I used to pioneer with a friend who was black, worked as a mason, and had a used BMW 325.
We (HE) would get stopped and harassed by the police with great regularity in our lilly white territory.
I think someone already mentioned this, but
this type of profiling is not completely unreasonable. This type of bias is a
result of previous observations. What do we see in the media about violent
crime? To me almost every time the media reports about a serious crime
(robbery, shooting, assault, stabbing, etc) is seems that a large percentage of
the suspects are black (at least in my area). Time and time again, we see the
same types of suspects in the same types of crimes, and this plays in people’s
minds. Also, what are the most dangerous areas in our country? Is is where
people from India live? Well no, as you already know.
If I’m walking down the street at 1am, and I
see two Asian guys walking my way, there is no uneasy feeling. Why? Well
because my experience has been that I don’t see many Asians committing
robberies.
To illustrate this further, if you were on a
plane, and you know there was a terrorist on board, who do you look at first?
The 75 year old Japanese women two rows down? Or perhaps the middle eastern guy
next to her? You know the answer, and again this bias is based on your
observations.
We must feel sorry for anybody in the black
community that is a decent person getting harassed by law enforcement, but the
profiling that is at the source of this, is not fabricated out of nothing.