but by successive infiltrations: little by little, individuals insinuate themselves among the “natives,” to anaemic and too distinguished to stoop to the notion of a “territory.” After a thousand years of vigilance, we open the gates . . . When one thinks of the long rivalries between the French and the English, then between the French and the Germans, it seems as if each nation, by weakening one another, had as its task to speed the hour of the common downfall so that other specimens of humanity may relay them. Like its predecessor, the new Völkerwanderung will provoke an ethnic confusion whose phases cannot be distinctly foreseen. Confronted with these disparate profiles, the notion of a community homogeneous to whatever degree is inconceivable. The very possibility of so heteroclite a crowd suggests that in the space it occupies there no longer existed, among the indigenous, any desire to safeguard even the shadow of an identity. At Rome, in the third century of our era, out of a million inhabitants, only sixty thousand were of Latin stock. Once a people has fulfilled the historical idea which was its mission to incarnate, it no longer has any excuse to preserve its difference, to cherish its singularity, to safeguard its features amidst a chaos of faces.

In the Metro, one evening, I looked closely around me: everyone had come from somewhere else . . . Among us, though, two or three faces from here, embarrassed silhouettes that seemed to be apologising for their presence. The same spectacle in London. Today’s migrations are no longer made by compact displacements but by successive infiltrations: little by little, individuals insinuate themselves among the “natives,” too anaemic and too distinguished to stoop to the notion of a “territory.” After a thousand years of vigilance, we open the gates . . . When one thinks of the long rivalries between the French and the English, then between the French and the Germans, it seems as if each nation, by weakening one another, had as its task to speed the hour of the common downfall so that other specimens of humanity may relay them. Like its predecessor, the new Völkerwanderung will provoke an ethnic confusion whose phases cannot be distinctly foreseen. Confronted with these disparate profiles, the notion of a community homogeneous to whatever degree is inconceivable. The very possibility of so heteroclite a crowd suggests that in the space it occupies there no longer existed, among the indigenous, any desire to safeguard even the shadow of an identity. At Rome, in the third century of our era, out of a million inhabitants, only sixty thousand were of Latin stock. Once a people has fulfilled the historical idea which was its mission to incarnate, it no longer has any excuse to preserve its difference, to cherish its singularity, to safeguard its features amidst a chaos of faces.

In line with the West German postwar narrative of victimhood, a German Aussiedler from Yugoslavia was an endogamous German-speaking victim of communism—a profile that would reappear with striking similarity to define a Soviet German Aussiedler in the early 1990s. He or she was not just someone of German descent but someone who, in addition and most crucially, spoke German. In the (undesirable but frequent) case that a spouse was not German, families were expected to use German as the dominant language. The overriding importance of language was only canceled out by political criteria—namely pro-partisan engagement during the Second World War, which could jeopardize the immigration of otherwise undoubtedly ethnic Germans.

the categories of Jewish people excluded often at that time mirrored the profile of non-ethnic social and political cleansing elsewhere.

the School Report (SR) and the high school profile. The SR includes information about curriculum, the number of students attending four-year colleges, and GPA, as well as a counselor evaluation that rates the rigor of a student’s course work and academic achievement. Some schools also provide the college with a profile that describes the curriculum, faculty, student body characteristics such as size and ethnicity, class rank, GPA ranges, awards, and even grade distributions for the class in every offered subject.

An attempt to create a new conceptual terrain for imagining alternatives to imprisonment involves the ideological work of questioning why “criminals” have been constituted as a class and, indeed, a class of human beings undeserving of the civil and human rights accorded to others. Radical criminologists have long pointed out that the category “lawbreakers” is far greater than the category of individuals who are deemed criminals since, many point out, almost all of us have broken the law at one time or another. Even President Bill Clinton admitted that he had smoked marijuana at one time, insisting, though, that he did not inhale. However, acknowledged disparities in the intensity of police surveillance—as indicated by the present-day currency of the term “racial profiling” which ought to cover far more territory than “driving while black or brown”—account in part for racial and class-based disparities in arrest and imprisonment rates. Thus, if we are willing to take seriously the consequences of a racist and class-biased justice system, we will reach the conclusion that enormous numbers of people are in prison simply because they are, for example, black, Chicano, Vietnamese, Native American or poor, regardless of their ethnic background.

Derived from a program of the same name run by the Drug Enforcement Agency in the United States and imported by the RCMP in the late 1980s, Operation Pipeline is a training program geared toward the enforcement of drug laws. It has since been used to train Canada Customs officers, provincial police officers and officers in Montréal, Toronto, Calgary, Winnipeg and Vancouver. Training methods analyzed by David Tanovich found that literature emphasized highly racialized "profiles" of likely drug traffickers, and included racial and ethnic characteristics, such as dreadlocks, as a means of singling out criminals and criminal organizations, making specific mention of Caribbean men and women (as well as Chinese people and other racial groups).

