It’s the left whose cynical abandonment of its own color-blind standard created racial preferences, which are an obvious form of racial profiling. Having marched in the Sixties to establish the principle of color-blindness, the left switched sides in the Seventies to support the principle it had just successfully opposed. Its rationale for embracing the profiling principle in the guise of "affirmative action" was that it was necessary to use racism to combat racism (although it is politically incorrect to express it so bluntly). This was the gravamen of the infamous Blackmun opinion in the Baake decision, which held that it may be necessary to take race into account to get beyond it. This is the most widely embraced Orwellian principle in our culture today. It allows the cynical manipulators of race on the left to smear conservative civil rights activists who oppose race-consciousness and race-privilege as "racists." It allows the left to call itself a "civil rights" movement even while it embraces the very principle that made segregation possible, and even though it is the conservative opposition that has remained faithful to the civil rights standard set by King and the hundreds of thousands who marched on Washington in 1963.
... Security profiles should be designed to protect law-abiding citizens from likely criminal predators. Profiles that include the ethnicity or race of potential suspects - but are not limited to those characteristics -- do not constitute "racial profiling" in any meaningful sense of the term. The inclusion of race in a security profile is in itself as harmless as the inclusion of gender or height or any other identifying characteristic. It does not imply racism on the part of the profilers. On the other hand, rigging admissions or contract standards for selected racial groups, does. The security profile is based on process. The racial preference profile is based on result. It is the sole purpose of affirmative-action racial preferences to achieve a race-specific result. They are designed to target racial groups for racial privileges. This is what segregation and apartheid were all about. The means and the end were identical.
This is not what the security profiling demanded by conservatives is about at all. Conservatives do not want Muslims to be arrested as terrorists if they are innocent. The profile is not constructed out of a desire to stigmatize Muslims as terrorists. It is based on already established incidences of terror and is intended to heighten awareness of where the danger may be coming from. To raise suspicions about groups whose members have in fact targeted innocents for harm bears no relation to ethnic or racial prejudice as long as the suspicions are not raised solely by ethnicity or race. An unintended side effect may to raise suspicions towards members of the group who are innocent. But this is not the same as convicting them. Causing inconvenience to innocents is regrettable but it is a price people regardless of ethnicity or race are willing to pay for safety. It is a characteristic of all preventive programs that innocents will be screened along with the guilty. But the ultimate target is the guilty and not the innocent, and the guilty may turn out to be of any ethnicity or race. In affirmative action measures, by contrast, the target itself is racial.
The war in which we are now engaged is a war with radical Islam. All the terrorists who have targeted us are Muslim and/or Arab. Not to have heightened suspicions of Muslims and Arabs in these circumstances is mindless, not to say suicidal. To draw conclusions solely on the basis of the fact that people are Muslims or Arabs would be unwarranted and prejudiced. But conservatives are not calling for the convictions of Muslims or Arabs on the basis of their ethnicity.
ME: The Left thinks it's fine to explicitly use race to determine economic outcomes (and in hiring and admissions), but not to assist law enforcement. THAT'S SIMPLY HYPOCRITICAL. What makes this even worse is that the Left thinks that the jihadoterrorism is a law enforcement problem (as opposed to a military one), and yet they want law enforcement to be hindered through (a) preventing them from using race as part of a profile, and (b) preventing law enforcement from getting information that might be used in domestic cases from the CIA or from newly expanded search warrant powers which are part of the Patriot Act. THIS HYPOCRISY exposes the deeper truth: the Left doesn't really care about national security. If they did, then they wouldn't find so many ways to hinder our law enforcers at home, and our military efforts overseas.
No comments:
Post a Comment