Two recent and separately-done surveys by the highly respected polling organizations, the Gallup Organization and Zogby International, seem to have provided dramatic evidence of the shock the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon has given America’s psyche.
Both surveys found that African Americans, who in recent years have raised a justifiable hue and cry about police racial profiling against them, are more likely than other Americans to favor the racial profiling of Arab Americans and Arab nationals.
In the Gallup Poll 71 percent of blacks supported requiring those of Arabic descent to undergo more intensive security checks at airports. In the Zogby International survey, that figure was 54 percent. And, again in the Gallup Poll, 64 percent of blacks supported requiring all those of Arabic descent to carry special identification. In all instances, these percentages were higher than those for any other groups of Americans.
The findings have clearly dismayed leading African-American politicians, scholars and activists, who have spoken against the racial profiling of Arab Americans in unambiguous terms—most recently, during several panel discussions at the just-concluded annual conference of the Congressional Black Caucus. So have I in this column and other forums.
Beyond our initial amazement at the polls’ findings, however, we shouldn’t really be surprised that African Americans themselves would harbor such attitudes.
For one thing, as Professor Alvin Poussaint, of the Harvard Medical School, has suggested, they show how profoundly affronted African Americans, whose deep-rooted patriotism is only rarely acknowledged, are by the attacks.
Professor Poussaint, a psychiatrist, told the Boston Globe that the attacks may have been the more disorienting to blacks because their own long struggle for full American citizenship has been unshakably rooted “in the turn-the-other-cheek, Christian principles of love, and thou shalt not kill” and in reforming American through its political process.
More broadly, we also should see in these polls’ findings more evidence of the perniciousness of racial profiling itself, no matter how it’s seemingly bolstered by glib or urgently-declared rationalizations.
These polls’ show that whenever people speak in favor of racial profiling, they always favor its use against some other group, not theirs.
That said, for any African Americans, or anyone else, to think that a policy of racial profiling of those who “look” Arabic would be confined to those who are of Arabic descent, is ludicrous.
The harassment and killings of not only innocent Arab-Americans, but also Sikhs—who are neither Arabic nor Muslim, but of Indian descent, and whose religion requires males to wear a beard and a turban—has provided tragic evidence that many Americans, including some who are African-American, have trouble telling people of color apart.
I’m all for stringent security measures. This emergency demands them. But let them be imposed equally on everyone, unless there are specific reasons to single out individuals for special attention. We already have more than enough evidence that racial profiling, whether as an instrument against “regular” crime or against terrorism, is not just pernicious, it’s bad police work.
That was underscored last year by the crime-fighting results of reforms which ended racial profiling at the U.S. Customs Service, the federal agency charged with preventing the smuggling of contraband at the nation’s airport.
After a decade of criticism of Customs’ practices of singling out black and Latino passengers arriving from abroad for intrusive body searches, and several egregious incidents in which black women at different airports were subjected to humiliating strip searches, Raymond W. Kelly, then the agency’s commissioner, pushed through a comprehensive overhaul of passenger-surveillance practices.
The reforms scrapped procedures that virtually automatically equated color and ethnicity with a “profile of suspicion” in favor of a disciplined approach to determining which individuals really deserve inspectors’ suspicion.
The result: From 1998 to 2000 the agency sharply reduced—by 80 percent, from more than 40,000 to under 10,000—the number of intrusive body searches it conducted. But the reduction substantially increased the agency’s “yield” of drug and contraband seizures—from 4 percent of searches in 1998 to almost 18 percent by mid-2001.
Customs’ commitment—to develop justifiable reasons to be suspicious of someone and good procedures for detaining and searching someone based on something other than bias masquerading as expertise—is what should be adhered to in our present emergency if America, in its search for security, is to not lose sight of those values which make America a beacon of freedom.
That is the last point the findings of the Gallup and Zogby polls underscores: the importance of leadership.
Just as President Bush and New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani from the first spoke out forcefully against stereotyping all people of Arabic descent, so in fact have leading black figures. They have all ably fulfilled that part of the responsibilities of leadership. Now, all Americans, including those who are African-American, need to be sure they fulfill the responsibilities of American citizenship.
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