Racial Profiling
Russian and American Opinions
 While in Russia, I’ve become acquainted with a fellow American exchange
student, who happens to have an Indian background. She, my host mother, and I were talking
one day, when she mentioned that she had been stopped by the police while riding the metro
and asked for her documentation. Having myself been checked a few times, and having seen
others being checked, this did not surprise me in and of itself. What surprised me was my
host mother’s immediate response, which was to say, “That’s because they thought you
were a Gypsy.”
To explain why this surprised me so much, it is necessary for me to
talk a bit about law enforcement and security in America. In America, there is currently a
heavy debate over what is known as “racial profiling.” Simply put, “racial
profiling” is associating particular races with particular crimes, and, accordingly,
allowing law enforcement officers, such as the police, to pay stricter attention to
members of certain races.
In America, there was a great deal of scandal after police officers in
some states were accused of stopping a disproportionately large number of black Americans
for speeding; the police officers, so people said, were conducting “racial profiling”
by assuming that blacks were more likely to speed, and thus paying closer attention to
cars which they saw had black drivers. The vast consensus was that this was a horrible,
very racist thing to do.
Recently, however, the discussion has become a bit more contentious.
Since September 11th, airport security in America has been heightened considerably.
Certain people, particularly people without US citizenship, may find themselves being
pulled out of line for considerably longer security checks than they would have faced
before. There is, of course, a large number of Americans who disapprove of this singling
out of non-US citizens; the debate that is relevant to racial profiling, however, focuses
on people who are of, or who look like they could be of, Arab decent.
Just as it was discovered that police officers were pulling over cars
driven by black drivers more frequently than cars driven by white drivers, it was soon
discovered that airport security officials were pulling over people who looked Arab more
frequently than people who did not. Many Americans had changed their views on what was
necessary for security since September 11th, and as a result insisted that this was a
perfectly logical thing to do. Others maintained that it was still racist and unfair, and
that, as it is truly impossible to say what a terrorist looks like, Arabs should be
singled out no more frequently than any other group of people.
My friend and I tried to explain this to my host mother, but she became
very confused. “Why wouldn’t you focus on certain groups of people?” she asked us.
“Doesn’t it make sense to pull over the people who are committing the crimes?” Yes,
we told her, there are some Americans who believe that, but there are some Americans who
believe that, as anyone can commit a crime, it is wrong to say that “one group behaves
this way, while another behaves that way.” To which she responded, “But, of course,
they don’t pull over everyone of a certain nationality; they just pull over the people
of that nationality that look suspicious. It’s very practical.” Neither she nor I
seemed to be able to entirely understand what the other wanted to say, and eventually the
topic was dropped.
I myself cannot say whether this practice is right or wrong, but I will
say that I found it interesting that, while in America, even the people who believe
strongly in racial profiling are well-acquainted with the opposing argument (having surely
been forced to argue against it at some point). My host mother, along with the majority of
Russians with whom I have spoken on the other hand, found it difficult to believe that the
appropriateness of racial profiling could even be questioned. It was just one of the many
times at which I was struck by how truly different things can be in two different
countries.
By Keiko Hayakawa
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