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 hether
you think the present emergency rises to the level of a war or not,
one thing that is fast becoming clear is that Americans at large
are much more tolerant of racial profiling than they were before
the terrorists struck. This fact was illustrated on September 20,
when four men “of Middle Eastern appearance” were removed from a
Northwest Airlines flight because other passengers refused to fly
with them. A Northwest spokesman explained that under FAA rules,
“the airline has no choice but to re-accommodate a passenger or
passengers if their actions or presence make a majority of passengers
uncomfortable and threaten to disrupt normal operations of flight.”
Compare this
incident with the experience of movie actor James Woods. Woods took
a flight from Boston to Los Angeles one week before the World
Trade Center attacks. The only other people in first class with
him were four men “of Middle Eastern appearance” who acted very
strangely. During the entire cross-country flight none of them had
anything to eat or drink, nor did they read or sleep. They only
sat upright in their seats, occasionally conversing with each other
in low tones. Woods mentioned what he had noticed to a flight attendant,
“who shrugged it off.” Arriving in Los Angeles, Woods told airport
authorities, but they “seemed unwilling to become involved.”
You can see
the great change in our attitudes by imagining the consequences
if the first incident had happened two weeks earlier, or the second
two weeks later. The first would then have generated a nationwide
storm of indignation about racial profiling, and stupendous lawsuits;
the second, a huge police manhunt for the four men concerned. It
seems very likely that Woods witnessed a dry run for the attack
on the World Trade Center. One of the planes used in that attack
was flying the same Boston-Los Angeles route that Woods flew. If
the authorities had acted on his report — if, that is to say,
they had been willing to entertain a little straightforward racial
profiling — 6,000 lives might have been saved.
Civil libertarians
are now warning us that in the current climate of crisis and national
peril, our ancient liberties might be sacrificed to the general
desire for greater security. They have a point. If truth is the
first casualty in war, liberty is often the second. The reason that
practically nobody can afford to live in Manhattan who isn’t already
living there is rent control, a WW II measure, never repealed, that
removed a landlord’s freedom to let his property at whatever rent
the market would bear. But the moral to be drawn from that instance
is only that, as legal scholar Bruce Ackerman has recently argued,
emergency legislation must never be enacted without a clear “sunset
provision”: After some fixed period — Ackerman suggests two
years — the law must lapse. The civil-liberties crowd does
not, in any case, have a dazzling record on the liberties involved
in private commercial transactions. What happened to a cabdriver’s
liberty to use his own judgment about which passengers to pick up?
Gone, swept away in the racial-profiling panic of the 1990s, along
with the lives of several cabbies.
It is in the
matter of proactive law enforcement — the kinds of things that
police agencies do to prevent crime or terrorism — that our
liberties are most at risk in tense times. Whom should you wiretap?
Whom should airport security take in for questioning? This is where
racial profiling kicks in, with all its ambiguities. Just take a
careful look, for example, at that phrase “of Middle Eastern appearance,”
which I imagine security agencies are already abbreviating OMEA.
The last time I wrote about this subject (“The Case for Racial Profiling,”
February 19), I concentrated on the topics that were in the air
at that time: the disproportionate attention police officers give
to black and Hispanic persons as crime suspects, and the targeting
of Wen Ho Lee in the nuclear-espionage case. I had nothing to say
about terrorists from the Middle East, or people who might be thought
to look like them. OMEA was not, at that point, an issue.
Now it is,
and the problem is that OMEA is perhaps a more dubious description
even than “black” or “Hispanic.” You can see the difficulties by
scanning the photographs of the September 11 hijackers published
in our newspapers. A few are unmistakably OMEA. My reaction on seeing
the photograph of the first to be identified, Mohamed Atta, was
that he looked exactly like my own mental conception of an Arab
terrorist. On the other hand, one of his companions on AA Flight
11, Wail al-Shehri, is the spitting image of a boy I went to school
with — a boy of entirely English origins, whose name was Hobson.
Ahmed al-Nami (UA Flight 93) looks like a Welsh punk rocker. And
so on.
Other visual
markers offer similar opportunities for confusion. This fellow with
a beard and a turban, coming down the road — he must surely
be an Arab, or at least a Muslim? Well, maybe, but he is much more
likely to be a Sikh — belonging, that is, to a religion that
owes more to Hinduism than to Islam, practiced by non-Arab peoples
who speak Indo-European languages, and with scriptures written with
a Hindi-style script, not an Arabic one. Sikhism requires male adherents
to keep an untrimmed beard and wear a turban; Islam does not.
Most other
attempts at a “Middle Eastern” typology fail a lot of the time,
too. Middle Easterners in the U.S. are mainly Arabs, right? That
depends on where you live. In the state of California, better than
half are Iranian or Afghan; in Maryland, practically all are Iranian.
Even if you restrict your attention to Americans of Arab origin,
stereotypes quickly collapse. You would think it could at least
be said with safety that they are mainly Muslims. Not so: More than
three-quarters of Arab-Americans are Christians. The principal Middle
Eastern presence in my own town is St. Mark’s Coptic Church. The
Copts, who are Egyptian Christians, are certainly OMEA, and they
speak Arabic for non-liturgical purposes, and have Arabic names.
They have little reason to identify with Muslim terrorists, however,
having been rudely persecuted by extremist Muslims in their homeland
for decades. Misconceptions cut the other way, too. Care to guess
what proportion of Muslim Americans are of Arab origins? Answer:
around one in eight. Most American Muslims are black.
That we could
impose any even halfway reasonable system of “racial profiling”
on this chaos seems impossible. Yet we can, where it matters most,
and I believe we should; certainly in airport security, which, as
a matter of fact, is where OMEA profiling began, during the hijack
scares of the early 1970s. When boarding a plane, documents need
to be presented, names declared, words exchanged. This gives security
officials a much richer supply of data than a mere “eyeball” check.
We return here to one of the points in my previous article on this
subject, as affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court: that “race” —
which is to say, visible physical characteristics typical of, or
at least frequent among, some group with a common origin —
can be used as part of a suspect profile to identify targets for
further investigation, provided there are other criteria in play.
We should
profile at airports because, as the James Woods incident shows,
profiling is an aid — very far from an infallible one, but
still a useful one — to identifying those who want to harm
us, in this as in any other area of law enforcement. To pretend
that any person passing through airport security is as likely as
any other to be a hijacker is absurd, just as it is absurd to pretend
that any driver on the New Jersey Turnpike is as likely as any other
to be transporting narcotics. Crises like the present one can generate
hysteria, it is true, but they can also have a clarifying effect
on our outlook, sweeping away the wishful thinking of easier times,
exposing the hollowness of relativism and moral equivalence, and
forcing us to the main point. And peacetime has its own hysterias.
I believe that when the long peace that ended on September 11 comes
into perspective we shall see that the fuss about racial profiling
was, ultimately, hysterical, driven by a dogmatic and unreasoned
refusal to face up to group differences. So long as the authorities
treat everyone with courtesy and apologize to the inconvenienced
innocent, racial profiling is a practical and perfectly sensible
tool for preventing crime and terrorism.
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