People from the same ethnic groups that are native to certain geographic regions typically share the same genetic profile. Geneticists call them “populations.” When geneticists compare these ethnic populations, they find there is more genetic diversity between populations within Africa than between Africa and the rest of the world. Ethnic groups in Western Africa are more genetically similar to ethnic groups in Western Europe than to ethnic groups in Eastern Africa. Race is a genetic mirage.

During an interview with Diversity Inc.’s director of research and product development, she walked me through a typical presentation used to pitch the value of the company’s software to prospective clients. I learned that their products are especially valuable to those industries not allowed to collect ethno-racial data directly from individuals because of civil rights legislation that attempts to curb how these data are used to discriminate. But now those who work in finance, housing, and healthcare can use predictive software programs to ascertain information that they cannot request directly. The US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy rule, for example, strictly monitors the collection, storage, and communication of individuals’ “protected health information,” among other features of the law. This means that pharmaceutical companies, which market to different groups, need indirect methods to create customer profiles, because they cannot collect racial-ethnic data directly. This is where Diversity Inc. comes in. Its software programs target customers not only on the basis of race and ethnicity, but also on the basis of socioeconomic status, gender, and a growing list of other attributes. However, the company does not refer to “race” anywhere in their product descriptions. Everything is based on individuals’ names, we are told. “A person’s name is data,” according to the director of research and product development. She explains that her clients typically supply Diversity Inc. with a database of client names and her team builds knowledge around it. The process, she says, has a 96 percent accuracy rate, because so many last names are not shared across racial–ethnic groups – a phenomenon sociologists call “cultural segregation.”18

Asians are still a small minority—14.5 million (including about one million identified as part Asian) or 4.7 percent of the population—but their impact is vastly disproportionate to their numbers. Forty-four percent of Asian-American adults have a college degree or higher, as opposed to 24 percent of the general population. Asian men have median earnings 10 percent higher than non Asian men, and that of Asian women is 15 percent higher than non-Asian women. Forty-five percent of Asians are employed in professional or management jobs as opposed to 34 percent for the country as a whole, and the figure is no less than 60 percent for Asian Indians. The Information Technology Association of America estimates that in the high-tech workforce Asians are represented at three times their proportion of the population. Asians are more likely than the American average to own homes rather than be renters. These successes are especially remarkable because no fewer than 69 percent of Asians are foreign-born, and immigrant groups have traditionally taken several generations to reach their full economic potential. Asians are vastly overrepresented at the best American universities. Although less than 5 percent of the population they account for the following percentages of the students at these universities: Harvard: 17 percent, Yale: 13 percent, Princeton: 12 percent, Columbia: 14 percent, Stanford: 25 percent. In California, the state with the largest number of Asians, they made up 14 percent of the 2005 high school graduating class but 42 percent of the freshmen on the campuses of the University of California system. At Berkeley, the most selective of all the campuses, the 2005 freshman class was an astonishing 48 percent Asian. Asians are also the least likely of any racial or ethnic group to commit crimes. In every category, whether violent crime, white-collar crime, alcohol, or sex offenses, they are arrested at about one-quarter to one-third the rate of whites, who are the next most law-abiding group. It would be a mistake, however, to paint all Asians with the same brush, as different nationalities can have distinctive profiles. For example, 40 percent of the manicurists in the United States are of Vietnamese origin and half the motel rooms in the country are owned by Asian Indians. Chinese (24 percent of all Asians) and Indians (16 percent), are extremely successful, as are Japanese and Koreans. Filipinos (18 percent) are somewhat less so, while the Hmong face considerable difficulties. Hmong earn 30 percent less than the national average, and 60 percent drop out of high school. In the Seattle public schools, 80 percent of Japanese-American students passed Washington state’s standardized math test for 10th-graders—the highest pass rate for any ethnic group. The group with the lowest pass rate—14 percent—was another “Asian/Pacific Islanders” category: Samoans. On the whole, Asians have a well-deserved reputation for high achievement.

Then, if you have voluminous records to read, start by asking yourself what’s missing. If there are no medical records, why not? (You will find more on the importance of medical information in Chapter Three.) If that person was seen at another agency, were the records requested and have they arrived? If the person is taking medication, what kind, how much, and who’s giving it to her? Start taking notes about the basic facts: age, ethnicity, who’s in the family, presenting problem, I.Q. scores, diagnosis, etc. Begin to build a profile on that person in your mind, ask questions, do your homework-and then add a healthy dose of skepticism to everything you’ve found out. Why? Because your job is to find out who that person really is, and the information in a file is only as useful and accurate as the competence and insight of the people reporting it.